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Cinema releases

TEN CANOES

Ten Canoes

Format: Cinema

Release date: 1 June 2007

Distributor: The Works

Director: Rolf de Heer and Peter Djigirr

Cast: Jamie Gulpilil, Richard Birrinbirrin, Crusoe Kurddal, Peter Minygululu


Australia 2006

90 mins

Rolf de Heer’s charming Ten Canoes, set among the Yolngu community and billed as the first feature in the Aboriginal language, starts as it means to go on, humorously deflating myths and conventions. Over the magnificent opening views of Arnhem Land in Northern Australia the jovial narrator is heard saying ‘Once upon a time in a faraway land’, only to stop and add, laughing, ‘I’m only joking’.

Ten Canoes‘ rather wonderful adventure started with the thousands of black and white photographs that were taken by anthropologist Dr Donald Thomson in the mid-1930s. One of them, depicting a group of ten men in their traditional bark canoes on the swamp, caught the eye of director de Heer and Aboriginal performer David Gulpilil – the narrator and co-initiator of the project – striking them as a remarkable image that perfectly encapsulated the lost world of the Yolngu’s past.

Shot in black and white to mirror the Thomson photographs, the framing story follows a group of men on a goose egg hunting expedition a thousand years ago. Respected elder Minygululu is leading the expedition and, aware that his younger brother Dayindi lusts after the youngest of his three wives, proceeds to tell him a cautionary tale set in a distant, mythical past. Shot in colour, this ancient tale of jealousy, murder and sorcery alternates with the quasi-anthropological black and white footage of the Yolngu men making canoes from bark, collecting goose eggs or building platforms in the trees.

As the narrator tells us an anecdote about his ancestors, who themselves are telling an anecdote about their own ancestors, it soon becomes clear that Ten Canoes is about the eternal story of mankind – a repetitive tale of love, lust, jealousy, conflict, food, farts, shit and death. Although it presents itself as a morality tale, the film is anything but, the ending being a joyfully inconclusive illustration of the messiness of human life. In all this it humorously demystifies exotic people from faraway lands or from the distant past. There is no idealisation of the ‘good savage’ or of a paradisiacal past here – a dubious perspective last seen in Terence Malick’s unbelievably bad The Lost World.

This is no white man’s view of indigenous culture but a film that connects past and present, Western audiences and Aboriginal community in a fresh, dynamic way. Not only does Ten Canoes incorporate storytelling elements from both Western and indigenous traditions but the film was also an occasion for the Yolngu people to recreate some of the ancient crafts and skills that had fallen into disuse with the increasing influence of modern technology. By recreating their history, and the history of the encounter between the white anthropologist and their people, the Yolngu make the images he took of them their own, part of a renewed tradition engaged in a vivid dialogue with the modern, Western world.

Virginie Sélavy

Cinema releases

LUNACY

Lunacy

Format: Cinema

Release date: 1 June 2007

Distributor: BFI

Director: Jan í… vankmajer

Original title: Sí­Â­lení­Â­

Based on the works of: Edgar Allan Poe and Marquis de Sade

Cast Pavel LiÅ¡ka, Jan Trí­Â­ska, Anna Geisleroví¡, Martin Huba, Jaroslav DuÅ¡ek

Czech Republic/Slovakia 2005

118 minutes

With his latest feature-length release, Jan í… vankmajer promises an atmospheric gothic brew of Edgar Allan Poe and the Marquis de Sade set in a lunatic asylum, full of catalepsy, premature burial and kinky satanism. The true mystery of Lunacy, however, is how í… vankmajer can have come up with such a dull and undistinguished film. His most celebrated works such as Alice and Little Otik (Otesí¡nek) mix live action with animation to startling effect, but here the animation is peripheral and perfunctory. A motif of severed body parts threads its way through the action in tableaux separating live action sequences. The credits feature naí­Â¯ve cartoon tarot-ish playing cards depicting mutilation which also reappear later in an enigmatic board game. What, one wonders at first, is the significance of these merrily dancing tongues and eyes, and these eyeless and tongueless playing-card figures? In the end, however, once all has been explained (I won’t bore you with the details), their tantalizing, gratuitous quality seems a sham. The real problem is that the animation does not mesh with the overall art direction. It is tacked on, its exuberance forced, wholly subordinate to a rather tired thesis. Indeed, the film as a whole is just too significant, too allegorical.

From the very start, there is no room for anything to breathe or resonate. í… vankmajer himself appears on the screen to deliver a far from fresh speech on psychiatry and the modern world: we are caught between extremes of discipline and liberty, and end up living with the worst of both worlds. Doubtless new things remain to be done with this theme, but here it dates the film to its director’s youth, to a very sixties convergence of surrealism and anti-psychiatry. The story concerns a young man, Jean Berlot, who is prone to lucid dreams featuring two leering, burly, shaven-headed goons pursuing him with a straitjacket. Having trashed his hotel room in the throes of this dream, Berlot is rescued by the ‘Marquis’, whose anachronistic costume and tendency to gales of insane laughter go largely unremarked by those around him. At this point, there are promising signs: the Marquis’ coach and horses trundling preposterously along the motorway is nice. But once Berlot has been taken into the Marquis’ castle, and changed into ancien régime attire, the ambiguity of setting largely disappears. As Berlot spies on a sort of black mass/orgy we are firmly in the world of 70s art-trash gothic. As the Marquis hammers nails into a crucifix, his followers gorge themselves on chocolate cake before being fellated under the table by nubile wenches in monks’ cowls. The sexual politics are fairly 70s too: the girls have been selected for a quite particular quality of breast and not much else.

Having said this, Charlota requires slightly more involved discussion. She first appears right at the beginning as a wan face caught by Berlot at the window of a departing bus. Now in the gothic setting she seems to try to escape from the Marquis’ rather hum-drum orgy. In the next phase of the film she moves centre stage. The Marquis traces Berlot’s persecution dreams back to his mother’s death, incarcerated in Charenton. The cure he proposes involves a sort of reverse psychology: spend some time in a lunatic asylum. At the asylum, Charlota reappears as the alleged daughter of Dr Murlloppe and once more appeals to Berlot to help her escape. The lunatics, she claims, have mutinied and taken over the asylum. The true director, Dr Coulmií­Â¨re, is locked up in the cellar. What we see when Charlota takes Berlot downstairs are creatures whose identity is obscured by tar and feathers, but whose outline suggests hulking aggression rather than a role in the caring professions. One of the film’s most visually accomplished scenes comes with the release of these fleshy demons, hurtling out of the hatches and straight back into their functions as brutal riot-police of madness. Poor lunatics, celebrating a year of freedom with an extended pillow fight: in a blizzard of feathers they are truncheoned back into their boxes. For, who would have guessed it, the lunatics were the better custodians of chaos. Dr Coulmií­Â¨re and his goons now have a free hand to reinstitute their regime of brutality and mutilation. Now it only remains for Berlot’s nightmare to be made real. All Charlota’s fault!

Misogyny by numbers. Over the course of the film, Charlota has gone from defenceless waif to merciless whore following a depressingly familiar pattern. í… vankmajer doubtless wants us to see her as an ambiguous and troubling figure, but she isn’t. The moment where she does embody a genuine tension (as opposed to a tedious duality) is, tellingly, one that í… vankmajer has explored much more effectively in the past. Charlota’s trips to the cellar to feed the monstrous attendants cannot but recall Alzbetka in Little Otik. What leads a little girl to lure her neighbours into the maw of a ravenous log is never programmatically explained, but a mixture of compassion and a desire to see the cruelty of a folk-tale played out is implied. In Little Otik, í… vankmajer presents ‘normal’ desires remorselessly driving people into grotesque and deadly circumstances, and the whole thing is played out with grim humour. Burdened with a horribly protruding thesis, Lunacy just cannot generate the sort of tensions and ambiguities it say it wants to, and Charlota’s perfunctory innocent/whore shifts are the surest symptom of this.

Lunacy made me wish at various points I was watching a number of other films: some of the late eighteenth-century interiors brought Werner Herzog’s Kaspar Hauser fondly to mind, and the feather-storm in the asylum had me dreaming of Jean Vigo’s Zéro de conduite. Apart from the echo of Little Otik, it made me think very little of í… vankmajer. Back to the drawing-board.

Stephen Thomson

Cinema releases

OPENING NIGHT

Opening Night

Format: Cinema

Release date: 15-28 June 2007

Distributor: BFI

Director: John Cassavetes

Cast: Gena Rowlands, John Cassavetes, Ben Gazzara

USA 1977

144 minutes

Within one minute of screen time, John Cassavetes’ Opening Night introduces us to three discernible theatrical spaces: backstage (the space of where actors ‘prepare’ to embark on a role); onstage (the space of the drama); and the auditorium (the space of the audience). Having from the onset drawn the boundary lines between these spaces, defining each in turn by the behaviour of, in particular, our heroine the Broadway actress Myrtle Gordon – played by Gena Rowlands -, the film now spends the next two-and-a-half hours doing its best to eliminate those boundaries.

Like all of Cassavetes’ best work, Opening Night goes beyond being merely a self-reflexive investigation into the perils of cinema making. Made immediately after what may be Cassavetes’ best film The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), the film tells the story of the week or so of out-of-town performances before the New York opening night of a play entitled ‘The Second Woman’ – in which Myrtle, who plays the title role of a woman cast aside in favour of a younger one, becomes unhinged after the death of a young female fan one night outside the theatre. Haunted by unbelievably real visions of the girl, Myrtle suddenly finds herself in the midst of a full-blown identity crisis. This initiates what Myrtle herself describes as an attempt to ‘find a way to play this role in which age doesn’t make any difference’, which, of course, counters the entire premise of the play she is in.

What makes this so typical of Cassavetes is the way in which this psychological crisis impacts directly on the film’s formal structure and subsequent events. As Myrtle’s sense of both time and space disintegrates so does that of the audience (as in us and the spectators of the drama being ‘staged’). In this respect, Cassavetes appears to aim for nothing less than to rethink what drama and play-acting actually are as well as the issue of female identity, sexuality and anxieties about aging in the process. Paradoxically, it is probably the latter, which – if anything – has (no pun intended) dated or aged the film and it is somewhat grating to modern viewers. It is an issue that quite literally looms over the proceedings in the oversized photograph of an elderly woman on the set of the play. It’s not merely that the spectre of old age haunts Myrtle in the form of a supernaturally beautiful younger version of herself (the dead fan), but that Myrtle drinks herself into oblivion continuously in order to survive this haunting. Granted, all the characters in Cassavetes’ oeuvre express concerns with time but here, Rowlands/Myrtle’s entire identity as a woman and an actress is completely consumed by the sense that things are slipping away. A rather depressing assessment of female creativity to say the least.

It is possible, of course, to consider this as a commentary on the death of theatre, or if you will, on the end of a palpable distinction between onstage and offstage, performer and audience. Thus, while it is Myrtle who keeps stumbling along the corridors of the backstage in a drunken stupor all the other characters, male and female, also appear liable to break down at any moment. There’s a wonderful scene where the director of the play goes through one of the sets on opening night, deliberately aiming to make it look more ‘messy’ as he agonizes over the complete chaos in which the play already finds itself.

By no means a perfect film, at two hours and twenty four minutes it’s at least half an hour too long, and for me personally, there was a bit too much emphasis on Myrtle’s drinking throughout as a perhaps rather trite, and dare I say, theatrical response to her schizophrenia. Nevertheless, in the grand finale when the play’s director Manny refuses to help her even stand or walk, and makes her crawl to the stage, we cannot help but be caught up in Myrtle/Rowlands’ bravura performance. By no means a standard Hollywood miraculous dramatic ending, Myrtle recovers moment by moment, within the work and the work within the work. Allegedly, Cassavetes even staged the faux play within the film in front of a real live audience, to gauge their natural reaction. Like us, the audience of the play is allowed to voice dissenting opinions on whether Myrtle/Rowlands really pulls it off. Despite her coming through in the end, there’s no reason to expect that she has really resolved anything, and the trick of the film, in a sense, is to make us be fine with this. Ultimately, it is not a film about recuperations or success, but about the agony of making choices. As Cassavetes put it himself: ‘The character is left in conflict, but she fights the terrifying battle to recapture hope. And wins!’

CB

Home entertainment

RED ANGEL

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Red Angel

Format: DVD

Release date: 24 July 2006

Distributor: Yume Pictures

Director: Yasuzo Masumura

Original title Akai tenshi

Cast Ayako Wakao, Shinsuke Ashida, Yusuke Kawazu

Japan 1966

95 minutes

Revisionist accounts of the brutalities of war have become so legion in recent cinema that they now constitute something of a sub-genre in themselves. The most recent of these was the twin Flags of our Fathers/Letters from Iwo Jima project in which Clint Eastwood was supposed to have re-examined the heroic struggle respectively to take and defend a small but strategically placed island in the Pacific during the Second World War. Although avowedly ‘anti-war,’ it’s a liberal ploy to present the story ‘fairly’ from both points of view and in Flags of our Fathers the framing narrative of avuncular old men looking back at the horrors of war from the comfort of their middle-class living rooms envelops the whole enterprise in a Werther’s Original wrapper of cosy sentimentality. Throw in the story of the heroic Native American and the entire project basks in self-congratulatory worthiness.

The same can by no means be said of Masumura’s Red Angel, which is a much more perverse though, for very different reasons, no less conflicted account of the plight of a nurse from Tokyo working in a series of field hospitals in China during the 1939 Sino-Japanese war. Having a female protagonist might make us think that this is going to be a reappraisal of the hitherto undervalued role of women in modern conflict and although we are presented with the day-to-day details of her work it is by no means the focus of the film. Indeed it’s precisely what Masumura does with the genre of the war film that makes it so intriguing and from the title alone we should know that this nurse is not going to be your average Florence Nightingale.

The red angel in question is Sakura Nishi. We first encounter her as she is warned by the Head Nurse to be on her guard against the recuperating soldiers who will go to any lengths to avoid being sent back to the front. What she isn’t warned about is their pent-up sexual boredom and on a night-round she is lured by Sakamoto, a fellow Tokyoan, and raped by him whilst pinned to a sickbed by his ‘bored’ accomplices. So far this account doesn’t seem to have taken us out of the relatively ‘safe’ bounds of the historical re-enactment of everyday life in a field hospital where the fact of a rape, though horrific, is perhaps not in itself that surprising. What raises this scene above the level of documentary however is the way it’s shot. The viewer is shown Sakamoto lifting up successive layers of Nurse Nishi’s undergarments but at the point of penetration the camera cuts to an exterior shot of the ward through a window which is quickly closed by a vigilant onlooker. Visually, the incident is closed off from the viewer and what we are ‘left’ with is a brief muffled scream before the next scene, of Nishi informing the Head Nurse of the event, is upon us.

It would be easy to overlook the way this scene ends but it’s a signal for much of what’s to come. Not only does it reinforce the sense of claustrophobia within which the whole film operates – most of the ‘action’ happens inside in a closed-off world and when we are shown ‘outside’ it’s often shot from inside – but it’s also the first point in the film where we suspect we are not in a nuts-and-bolts war drama. The denial of audience involvement in the rape scene is also one of a number of moments where Masumura withholds what the viewer can and can’t see and these become more intense as the film proceeds.

As a result of his transgression, Sakamoto is redrafted to the front and Nishi herself soon moves closer to the frontline where she becomes assistant to the field hospital surgeon, Dr Okabe. Here we are shown the full-on consequences of battle as wave after wave of casualties enter the hospital and it’s for Okabe to decide their fate. More often than not he is required to amputate limbs because of a lack of suitable drugs. Early on Nishi is forced to hold down a patient whilst his leg is sawn off and from the way it is filmed there are clear parallels between this and the previous rape scene, the difference being we are allowed to watch this time. I find this problematic because although we are invited to view these scenes as versions of each other it’s difficult to see to what extent they are equivalent even given the power relations involved in both acts. Indeed this is the first in a number of incidents which expose the film’s conflicted sexual politics. The second of these isn’t far behind as a badly wounded Sakamoto is brought into the field hospital needing a blood transfusion. However transfusions can only be given to soldiers of superior rank and it is only through Nishi’s pleading with Dr Okabe on his behalf that he undergoes treatment. Do we applaud Nishi’s selfless act, that she is able to forgive her former aggressor? It’s a difficult question and one that we aren’t allowed to linger over as Sakamoto dies anyway having wasted precious blood.

One significant result of Nishi’s actions is that it attracts the attention of Dr Okabe who summons her to his quarters. Here he secretly admits that he no longer thinks of himself as a real surgeon but as a caricature turning all his patients into cripples. The conversation that follows is extraordinary for its combination of crudity and compassion. Okabe’s policy of mass amputation means he is effectively emasculating a generation of Japanese men yet Okabe is himself sexually non-functioning – the job has driven him to drink and morphine which has in turn rendered him impotent – and he implores Nishi to inject him so that he can sleep. There’s clearly a role reversal here. The hacker-off of limbs, the impotence machine, is feminized whilst Nishi assumes the role of male aggressor, syringe in hand (in a later scene this is made more explicit as Okabe makes her dress up in his uniform). Sexual analogy is played out very blatantly but the scene is filmed with a sustained lyrical tenderness that makes it also heart-warming (though this too is undercut by the gentle but austere soundtrack which sounds like some of the quieter of Bach’s organ pieces). It’s an altogether unsettling combination and it makes for at times uneasy viewing. This is reinforced when Okabe tells Nishi to undress because a man of his rank can’t get drunk in front of a nurse, yet ‘undressing’ in this context means leaving on her chemise. There’s a child-like theatre to the whole affair which is reinforced when Okabe asks Nishi to wait by his side until he falls asleep, which casts Nishi less as angel than as mother.

Nishi’s time with Okabe is cut short and she is forced to return to the former field hospital where she now treats Orihara, an armless amputee who is a living example of Okabe’s butchery. Stuck in the hospital he is not allowed home because he is visible evidence of the horrors of war, the admission of which would be detrimental to public morale. Because he has no arms he is also an embodiment of Okabe’s secret guilt. One night as Nishi washes him he implores her to masturbate him as his missing hands have left him sexually unfulfilled and he fears he will never see his wife again. The previous scene between Nishi and Okabe is ratcheted up a notch here – indeed one wonders whether it’s not again another ‘version’ of this scene – with Orihara’s pleading drawn out to the extent that it’s nearly unwatchable. As Nishi’s hands are about to disappear under the sheets the camera cuts to the one of Okabe’s implements rhythmically sawing through a patient’s leg back on the frontline. Again this is a rather crude reminder of the link between amputation and sexual deprivation and it is followed by Orihara’s request that he masturbate her with one of his feet which have become as sensitive as his hands once were.

It’s at this point I think we realise how far we are from a ‘straightforward’ war drama and this is confirmed when Nishi takes Orihara to a hotel for sex. The ensuing sequence is remarkable for the way in which Masumura photographs the bodies. As Nishi bathes Orihara in the starkly photographed hotel bathroom we are shown his stumps, his partial body, yet we are afforded only partial glimpses of Nishi’s own ‘whole’ naked torso as she pirouettes close to the camera. Later in bed they lie across each other, the amputee’s torso covering the parts of Nishi’s body that can’t be shown because of the laws governing what can and can’t be revealed on film in Japan. In another shot Nishi covers her own breasts and Masumura has her head completely out of the frame, effectively beheading her. It’s a magnificent and complex instance of internal and external cinematic permissions coming together.

There’s another telling moment in this scene. Orihara asks Nishi why she is doing all this for him and her reply, ‘for no reason’, is oddly emblematic of her character which is throughout much of the film, certainly up to this point, more of a non-character. Although I’ve said rather flippantly that she’s ‘no Florence Nightingale’ I also kept wondering to what extent Nishi is the ‘red angel’ of the title, a moniker that seems to paint her as a force of destruction. At times the film tries to make us believe this or more accurately it tries to make us believe that she believes this is what she is but it’s not that convincing. For instance she blames herself for the death of Sakamoto and then for Orihara’s suicide – he jumps from the roof of the hospital to his death after Nishi tells him coldly that their encounter is never to be repeated – but there’s a blankness to her ‘sadistic’ rejection of Orihara as well as her burgeoning sense that she is responsible for both deaths. Perhaps the ‘red angel’ label sticks to her despite herself and it’s a comment by Masumura on the hopelessness and emptiness of choice available to those caught up in war – whatever course of action she decides on will inevitably end in death – but the problem with this view is that it can lead to the removal of agency from the equation and thus to a laissez-faire politics which is as disastrous in wartime as it is in times of (so-called) peace.

We might read also Nishi’s blankness as passivity and consequently no more than Masumura’s registration of the constraints placed on women during the war and immediate post-war years. This would be to read Red Angel as a comment on the ‘caring’ role of women who are forced to service a male-dominated Japan but this would hardly be news even in 1966. And what the film doesn’t do either is present us with the emergence of the new woman. After Orihara’s suicide, Nishi is sent back to Okabe’s hospital and the film is structurally locked in a rigid pattern of exile and return which won’t allow for any development of character or otherwise. Witness the scenes between Nishi and Okabe – although occupying different rooms they’re all shot to look the same, enclosed and unchanging and when Nishi does eventually tell Okabe that she loves him – because he reminds her of her father – we’re locked into another set of controls with which we’ve become all too familiar, certainly in the West.

The film’s final section which sees Okabe called yet closer to the front – farther and farther from Japan as he says to Nishi – is no less easy to watch than the rest. Accompanied by a more-than-willing Nishi they are diverted to a beleaguered military outpost where cholera becomes rampant reducing it to a handful of men awaiting an imminent Chinese attack. Intercutting the urgent scenes of expectant soldiers outside, Nishi forces Okabe to give up his morphine habit by tying him down in his quarters and making him go through cold turkey before his manhood is restored and he can die a fully reconstructed male. There’s little sense that Nishi has gained much from this final encounter except to pry the words ‘I love you’ from Okabe after he has achieved his long-delayed orgasm.

If this sounds cynical there is another way of reading it – as a blindly romantic transcendental tryst whose participants must remain oblivious to imminent death – but I think Masumura himself undercuts such a reading by the way he ends the film. After the Chinese attack, Nishi is the only survivor and scouring the camp she discovers Okabe’s corpse, drawn samurai sword in hand. The temptation to see this as evidence of a newly-discovered capacity for heroism is undermined by the fact that his sword has been reduced to a mere stump not unlike the limbs of his unfortunate patients. It’s an unsettling end to a film that constantly denies resolution and I was left with the distinct impression that the landscapes, both interior and exterior, through which its characters move are as much indicators of psychological states as the backdrop for the playing out any kind of ‘story.’ This is unsurprising perhaps for a so-called ‘new-wave’ director and there’s clear evidence throughout Red Angel of sophistication in Masumura’s handling of the mechanics of film. I was still left wondering however, after the death of all three ‘lovers’, what Nishi was left with. As with many of Masumura’s counterparts in Europe the handling of sexual politics is fraught and difficult to ignore.

Jeff Hilson

Home entertainment

BLIND BEAST

Blind Beast

Format: DVD

Release date: 22 May 2007

Distributor: Yume Pictures

Director: Yasuzo Masumura

Original title Môjuu

Cast Eiji Funakoshi, Mako Midori, Noriko Sengoku

Japan 1969

86 minutes

From the very first frame, Masumura’s Blind Beast is as visually arresting as it is morally dubious, and it doesn’t let up pursuing its own preposterous logic for a second from then on in. What more can you ask of a film? Whatever the narrative may seem to claim, it would be a gross injustice to suggest that Blind Beast has anything as coherent as a thesis. There are ideas at work, of course, but really, if you want to discipline them and make them reasonable you will have to poke your eyes out. Which is just as things should be.

Early one morning, artist’s model Aki is visiting a photographic exhibition featuring images of herself in various states of bondage, reminiscent of (though predating) the work of Nobuyoshi Araki. In the sterile, brightly-lit, empty gallery she comes upon a man on his knees, strangely embracing and scrupulously caressing the nude sculpture (also modeled by Aki) that forms the centre-piece of the exhibition. Within minutes, the same man has turned up at Aki’s apartment in the guise of a masseur, knocked her out with chloroform and, with the help of his grimly besotted mother, carted her off to a bleak and isolated warehouse. We know the warehouse is bleak and isolated because we do not see the way there, or any suggestion of surrounding space: it is always presented by the same twilit establishing shot in mottled greys, occasionally enlivened with flecks of snow. The whole film is, in many respects, remarkably minimal. There are only the three characters mentioned and not a single other breathing human figure. The action from now on is confined to the interior of the warehouse, made up of a spartan living space where Michio the blind sculptor and his mother live, eat, and share a bed. Through the double iron doors, however, lies the more ambiguous space where Aki is imprisoned.

Michio’s ‘studio’ is likewise minimal in its palette, but otherwise monstrous and excessive. Aki awakes to find herself surrounded by a cavernous darkness punctuated by off-white giant effigies of dismembered female body parts. As Michio explains his artistic mission and tries to persuade Aki to become his muse, the camera reveals what appear to be only small areas of a much vaster space; one that has no visible walls, is not unambiguously rectilinear, and is ultimately incomprehensible. At one point the camera makes a series of high speeding jolting pans to reveal one segment at a time, each devoted to a different body part. Each tableau is flat, but fish-eyed: logically, they ought to be walls, but they doní‚´t add up as walls. The only things holding all this together are two giant recumbent female torsos occupying the studio floor, one supine, one prone. It is around these, particularly the one on its back, that the action and sense of space increasingly revolves. The only touch of vivid colour is Akií‚´s green dress, but this quickly fades. Latterly, the scene is all chiaroscuro in close-up, small moments of light picked out in an enveloping, shapeless darkness. By now, Aki has lost her sight, presumably out of sympathy, and the presentation of blindness has shifted. Earlier Michio showed off his agility and awareness, nimbly chasing Aki round the studio in near-slapstick, now-you-see-them-now-you-don’t routines. By the end, they are both clambering tremulously like Beckett characters whose misfortune is to be condemned to inhabit a big papier-mí­Â¢ché lady; quivering, boggling, reaching with splayed fingers, stumbling.

The film, it seems, is trying to find a way to render non-visual intimacy in an inescapably visual medium. In this respect, it is almost as crazy as the blind beast himself. Why, laments Michio, should art be all about sight and touch? He will create a new genre of art devoted to touch, an art by and for the blind. Tragically for him, the genre in question has already been around for some centuries. What is more, there is nothing in it that positively excludes the sighted, and you are often not even allowed to touch it. It’s sculpture! But it seems almost cruel to point this out, and certainly Aki is too scared to mention it. The theme of blindness is nevertheless important to the film, and it places it oddly in relation to other famous cinematic obsessions with the female body. When cinema has taken a long hard look at itself, it has often concluded there may be something voyeuristic in its very nature. Most obviously, Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) upset people because it had the camera perform the rape and violation which it usually only happens to witness. The spectacle of alluringly terrified women driven into darkened corners on its own would hardly raise an eyebrow. Blind Beast, on the other hand, claims not to be about voyeurism at all. Michio’s beef is that, as a blind man, he has been deprived of the only sort of contact that makes sense to him: why should he not be allowed to touch beautiful ladies just as we get to see them?

We, of course, do get to see a lot of Aki, and in a light that becomes more and more curious. After her initial and understandable attempts to escape, at one point aided by the incestuously jealous matron, Aki inevitably falls for her touchingly virginal captor. Her conversion is abrupt to say the least, and the descent into limb-chopping suicidal lunacy is vertiginous. If only they had heard King Missile’s ‘Gary and Melissa’, they would have seen there were many more erotic options open to them between massage and butchery. Even Nagisa Oshima’s famously adventurous couple in Ai no corrida (1976) make their perverse progress at an infinitely more sedate pace. The turning point is Michio’s mother’s death. After this the camera barely leaves the studio; once to focus on Mum’s putrid grave, and once to follow Michio in search of Akií‚´s ultimate sex-toys, a cleaver and mallet. As he returns, she assumes the position, the one, that is, that she took for Michio’s sculpture. And as the cleaver falls, it is the limbs of the sculpture we see fall with a clunk to the studio floor.

But it’s also the posture of the vast landscaped reclining Robert Crumb woman that was already the centrepiece of the studio when Aki first awoke there. For that matter, it bears more than a passing resemblance to the sculpture by a quite different artist round which the pair first met. The whole point of abducting Aki was to produce an unprecedented, genre-forging perfection in the art of touch. To this end, he spends quite a considerable time ascertaining the precise form and consistency of Akií‚´s breasts. He also artfully conceals them in the process. This coyness continues throughout the sex scenes, but interestingly enough is completely forgotten once torture is the order of the day. And what we see here is that Aki’s breasts bear absolutely no relation to those on the sculpture supposed to represent her. What the sculpture does have are the very same mountainous breasts as its artistic ancestors. These breasts, the vast hill-like ones, have a large part in the film. Intimacy gravitates towards their sheltering valley. On a more practical note, they are useful as hand-holds when scaling the heights of giant torsos. But most importantly, they are also a sort of leitmotiv of commodified femininity throughout. They owe their form not to the vagaries of individual artistic perception, but to an invariable, transcendent consumer demand. We are all, it seems, blind beasts, but that never stopped us looking.

Stephen Thomson

Cinema releases, Home entertainment

HAXAN (WITCHCRAFT THROUGH THE AGES)

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Haxan

Format: Cinema

Screening on: 6 May 2007

Time: 3pm

Venue: The Barbican, London

With hammered dulcimer score performed by Geoff Smith

Also available on DVD

Distributor: Tartan Video

Release date: 24 September 2007

Director: Benjamin Christensen

Original title Häxan

Cast Maren Pedersen, Clara Pontoppidan, Elith Pio

Denmark/Sweden 1922

104 minutes

This legendary silent film, much admired by the Surrealists, is a spellbinding brew of ingredients that don’t naturally mix, at least not in modern cinema. Combining the scholarly and the outlandish, the fact-based and the supernatural, Häxan is simultaneously a documentary on witchcraft and a collection of wildly fanciful visions. Banned or censored in many countries on its release in 1922 for its candid depiction of nudity, sexuality and torture as well as for its strong anti-clerical tone, the film has retained a sulphurous aura to this day.

We have to remember that at the time the film was made there were no clear boundaries between documentary and fiction. In the yet uncharted waters of the nascent film art, the aim of director Benjamin Christensen was to make an educational, informative film that would also have artistic value. Christensen himself embodies the paradoxical position of the film, poised between objective and subjective, rational and irrational. The director is the first-person narrator in the titles and as such he is the voice of rationality that coolly comments on the mass delusion that gripped ancient, barbaric times. But in an intriguing personality split, Christensen – who started his film career as an actor – also plays the lewd, tongue-wagging Devil that represents the violent, uncontrollable irruption of the irrational in the human mind.

The factual content of the film was very important to the director, and this is obvious in the detailed, realistic depictions of medieval daily life and dress and of the torture instruments used at the witch trials. He had even hoped that scholars would write the ‘script’ for the film but his request was rejected by academics who thought that cinema was not a suitable vehicle for serious study. Christensen therefore did his own research, drawing on medieval woodcuts, illustrations and treaties, in particular Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches), a witch hunter’s manual written in 1487 by two Dominican monks.

Through the meticulous recreation of the past Christensen wanted to educate his audience about the consequences of superstitious and intolerant beliefs, demonstrating how they led to the persecution of anyone seen as different – in this case, the very old, the very ugly, beggars and cripples. These beliefs were stirred up and influenced by the Church and Christensen starkly denounces the responsibility of the Christian clergy for the burning of 8 million people at the stake (although the scholar Casper Tybjerg explains on the Criterion DVD that the figure is in fact closer to 50 000). In one of the titles Christensen explains that the ‘witch madness’ was like a ‘spiritual plague’ that followed wherever the monks of the Inquisition went: the monks were not the remedy as they claimed, they were the disease.

Christensen’s position is explicitly rationalist and he contrasts obscurantist medieval superstitions with enlightened contemporary society: ‘The belief in evil spirits, sorcery, and witchcraft is the result of naí­Â¯ve notions about the mystery of the universe’, reads one of the titles of the first section. Emphasizing the point, we later see two pioneer medical students accused of being witches because they have stolen bodies in the cemetery, which they were planning to open in order to learn more about how disease affects the human body.

Yet, for all the rationalist posturing it is the representation of the supernatural that makes Häxan so memorable. Christensen clearly relishes bringing to life the fears and horrors that lurk in the human mind. The masterful use of light and shadows, the actors’ rugged features, the red and blue tints that lend the black and white images an otherworldly quality all contribute to infuse the film with a pungent, macabre atmosphere. At times it is as if paintings by Goya, Bruegel or Bosch had been magically animated. The scene of the witches flying through the air above the sleepy town remains not only impressive in terms of special effects but strikingly poetic while the unholy scenes of the Sabbath, with their orgiastic excess, uprooted trees and sinister blue tint have a truly nightmarish beauty.

Christensen is least persuasive when he takes us back to the rational, modern world and attempts to demonstrate Professor Charcot’s theory that the phenomena associated with witchcraft were caused by hysteria. While he convincingly connects witchcraft to sexual repression in the medieval section, he doesn’t seem able to make a similar link with so-called ‘hysteria’ in the modern world. We see women affected by somnambulism and kleptomania but Christensen seems unable to engage with their troubled minds. As a result, while the medieval depictions of a monk being willingly flagellated for lusting after a young ‘witch’ or of a whole convent of nuns overcome by uncontrollable delirium are heady, potent sequences, the modern somnambulist and kleptomaniac are little more than dull, superficial case studies. It is as if Christensen’s attempt to remain within the strict boundaries of rationality in the last chapter had killed off his capacity for imagining the unspeakable corners of the human subconscious.

What’s more, blinded by his rationalist stance, Christensen is unable to see that Charcot’s pseudo-scientific diagnostic of ‘hysteria’ is just as extravagant as the previous witchcraft accusations – and just as misogynistic: women are no longer dangerous heretics to be burned at the stake but deranged patients who need to be treated in institutions. Granted, Christensen’s lack of perceptiveness is mitigated by the fact that he was after all a man of his time and couldn’t possibly have guessed that decades later hysteria would be widely discredited as a valid medical diagnosis by scientists and feminists alike. Paradoxically, this means that the film can now be seen as an unwitting denunciation of rationalist certainties: what was held as true in the Middle-Ages was reviled as superstitious drivel in the nineteenth century, but what passed for science in the nineteenth century has now been repudiated as unfounded nonsense. While this is obviously not what Christensen had in mind, it adds a piquant new layer to the film’s complex mix of fact and fiction.

Fifty years after its original release, Häxan remains a fascinating film for its alien beauty, its singular blend of the real and the supernatural and its intelligent investigation of the psychological mechanisms behind the witch hunt mania. In that, it is a timeless work, which just like Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, applies far beyond its explicit (or implicit – McCarthy’s Communist witch hunt in Miller’s play) subject matter. Watching The Crucible performed last year was a powerful reminder of how relevant its dissection of the phenomenon is to our own times. Häxan sounds as stark a warning: the monks it depicts are convinced that they are protecting Christianity from evil; believing that they are fighting on the side of good against the terrifying threat of darkness posed by the ‘witches’, they feel entirely justified in their use of torture, brutality and deceit to extract confessions. See the parallels with our troubled times yet?

Virginie Sélavy

Cinema releases

JOE STRUMMER: THE FUTURE IS UNWRITTEN

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Joe Strummer

Format: Cinema

Release date: 18 May 2007

Distributor Vertigo Films

Director: Julien Temple

UK/Ireland 2007

123 minutes

Joe Strummer always cut an incongruous figure as a punk. While the rest of the self-styled last gang in town were suitably weaselly and malnourished (Jones and Topper) or remote (Simonon), Strummer, well-built, full of face and with a mockney accent that belied his boarding school past, seemed too old, too worldly-wise for such a nihilistic movement. Not for him the anguished howl of alienation and misanthropy that Johnny Rotten embodied so well. Nor did his band stick to the DIY, three-chord aesthetic propounded by Sniffin’ Glue that seemed such an important tenet of punk, preferring instead to venture into reggae and ska. No, Strummer’s vision of punk was different, educational and multi-cultural, and at its worst had a proselytizing tendency uncomfortably close to that of Bono, and a po-facedness that’s mirrored in the legions of bands they spawned, from the Manics to the Libertines.

Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten is Julien Temple’s beautifully assembled love letter to his dead friend. Born John Graham Mellor in Ankara, Turkey to a foreign-service diplomat father, Strummer lived in various countries before being deposited in an English boarding school with his older brother David. Temple brilliantly evokes the cool austerity of the 50s and the vibrancy of the 60s with a collage of home movies and vintage footage, ending in the tragedy of David’s flirtation with fascism, his descent into depression and his suicide in 1970. We’re left to imagine the impression his brother’s death must have left on the young John Mellor, now calling himself Woody after his hero Woody Guthrie, as we follow him first to art school and then, following an incident with an artwork composed entirely of used tampons, to Newport, South Wales where, sporting decidedly non-punk flowing locks, he forms his first band.

Back in London in 1974 Strummer becomes involved in the squat scene of the time and Temple demonstrates how the political ideas of community and social justice, essentially hippy ideals from the sixties, that would come to define him were developed. After forming the 101’ers, Strummer is picked out by Svengali Bernie Rhodes to join a new band called The Clash and the film picks up pace, with grainy footage of amphetamine-fuelled gigs and the smell of ambition barely disguised as punk ethos, Strummer throwing everything into his new role. Topper Headon pops up to recount how he joined the band, complaining that he left his wife in the morning with long hair and flares and returned in the evening with a punk cut and zips. As a lesson in how punk changed everything overnight it’s perfect. The Clash bandwagon rolls ever faster, a vehicle for Strummer’s struggle for justice, decency and righteousness. Whether it’s protecting the kids from the bouncers, support slots for Grandmaster Flash (he’s booed off), or triple albums called ‘Sandinista’, Strummer walks it like he talks it.

Inevitably it can’t last. Drugs and drink and constant touring conspire to turn The Clash into a parody of the rock bands that, just three years earlier, they’d set out to destroy. Topper writes Rock The Casbah and is shortly afterwards dismissed for his addiction to heroin. Mick Jones writes ‘Should I Stay Or Should I Go?’ (shown here live with Mick singing ‘It’s always Joe, Joe, Joe’, should you have ever wondered where Doherty and Barat got the idea for ‘Can’t Stand Me Now’ from) and shortly afterwards receives his own Clash communiqué from Strummer. ‘Are you discouraged by the rock’n’roll business?’, an interviewer asks Mick Jones. ‘It’s no worse than any other prostitution business’, he replies.

After The Clash fall apart Strummer is portrayed as a walking ghost, seeking consolation in the bottle. In one of the film’s funniest anecdotes (and there are a few) Strummer says: ‘I knew I had to cut down on the drinking. Just then the phone rang. It was The Pogues. They wanted to know if I could go on tour with them.’ Slowly though we see him pick up the pieces and eventually form The Mescaleros. We sense a man finding his purpose again, or at least determining what is important. The circle is completed when Mick Jones joins Strummer on stage for a benefit for London’s firemen. Ten days later he dies peacefully on his couch at home, reading The Observer.

Temple tells the story with no little skill, compensating for a lack of footage in the early and later years by mixing in sound snippets from Strummer’s BBC World Service radio show and animations of Strummer’s own cartoons. Perhaps his best trick though is a recreation of one of the Strummerville campfires that had become Strummer’s main focus in the last few years of his life, and which live on as a charitable foundation run by his family and by Temple himself. Gathered around the flames somewhere high above London, drinks in hand, Strummer’s family, friends and fellow artists talk openly and with affection about the man they knew, providing the film with an emotional heart and Temple with a wealth of material. It’s this warmth, from the director down, that is the film’s real strength, and yet paradoxically you catch yourself wondering how another director might tell the story. Occasionally we catch glimpses of a Joe that doesn’t quite tally with the other eulogies – the naked ambition on forming The Clash that led him to snub his former friends, an emotional Topper Headon recounting how Strummer had slept with his girlfriend on tour – and you wonder what else there might be. Temple puts it out there, but there’s a sense that the picture being painted is more of a memorial than a warts-and-all portrait.

Whether or not this is true, you come away from the cinema inspired by Joe Strummer the man. A generous, passionate, larger-than-life character who lived his life in the only way he knew how, fighting for people, for multi-culturalism, for rock’n’roll and for the politics of the left. A man who cried when he read that the American army had written ‘Rock The Casbah’ on a warhead destined for Iraq. If he never quite cut it as a punk, well, maybe he was more than that. After all, as John Cooper-Clarke says, ‘Punks were just hippies with zips’.

Sean Price

Cinema releases

THE BOTHERSOME MAN

The Bothersome Man

Format: Cinema

Release date: 25 May 2007

Distributor ICA

Director: Jens Lien

Original title: Den Brysomme Mannen

Cast: Trond Fausa Aurvag, Petronella Barker, Birgitte Larsen

Norway 2006

90 minutes

A man steps down from a rattling bus at a rundown gas station in the centre of a deserted volcanic wasteland. He is expected. In a nearby city an apartment waits for him, a job, a whole new life. But something is wrong here. The inhabitants of the city seem happy, content with their lot. But the food tastes of nothing, the alcohol is ineffective, the music bland, the décor uniform and drab. Even sex is joyless.

The opening scenes of Jens Lien’s debut feature The Bothersome Man tick all the boxes in the now-familiar category marked ‘surreal/ existentialist’. A lone stranger. A world familiar, but not quite like our own. Plenty of empty silences, meaningful glances and quiet desperation. Scattered touches of delicate whimsy, and a handful of random absurdity (in this case, two men playing badminton in an open field). A lot of none-too-subtle social commentary.

The film is obviously intended as a Kafkaesque allegory on middle-class Scandinavian culture, and hammers its point home with numbing regularity. The characters, bemused hero Andreas notwithstanding, are uniformly dull and lifeless. They are obsessed with interior design, any hint of emotion or imagination terrifies them. Even when Andreas thinks he’s found real love, with blonde office junior Ingeborg, it turns out she’s just an empty vessel like all the rest.

The main problem the filmmakers face is that it’s very difficult to make a film about joyless people in a joyless world and still make the film, well, enjoyable. When virtually all your characters are dour and plastic, how is an audience supposed to relate? Even poor Andreas has no context in which to display his personality. He’s presented as the archetypal everyman, trying to make his way in an uncertain and unpredictable world. Trond Fausa Aurvag plays the character just a notch above unconscious, blinking warily at the steadily unfolding drama in which he has become an unwilling central player. The other actors essay their parts perfectly, but it’s hard to tell how talented they are when the characters are all essentially the same: cold, loveless, lifeless.

The final act of the film brings some spark to the proceedings. Following an abortive subway suicide attempt (in this world it’s impossible to die), Andreas overhears the distant and beautiful sound of music. He discovers a hole in the wall of an abandoned cellar, from which strange and emotive sounds and smells regularly emanate. He attempts to break through, but his efforts are impeded by the mysterious city authorities.

The suicide sequence is by far the strongest in the film. There have been shocking images before – a man impaled on railings, his intestines hanging out; Andreas cutting off his own finger, only to find it mysteriously re-grown. But when he jumps under the train, the film takes off in a new and temporarily riveting direction. Andreas is smashed, battered, dragged along and torn to shreds, all the while conscious and aware of what’s happening to him. And it’s all presented in horrifyingly vivid detail, every bone snap and crunch clearly audible. For a moment the film begins to resemble Miike Takashi’s Audition, another sly comment on middle-class mores which descended into surprising and disturbing violence.

But The Bothersome Man entirely lacks the earlier film’s integrity, or its intelligence. It’s hard to tell if Lien or screenwriter Per Schreiner realise quite how narrow and offensive the premise of their film is. This is a world in which the majority of people live drab, empty lives which mean absolutely nothing. They don’t enjoy the benefits they are given, they are small-minded, petty individuals with nothing to recommend them. The women, particularly, are trouble: self-centred, treacherous, beautiful but empty, unable to connect on any kind of human level. Is this how Lien and Schreiner view the world? Do they see themselves as Andreas, ‘real’ souls trapped in this prison of fakery?

There isn’t an ounce of subtlety in The Bothersome Man. It is a film as anhedonic and soulless as its characters, dripping with patronising superiority. What strength the film has lies in its ability to shock, but such moments are fleeting and purely physical. There is nothing here we haven’t seen before, or needed to see again.

Tom Huddleston

Cinema releases

THE NIGHT OF THE SUNFLOWERS

The Night of the Sunflowers

Format: Cinema

Release date: 11 May 2007

Distributor Yume Pictures

Director: Jorge Sí¡nchez-Cabezudo

Original title: La Noche de los girasoles

Cast: Carmelo Gí­Â³mez, Judith Diakhate, Cesí¡reo Estébanez

Spain 2006

123 minutes

La Noche de los girasoles (Night of the Sunflowers) starts with two separate stories that are interwoven: the discovery of a cave that may or may not drastically change the fortunes of a small northern Spanish village, and the murder of a girl found in some nearby sunflower fields. Both storylines act as a catalyst for what subsequently takes place and are merged together through the arrival of speleologist Esteban (Carmelo Gí­Â³mez) and his girlfriend Gabi (Judith Diakhate) in the village. The film is told in six chapters that each expand as well as cast further light on the story. Each chapter starts further back in time than the previous one and ends further ahead, thus moving the story forward. Each chapter also has a new protagonist, often introduced towards the end of the preceding section, who is linked to the story in a coincidental way.

The first feature by young Spanish director Jorge Sí¡nchez-Cabezudo, it is one of those films that feel like they were constructed on a drawing board before they were actually written in order to make sure that, as the puzzle unravels, all angles are covered. The last ten years have seen a proliferation of such films: Se7en, The Game, Memento and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to name but a few. However, those movies only used their elaborate construction and multiple twists and turns for no other reason than to cover up their own hollowness whereas La Noche de los girasoles is a far more sophisticated and mature film. By telling the story backwards Sí¡nchez-Cabezudo manages to convince us first of all that all these coincidences could plausibly occur – which is no mean feat considering how many there are. What’s more, by combining this with a construction in six chapters that each have their own titles, he very successfully manages to engage you in what are essentially six gripping and very different short stories, ranging in tone from the Taviani Brothers to Claude Chabrol and ending in a scene that can only be seen as a tribute to Ví­Â­ctor Erice’s Spirit Of the Beehive.

The main achievement here is how well it all works, how effortless the construction seems and how it gives Sí¡nchez-Cabezudo the chance to spin lovely side stories that give you a genuine sense of life in a little rural Spanish village. It feels like Sí¡nchez-Cabezudo really knows the environment he describes and although his choice of characters might be a tad predictable (travelling salesman, village idiots and policemen) he manages to flesh them out to be much more than just stereotypes.

Kim Nicolajsen

Cinema releases

JINDABYNE

Jindabyne

Format: Cinema

Release date: 25 May 2007

Distributor Revolver

Director: Ray Lawrence

Based on: ‘So Much Water So Close to Home’ by Raymond Carver

Cast: Laura Linney, Gabriel Byrne, Deborra-Lee Furness

Australia 2006

123 minutes

Five years after the widely praised Lantana, Ray Lawrence returns with an adaptation of a short story by American writer Raymond Carver, ‘So Much Water So Close to Home’ – which Robert Altman had also adapted earlier in Short Cuts. Lawrence relocates the story to the outback of his native Australia, more precisely to Jindabyne, a small town in the mountainous wilderness of the southwest.

Jindabyne opens with the murder of a young Aboriginal woman before introducing the protagonists of the story, Irish mechanic Stuart, his pals Carl, Rocco and Billy, and his wife Claire. At the weekend the four men go on their long-awaited annual fishing trip in the mountains. But on the first day Stuart discovers the body of the murdered woman in the river. Without any deliberation, they simply tie the body to a tree so that it won’t drift away and carry on fishing. When they report the murder to the police on their return two days later, their actions are met with disgust in town and provoke anger in the Aboriginal community. Profoundly disturbed by her husband’s behaviour, Claire makes misguided attempts to reach out to the murdered woman’s family.

Jindabyne has been fairly well-received by festival audiences and critics and there is no denying that it is a well-crafted film, the intertwined themes of moral choice and family life being dealt with in a mature, sober way. The disintegration of Claire and Stuart’s marriage is well observed, the incident bringing back to the surface old resentments and repressed feelings from their past history. Claire’s uneasiness, caused partly by her suspicion that her husband harbours somewhat shameful feelings in relation to the dead girl, is convincingly drawn. The thriller part is well handled, the killer remaining mysterious and terribly familiar at the same time, with no easy resolution.

And yet some extremely misjudged decisions make Jindabyne a rather unpalatable experience. While there is a real effort to be true to Carver’s style and convey the characters’ emotions through acts and situations rather than through words, that effort is thoroughly ruined by the awful yodelling pseudo-spiritual singing on the soundtrack. Blasted in our ears while we are treated to images of spectacular scenery, it is obviously meant to let us know that at that point we should be feeling in awe of the stunning wilderness that unfolds before our eyes. The same strategy is repeated at the end, and the traditional Aboriginal ceremony is turned to mawkish caricature by the lengthy, over-emotional a cappella singing. This is a rather unsubtle, irksome and un-Carver-like way to try and tell the audience how they should feel.

And then there’s the race angle, which plays no part in the original story. Lawrence clearly tries to use the plot to say something about the treatment of Aboriginal people in his country. But Claire’s misplaced, drippy race guilt provides no insight into this theme, and does nothing but represent a self-obsessed white perspective. She goes to a private ceremony even though she is not wanted there in order to assuage her own bad conscience. And although what Stuart has done is irreparably insulting for the Aboriginal people, there is an intimation that some kind of reconciliation between Claire and her husband might be possible. In the middle of the Aboriginal ceremony, what interests the director most is not the Aboriginals’ sense of loss but what is going to happen to the white couple’s relationship.

This may be a well-meaning film but its po-faced worthiness, its lack of sophistication in its handling of the race issue and its incapacity to see beyond an all-white point of view make it an altogether unpleasant experience. Better to save your cash to go and see Ten Canoes next month, an Aboriginal folk tale starring only Aboriginal actors, which offers a much more complex – and humorous – take on the issue.

Virginie Sélavy