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Lawrence of Belgravia

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Lawrence of Belgravia

55th BFI London Film Festival

12-27 October 2011, various venues, London

LFF website

This subtle portrait of a reclusive indie musician seems to have generated one of London Film Festival’s warmest responses, with extra screenings needed for all the fans of Lawrence, the Birmingham-born progenitor of 80s and 90s bands Felt and Denim. Lawrence’s story is not a happy one: Felt’s ethereal guitar pop was arguably superior to, say, The Smiths, yet failed to rise above cult status; with Denim, Lawrence nailed 1990s indie’s obsession with nostalgia early in the decade, with a skewed wit and obsessive rigour that was probably a bit too much for Oasis and Blur fans. Mental health and drug problems have dogged his current band, Go-Kart Mozart, whose perverse synth-rock songs are exercises in self-sabotage lit by some occasionally inspired tunes and arrangements. Rather than construct a biopic focusing on his more palatable past, director Paul Kelly lets the present-day Lawrence steer the film, and it’s the better for it, albeit searingly moving and uncomfortable in places. We see Go-Kart Mozart stumble through rehearsals, recordings and some live shows, while Lawrence is interviewed by journalists (who seem in the main to still be holding a torch for Felt), sifts through archives of personal ephemera and moves into a new council flat on the edges of the City of London after being evicted from his previous home. The capital’s loneliness, its sharp, cold angles, are soulfully evoked by the filmmaker who also helped create St Etienne’s paean to London, Finisterre (2005).

Kelly’s a friend of the singer, and you suspect some of Lawrence’s more unpleasant, paranoid traits have been softened in the edit - although not that much; there’s a scene in which a new Go-Kart song seemingly about a fear of vaginas gets an airing. What he draws from Lawrence most valuably is his sharp critical intelligence and instinctive feel for pop music’s power and history - things that seem unextinguished by failure or addiction or age. Listening to Lawrence talk about music, the secret magic life of it, is a pleasure, however spectral and neglected he looks now: if things had worked out a little differently, if Go-Kart’s ‘We’re Selfish and Lazy and Greedy’ had taken off like ‘Common People’, perhaps he, like Jarvis Cocker - another almost-failure from the 80s who triumphed in the following decade - would be signing Faber deals and headlining stadia while pontificating about rare records on the radio. It’s this plucky eccentric almost-a-contender status that I think some of my fellow viewers of Lawrence of Belgravia seek to confer on him, but while it’s well-meaning, it implies a slightly sour triumph; Lawrence quite obviously would have liked to have been much more of a real star before becoming the outsider-ish ex-star he now appears to be.

Musicians from the 90s, thought to be retired, seem to appear in the media at almost weekly intervals these days with news of a tour and a hint of some precious ‘new material’, while BBC4 documentaries on Creation Records and films like the recent account of Oxford’s alternative music scene, Anyone Can Play Guitar, recount indie’s various ‘golden ages’. Lawrence of Belgravia is both part of this trend, and a disruption of it, because his presence and participation stop us from celebrating this recent past too complacently. He is something of a ghost at the nostalgia feast; a ghost with a comedy song about Rwandan landmines and Um Bongo. The light in which we’ve cast ‘indie’ and ‘the 90s’ fades into an agoraphobic sickliness; not everyone got out OK.

It is to Kelly’s credit that, despite the sadness at its heart, his film is so sincere, warm and affectionate. I loved it, but it left me chilled to the bone, writing 2000-word blog posts into the small hours, coshed with memories and having a good cry to Denim’s ‘I’m against the Eighties’. It was quite a trip, so I would advise any 30-something music nerds with similarly delicate dispositions to approach this film with caution.

Frances Morgan

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Les enfants du paradis

Les enfants du paradis

Format: Cinema

Release date: 11 November 2011

Venues: Key cities

Distributor: BFI Distribution

Director: Marcel Carné

Writer: Jacques Prévert

Cast: Arletty, Jean-Louis Barrault, Pierre Brasseur

France1945

163 mins

It’s a wonder that this wonder-filled film ever got made. Work began on Les enfants du paradis in 1943 when France was occupied by the Germans, there were power shortages, rationed film stock, and a suspicious Vichy government that declared that films couldn’t be longer than 90 minutes. The epically involving Les enfants du paradis runs at three hours, and the Jewish composer Joseph Kosma and set designer Alexandre Trauner were forced to make their contributions clandestinely. To have made a simple, domestic drama in these circumstances would have been impressive, but Marcel Carné’s film is a riotous, romantic costume melodrama, with magnificent sets: the action takes place in a foggy duelling ground, backstage at the theatre, in a grand mansion and a rough and ready rooming house with over a thousand extras, many who were in the Resistance, milling through vividly recreated 1840s Paris.

The opening shot is a tumultuous, joyful street scene, a miracle of perspective in which a thronging crowd mass along Le Boulevard du Crime, in the theatrical district, where a dizzying array of street acts, from strong men to tight-rope walkers advertise forthcoming attractions. The camera gradually focuses on individuals in the crowd, Garance, the enigmatic heroine of the film, played with a cool, self-possessed insouciance by Arletty, and aspiring actor Frédérick Lemaître (Pierre Brasseur), who flirts with her. Falsely accused of being a pickpocket, Garance is saved by the melancholy Baptiste (Jean-Louis Barrault), who wittily mimes the true circumstances of the crime, earns a rose from Arletty’s breast, and is immediately overcome with love. There are two more men in Arletty’s life: Lacenaire, a ruthless dandy of the criminal underworld with a villainous moustache, a frilled shirt and a neat line in bleak, cut-throat wit, and the Count Edouard de Montray, a cold-hearted, upper-class duellist who makes his aristocratic appearance towards the end of the first part of the film.

Affection, unrequited love, jealously, obsession and artistic ambition are played out against this theatrical background. It’s a complicated film that explores the nature of performance, with Baptiste’s clever mimes adding an extra layer to poet Jacques Prévert’s witty, stylised script. Baptiste acts out his heartbreak on the Funambules’ stage, as he falls in love with a statue, played by Garance, who comes to life and heads off with Harlequin, acted out by Frédérick. In the second half of the film (entitled ‘The Man in White’), the love story remains as complicated as ever, an unhappy, but involving drama of domestic pragmatism versus melodramatic passion. The ending returns to the crowded boulevard, crammed with festive Pierrots, for a spell-binding finale.

Carné’s film about actors acting was made in the most trying of circumstances, but the elaborate sets, sumptuous costumes and lovely, poignant orchestral score reveal nothing of the harsh realities of life in occupied France (many of the extras were starving members of the Resistance). The post-war nouvelle vague critics initially admired this impressive example of French poetic realism, but with its careful attention to detail and stylised script, it was a far cry from their own, spontaneous guerrilla-style approach to storytelling and filming and they soon turned against Carné, dismissing his work as the quaint, hidebound ‘cinéma de papa’. Yet Les enfants du paradis, for all its costume drama accoutrements, has a surprisingly subversive heroine in Garance. Older than the typical starlet, enigmatic rather than beautiful, she is entirely self-possessed, her character is adventurous, mysterious, prepared to experience all that life has to offer, and a deliciously elusive counterpoint to the emotional melodrama that surrounds her. Even Truffaut conceded in the end: ‘I have made 23 films, well, I would swap them all for the chance to have made Les enfants du paradis‘.

Eithne Farry

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The Human Centipede 2

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The Human Centipede 2

Format: Cinema

Release date: 4 November 2011

Venues: Nationwide

Distributor: Bounty Films/Eureka Entertainment

Director: Tom Six

Writer: Tom Six

Cast: Laurence R. Harvey, Ashlynn Yennie, Emma Lock, Katherine Templar

UK 2011

88 mins

Like last year’s infamous A Serbian Film, The Human Centipede 2 has managed to become the hot button issue of the UK film industry. In one corner, we have the BBFC; in the other, the fans. What is being fought over is not only the morals of British society but also our approach to controversial art in the future.

First, the BBFC banned the film, because they said it was impossible to cut it to an acceptable format. Now they’ve allowed it in a cut version although one member of the board abstained from voting in favour of the decision. Some critics love it, some absolutely hate it. Audience members throw up, some cheer, others boo. The contents have now become almost mythical for their gratuitous violence. So how does a low-budget horror film elicit such strong reactions from every segment of the film industry?

With The Human Centipede, Tom Six proved that horror did not need to live up to expectations to fulfil its potential. Audiences expected gross-out body horror of the most extreme kind, and he delivered a well-timed and skilful update of the mad scientist figure.

With the sequel he seems to have pulled out all the stops to deliver something visually extreme. However, at the core of his film lies a central performance that borders on slapstick. Laurence R. Harvey stars as Martin, a seemingly mild-mannered car park security guard who lives with his abusive mother. Martin seems to spend his days watching the original Human Centipede on repeat and putting together a shoddy plan to continue the work of Dr Heiter (Dieter Laser). As his psychosis blooms, no one around him is safe from his fantasies of playing doctor and conducting the ultimate centipede experiment.

In this sequel, Tom Six promises that the whole thing is ‘100% medically inaccurate’ and to say that he fully delivers on this claim is an understatement of sorts. Martin is an introvert, the kind of person who as a child would get picked on at school, and his understanding of surgery and human anatomy leaves a lot to be desired. However, Martin compensates for his lack of knowledge with a gleeful sense of enthusiasm that drives the film forward.

Laurence R. Harvey’s performance is pitch-perfect: Martin lies somewhere between the deadpan mannerisms of Buster Keaton and the full-blown psychotic tendencies of Henry. Each gesture, each facial expression perfectly conveys his character. He is not moral or amoral but free from these considerations - a child lost and never found.

Perhaps the biggest problem with The Human Centipede 2 is the forced cuts by the BBFC - reading their detailed report on the film, it’s hard not to feel cheated by these numerous snips, which create leaps in the narrative logic and a sense of discordance. However, as it stands, The Human Centipede 2 is still a terrific movie: if you can tune into its warped, droll humour and excessive brutality, this is one hell of an experience you are sure not to forget. Tom Six has managed to channel a true British nasty through his uniquely European approach. Unmissable.

Evrim Ersoy

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Miss Bala

Miss Bala

Format: Cinema

Release date: 28 October 2011

Venues: Key cities

Distributor: Metrodome

Director: Gerardo Naranjo

Writers: Gerardo Naranjo, Mauricio Katz

Cast: Stephanie Sigman, Irene Azuela, Miguel Couturier

Mexico 2011

113 mins

The second feature from Gerardo Naranjo, Miss Bala is a searing, brutal film set in the midst of Mexico’s vicious drug war. Laura (played by the terrific Stephanie Sigman), her bedroom walls covered in images torn from the pages of fashion magazines, is a stunning but poor young woman who dreams of winning the Miss Baja California beauty contest. Unless that happens, she’s stuck in a mundane existence caring for her father and young brother. But the night before her audition, she witnesses an attack by members of a cartel on a club filled with cops, gangsters and their girlfriends. She manages to dodge the hail of bullets, escaping unharmed, but loses her friend Suzu in the chaos. After one terrible error on Laura’s part, she’s plunged into a morass of betrayal, corruption and violence.

Naranjo has made a very different film from his 2008 debut, Voy a explotar, a tragically romantic love story about two young runaways, filled with pop culture references. Miss Bala is darker, deeper and more haunting; for Laura, there is no escape. When she seeks help from a traffic cop in finding Suzu, she’s instead delivered into the hands of the criminals who shot up the club, and their very unglamorous leader, Lino (Noe Hernandez). Instead of killing her, he does something almost worse, forcing her to become a pawn and accomplice in his war with the government. In return, he will do what he can to help her win the beauty contest, except that too is little more than a set-up.

It’s a gripping story told in the style of a very un-Hollywood thriller, with the action and suspense stemming from a disturbingly realistic portrayal of violence. ‘I wanted to make a social film, but I wanted to put it in the frame of an action or suspense film, a thriller. I wanted it to have another layer of movie-making, so people weren’t put off by the idea of a “political” film,’ said Naranjo at an interview during the London Film Festival. ‘There was no practical reason for making this movie, but I had a social and moral obligation. It’s a very sad subject, it’s a dark thing, something we’re not proud of. There are some people who think that we shouldn’t make movies like this, that they’re promoting the problem. If we give the problem a face and identify what’s happening, there are other people who think it’s a very unpatriotic act. Obviously we don’t agree with that.’

In the film, the line between the police and the criminals is disturbingly blurred; corruption is ingrained, and the gangs act with shocking impunity. High-ranking officials are murdered, with one DEA agent’s body strung up from a bridge, dangling over passing traffic. Laura, out of fear for her own life and the safety of her family, has little choice but to do as Lino demands. ‘The criminals are the law,’ said Naranjo. ‘People in Mexico are living in fear. That was the origin of the film.’

Laura is very much at the centre of Miss Bala (which means ‘bullet’), the camera almost never leaving her. This was a very conscious decision by the filmmaker: ‘Other movies about crime in Mexico are all told from the criminal’s point of view, almost to justify their actions. I wanted to talk about the experience of the victim, someone who was alien to the criminal world. I saw the news about this beauty queen who was arrested with all these criminals, so we decided to explain how these two realities that are so distant can meet. I was also very upset about how the media portrayed the criminals, with the gold chains, the women, the orgies and the drugs, like it’s a constant party. When we researched we discovered it was nothing like that. The life of a criminal is much more pathetic, with a lot of fear and paranoia.’

Miss Bala is bleak but engrossing, mixing the political message with some excellent filmmaking and cinematography. In creating such a compelling picture, Naranjo and Stigman have drawn much needed attention to an ongoing tragedy - as the film reveals in its closing moments, more than 30,000 people have been killed in the drug war since 2006.

Sarah Cronin

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The Silence

The Silence

Format: Cinema

Release date: 28 October 2011

Venues: UK wide

Distributor: Soda Pictures

Director: Baran bo Odar

Writers: Baran bo Odar, Alex Ross, Richard Shakocius

Based on the novel by: Jan Costin Wagner

Original title: Das letze Schweigen

Cast:Ulrich Thomsen, Wotan Wilke Möhring, Katrin Sa&#223, Burghart Klau&#223ner, Sebastian Blomberg

Germany 2010

118 mins

When a young girl is murdered in circumstances identical to a crime that took place two decades previously, the police rush to investigate. Gradually we see, through flashbacks, how a friendship between two men led to the first killing. This debut film from director Baran bo Odar expands the form of the police procedural, granting moments of pathos to all characters concerned, telling their stories, while never straying too far from the film’s roots in the thriller genre.

Rather than go for the easy Gothic feel of a wintry murder story set in Mitteleuropa (dark red stains tainting driven snow) the film is set during a heatwave. The simmering temperature is palpable, creating a clammy, fractious tension that befits the film’s subject matter. The Silence puts one in the uncomfortable position of almost rooting for Timo, the sweaty-palmed accomplice to the crime, yet this is not a provocation, but comes from the film’s insistence on the humanity of all the characters. A perverse sense of dramatic irony descends in the film’s second half, as Timo attempts to apologise covertly to the victim’s mother for his part in the crime. Another chilling moment shows two child murderers standing in an awkwardly held medium shot, as a young boy overhears them and innocently asks if he can join them in watching a film.

Actors’ past roles bring a ghostly presence to their current ones, and there is an awkward pathos in seeing the abuse victim from Festen (1998) turned abuser. In his current guise, Ulrich Thomsen resembles a kind of haggard, Nordic Colin Firth. He portrays the killer as an inadequate, rather than a cackling, serial killer, although we understand he is part of something even more disturbing than what we see on screen. The police characters are fully rounded too. The inclusion of a pregnant detective has been called a Fargo reference but, in fact, the actress signed up for the role before becoming aware of her condition. In a film about the impact of lives being snatched away, the inclusion of a life not yet lived adds a thematic counterweight. The film’s most intriguing performance, though, is Claudia Michelsen’s. Her presence is a distinct mixture of elegance and burned-out discomfort well-suited to her role as the wife of the weak-willed accomplice.

There are some signs that this is a debut feature. The score is too conventional for such an intense story, coming across as generic ‘murder mystery’ music at times. The scene in which several characters are cross-cut as they find out about the copycat murder would be more effective were it not marred by dissonant industrial noise swelling on the soundtrack. Shots of the murdered girl’s stuffed toys and paintings seem like too obvious a tug at the heartstrings. Ultimately though, this is a confidently paced film with a taut script that allows characterisation to develop with the performances rather than the dialogue. The Silence presents no convenient resolution and offers no easy answers.

John A. Riley

Cinema releases

Contagion

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Contagion

Format: Cinema

Release date: 21 October 2011

Venues: UK wide

Distributor: Warner Brothers

Director: Stephen Soderbergh

Writer: Scott Z. Burns

Cast: Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, Kate Winslet

USA/United Arab Emirates 2011

106 mins

‘Somewhere in the world, the wrong pig met the wrong bat’. Stephen Soderbergh’s new thriller, Contagion charts the progression of a deadly mutating virus - part-pig, part-bat - as it spreads across the globe, indiscriminately killing human beings at an impossible speed. The film is full of lines as laughably silly as this one, all portentously intoned by Hollywood’s finest. On the possibility the disease is being spread by terrorism: ‘Somebody doesn’t need to weaponise the bird flu, the birds are already doing that’. On the outbreak of internet conspiracy theories: ‘Blogging is not writing - it’s graffiti with punctuation’. Such sentiments are uttered at a time when the human race is fighting for survival, yet they read like inane advertising copy. An hour and three quarters of this induces a malaise far more fatal than any mutating virus.

Contagion is a film that prides itself on its meticulous scientific research (as shown in the copious press notes) and its portrayal of a 21st-century world of technological advancement and globalisation. It attempts to chronicle a worldwide crisis by covering multiple narratives. The economical medium of film is well suited to the task and Contagion is at its most successful when it efficiently leaps between cities or provides punchy statistics. Where it fails is in its narrow definition of what ‘global’ means and its limited social scope, neither of which allow for any narrative progression. All we see is a world of expensively decorated homes, hotels and airport lounges, primarily populated by glamorous, affluent heroes. It’s an epidemic confined to the immaculately coiffed. America and Europe dominate. Does the disease reach Africa or the Middle East? Who knows - and judging by the negligence of Scott Z. Burns’s script - who cares!

Worse still is the film’s cartoonish presentation of China, confined to a similar role as the Soviet Union in Cold War Bond films. The outbreak starts in Hong Kong but it’s not an everyday urban centre that the viewer sees; it’s a morally dubious casino and unhygienic food market. The Chinese are presented as a nation intent on sabotaging the fight against the disease. A particularly ludicrous episode occurs when Dr Leonora Orantes (played by Marion Cotillard) is kidnapped and forced to stay in a rural village rather than return to Geneva with her vital scientific data. When a colleague comes to her rescue, armed with a batch of vaccines for the village inhabitants, Dr Orantes is horrified to learn that the syringes only contain a placebo. Could European and American powers be playing with people’s lives? But of course not! As her colleague explains, ‘the Chinese insisted on it’!

A voice of dissent does come in the form of a wonky-toothed Australian blogger, Alan Krumweide, a role obviously relished by Jude Law, who ably performs against type. A fan of conspiracy theories, Krumweide argues that the American government is in bed with drug companies and is withholding information about an effective homeopathic drug. This sub-plot creates an interesting parallel between the spread of internet-borne fear and contagious diseases but is neatly shut down when Krumweide is revealed to be an egotistical misanthrope, hell-bent on creating a name for himself amid the ensuing chaos. This narrative thread highlights the deeply conservative nature of the film. Western authority is not to be challenged. India may be experimenting with alternative medicine with some success but it is only the US and France who are close to discovering a vaccine (remember, despite its vast economy and scientific knowledge, China only wants to sabotage). When law and order break down, it is primarily stereotypical rioters - groups of young men - that we see raiding banks and gutting shops. Aside from a near-theft at the supermarket, we never see the everyday all-American hero, Mitch Emhoff (Matt Damon), breaking the law, although presumably he must do so to survive.

The unquestioning maintenance of pre-disease social structures makes for a disappointingly dull film. At core, Contagion is about what happens when normality is eradicated by a previously unknown, unpredictable force. It is an ideal opportunity for imaginative scriptwriting but, sadly, very little changes and very little is challenged in the course of this film. Occasional moments of moral conflict and social tension are not interrogated sufficiently. Characters are under-developed, delivering what would make great film taglines with little emotion. As they wisecrack their way through scenes, tension and emotional connection evaporate. Moments of sympathy do pop up now and again, mainly due to fine acting. Matt Damon’s grief is well executed, Jennifer Ehle creates a likeable character and Kate Winslet’s panic as she begins to show symptoms is physically palpable, but there’s something missing.

Since the screening, I’ve been wondering if I were foolish to expect anything more from a mainstream thriller. Then last night, on a whim, I decided to re-watch Casablanca (1942). It’s not an obvious comparison but it’s a surprisingly instructive one. Both films explore what happens when a menacing force interrupts lives and threatens human existence throughout the world. They are both Hollywood productions with pithy dialogue, catchily written one-liners and a cast of international characters. As the credits closed, I suddenly realised Michael Curtiz’s film -in a strange way - points out what is missing in Soderbergh’s. Casablanca takes the microcosm of Rick’s bar to reflect the global situation: the desperation and cynicism; the tussles and tensions; the human need to maintain and create alternative social structures in chaotic circumstances. Casablanca builds the personal and global, the emotional and political into a blended crescendo. There is no such focus in Contagion, none of the warmth between characters, none of the healthily irreverent attitude. Despite Casablanca‘s clear propagandistic purpose, there is a subversive - and inclusive - championing of the underdog. The underdog is nowhere to be seen in Contagion, aside from in the characters of rioters or passive receivers of paternalistic assistance from the powerful. There is only one voice in Contagion and it is a rather empty one.

Eleanor McKeown

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Silent Running

Silent Running

Format: Cinema

Screening dates: 21-27 October 2011

Venue: ICA, London

Format: Blu-ray

Release date: 14 November 2011

Distributor: Eureka

Director: Douglas Trumbull

Writers: Deric Washburn, Michael Cimino, Steven Bochco

Cast: Bruce Dern, Cliff Potts, Ron Rifkin

USA 1971

90 mins

The future. Earth is defoliated, the last remaining plant life confined to geodesic domes floating in deep space. When the order is given to destroy the gardens, the botanist rebels, murders his crewmates and sails one garden off through Saturn’s rings.

Silent Running is a film to see when you’re young, if you can arrange it that way. Revisiting it, decades after a BBC2 screening in the 70s, I was struck by how curiously illogical it all is, full of plot contrivances that don’t make any sense except as stepping stones to the next emotional moment. You can see it’s a director’s film, and the services of three writers, including Michael Cimino (Heaven’s Gate) and Steven Bochco (NYPD Blue), haven’t tamed the unruly vision into something narratively coherent.

The director in question is Douglas Trumbull, who supervised the special effects on 2001, and here used his expertise to create a visually impressive science fiction epic on a budget of a million dollars. The excellent extras on Masters of Cinema’s new Blu-ray fill in the details of how he managed this (with great ingenuity and skill, is the short answer).

One budgetary saving was made by having actor Bruce Dern alone on screen for much of the movie, a Robinson Crusoe figure slowly deteriorating mentally through guilt and loneliness, with only his robot servants for company. If you’re going to make a naí¯ve, didactic eco-fable, Dern’s casting is very smart: since the other astronauts are interchangeable louts and the scales are heavily weighted in favour of the eco-conscious space hippy, it helps that Dern makes him shrill, manic, passive-aggressive and obnoxious from time to time. Without altogether losing our sympathy, he gives the thing an edge. With his narrow, vaguely rodent-like face, blazing blue irises and tiny, pin-prick pupils, Dern stops Freeman Lowell becoming some sort of tree-hugging Jesus. The fact that the script makes him a murderer also helps, and the film pulls towards an exploration of guilt, an all-consuming torment that consumes the character even as he tries to create a new Eden.

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The science is notably weak, to the point where the film seems to be more allegory than speculative fiction, and the strange and potent image of a child’s watering can in space suggests that Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince may have more to do with this movie than 2001. Indeed, even the ecological message may be a red herring. We’re told that everywhere on Earth is 75 degrees: an air-conditioned, sterile paradise has been created, rather than the uninhabitable, polluted wasteland of global warming prophecy. Lowell’s objection to that is more aesthetic or spiritual than pragmatic, ‘the simple beauty of a leaf’ being something a child should experience for the good of the soul. So while the Peter Schikele/Joan Baez songs insist on the vitality of nature, from a nostalgic point of view where all that is to perish, the film’s real interests may actually be more elusive.

John Carpenter and Dan O’Bannon’s Dark Star, made at a far lower cost than Silent Running‘s tight one million, is likely to remain for most the space hippy movie of choice, but Trumbull has an ace up his tie-dyed sleeve. His last image, of a lonely robot drifting away from us in a floating garden, is the seed from which the whole of Wall-E grew, as well as providing Spielberg with his closing credits for Close Encounters. And while Carpenter’s country song accompaniment to space travel is irresistibly comic, and Spielberg’s use of ‘When You Wish upon a Star’ inescapably kitsch, I find the combination of deep space and folk music peculiarly moving here.

Silent Running screens at the ICA, London, from Oct 21 to 27.

David Cairns

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The Yellow Sea

The Yellow Sea

Format: Cinema

Release date: 21 October 2011

Venues: Key cities

Distributor: Bounty Films

Director: Na Hong-jin

Writer: Na Hong-jin

Original title: Hwanghae

Cast: Ha Jung-woo, Kim Yun-seok, Cho Seong-Ha

South Korea 2010

140 mins

Gu-nam (Ha Jung-woo) is the loser’s loser, down on his luck at the mah-jong tables, leading a pitiful life as an ethnic Korean in Yanbian, China. His wife left for Korea in search of work months ago and he hasn’t heard from her since, he is unable to support his child, and the debts have long spiralled beyond his ability to pay. Then local gangster Myun-ga (Kim Yun-seok) offers him a chance to wipe the slate clean: all he has to do is cross the Yellow Sea to Seoul and kill a businessman. He is understandably reluctant, but this seems his only way out, and offers him a chance to track down his wife.

Everything, of course, goes horribly wrong.

Na Hong-jin’s exhilarating film is pretty much a game of two halves. For the first hour or so it’s a wholly credible portrait of a desperate life. Gu-nam lives in a crappy world, he is well aware of his status as a ‘josenjok’, unwanted and despised. Everything seems to be on its last legs, everyone is heartless and on the make. His days in the shabby milieu of Yanbian, the gruelling smuggling operation that gets him to Korea, his cold and hunger and increasing frustration and stress are graphically evoked in blues and greys, through clipped sparse dialogue and sharp editing, as he plans to kill a man he does not know.

From the clusterfuck assassination onwards, however, the film evolves into a high-octane gore-flecked black comic shocker as Gu-nam goes on the run from hordes of cops, the Korean gangster behind the hit, and Myun-ga, who re-enters the picture to cut a bloody swathe through the last hour with a butcher’s knife and hatchet. The carefully built sense of verisimilitude is first strained, then shattered, as our fugitive changes from a pitiful nobody into a resourceful killer with nine lives. This never stops the film from being entertaining, however. Na Hong-jin clearly knows what he’s doing with a camera and there are a series of pulse-pounding audacious action sequences. Moreover, his sense of telling detail and street-level scuzz never deserts him. I enjoyed the town mouse/country mouse disdain that the Seoul gangsters feel for the Yanbian mob, and Myun-ga’s appalling grasp of housekeeping. It’s just that the poignancy and sad irony that the film aims for at its resolution seem oddly misplaced after all that Fargo via Simpson/Bruckheimer bloody chaos.

This is a common feature in a lot of Eastern cinema (‘the Asian Gear-Change’?). Many kung fu dramas crunched from Laurel and Hardy slapstick to grim Deathwish revenge thriller after the third reel. Fans of this stuff aren’t going to bat an eyelid at the wildly different tones that The Yellow Sea goes through, but it just seems odd to me, like James Toback’s Fingers being spliced with The Last Boy Scout. Ah well. Kim Yun-seok and Ha Jung-woo hold the screen well, I was never bored, it’s fast and funny and edge-of-the-seat tense; it’s just that I’d still like to see the end of the film it started off being.

The Yellow Sea screens at the London Korean Film Festival on November 9. The LKFF runs from 3 to 17 November 2011. More details on the LKFF website.

Mark Stafford

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Quatermass and the Pit

The third in the trilogy of films based on Nigel Kneale’s seminal Quatermass series, Quatermass and the Pit, about a scientist battling terrifying alien forces discovered during excavations in London, was made by Hammer Studios in 1967. It is released on Double Play (DVD + Blu-ray) in the UK on October 10 by Studiocanal.


Comic Strip Review by Rebecca Burgess
For more information on Rebecca Burgess, go to her website.

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Melancholia

Melancholia

Format: Cinema

Release date: 30 September 2011

Venue: UK wide

Distributor: Artificial Eye

Director: Lars von Trier

Writer: Lars von Trier

Cast: Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Kiefer Sutherland, Charlotte Rampling, John Hurt

Denmark/Sweden/France/Germany 2011

136 mins

It’s hard not to draw parallels between Melancholia and The Tree of Life, this year’s other contender for the ‘Cosmic Opera’ Academy Award. The similarities are superficial, to do with look and sound rather than intention, but I can imagine both films alienating some audiences in the same way: if you found Terrence Malick’s vision of the world’s creation, soundtracked by the emotive, devotional compositions of Gorecki and Tavener, overwrought, you are likely to find Lars von Trier’s take on its destruction - a haunting series of surreal opening tableaux set to the Prelude of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde - equally so.

Both directors use these lush, near-psychedelic sequences to frame stories about the family; but, while Malick’s is essentially redemptive, von Trier’s is, as you might expect, so much darker as to be almost Tree of Life‘s bleak reverse. In Melancholia, a dysfunctional upper-class family awaits and then experiences the end of the world, courtesy of a rogue planet (the Melancholia of the title) that collides with Earth. In the way that von Trier’s Antichrist (2009) co-opted aspects of the horror genre, Melancholia nods to disaster movies, but - like Antichrist - does so both knowingly and somewhat clumsily, which will move some viewers to ask, as so often with von Trier, whether the director is on some level toying with his audience and laughing at their expectations of genre and story.

I’m not sure this is the case here. Melancholia‘s take on the End Times is more in line with Tarkovsky’s Sacrifice (1986) or Doris Lessing’s lengthy novel, The Four-Gated City, in that it’s not the approaching disaster itself that’s the point, but how a small group of individuals anticipate, discuss and respond to it. Because it’s von Trier, there is a grim humour at work, but that doesn’t mean he’s unsympathetic or sneery. Take, for example, the film’s first chapter after its Wagnerian intro, which documents the lavish but excruciating stately-home wedding reception of Justine (Kirsten Dunst), organised by her sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg). We expect large family gatherings on film to be tense, but Justine’s depression, which is severe, disabling and barely held in check, makes this a particularly painful one to watch. Yet depression also seems to stand her in good stead when, shortly after her failed wedding, the planet Melancholia draws near. While Claire panics, her sister responds with equanimity - she’s not afraid of annihilation. In fact, the threat of the planet’s approach seems to draw her out of a catatonic episode. Again, there’s a dark irony here, as when Justine scorns Claire’s desperate ideas for a ‘final’ gesture before the planet hits - but it is not at the expense of the characters.

There are classy but rather clichéd performances from Kiefer Sutherland (as Claire’s scientist husband), Charlotte Rampling and John Hurt (as the sisters’ inadequate parents), but the central relationship of the two sisters is well observed, allowing space for Gainsbourg’s more ‘sane’ sibling, who is at turns frustrated, controlling and kind. Von Trier is candid about his own experience of depression, and it probably does take a depressive to portray the condition like this, in all its crippling, self-aggrandising, planet-sized horror. Dunst rises to the challenge well, and she and Gainsbourg work hard to transcend some of the plot’s holes and clunky moments of dialogue.

Opinions on whether they succeed or not will be as polarised as those concerning the monumental music and visionary opening scenes. But this is not supposed to be an attractive film, despite the beautiful country house setting and elegant actors; and von Trier’s suggestion that the idea of being crushed by an alien land mass might actually seem preferable to being suffocated by your family and destroyed by your own psyche rings with a certain bleak sincerity - even if it is, in fact, the awful false logic of depression.

Frances Morgan