What if the British army was stranded at Dunkirk and we lost the Battle of Britain? What if the Nazis thought of the Channel Tunnel 50 years before we did? What if Hadrian’s Wall was still intact and no one had heard from the Scots in 100 years? This is the alternative Second World War England of Jackboots on Whitehall, the epic stop-motion animation debut from brothers Edward and Rory McHenry. When Nazis invade London it’s up to farm boy Chris (Ewan McGregor) and vicar’s daughter Daisy (Rosamund Pike) to rescue Prime Minister Winston Churchill (Timothy Spall) and lead him to the safety of Hadrian’s Wall, marshalling an army of villagers along the way.
Jackboots is a film for anyone who played with Action Man, Barbie, Airfix kits or Hornby model railways as a child. The animation is excellent, with large-scale battles, plenty of plastic gore and only the bare minimum of computer manipulation to help with the lip-syncing and facial expressions on the dolls. Similarly, the sets are incredibly detailed and anyone familiar with London will appreciate the effort that’s gone into creating the model versions of real landmarks.
The brothers McHenry have done a great job attracting a cast of big British names (even American volunteer Billy Fiske is voiced by great British export Dominic West), but this cannot have been based on the strength of the script, which is sadly lacking. Because there are just not that many mainstream stop-motion films, Jackboots invites comparison with films like Team America: World Police. Indeed, it shares the same simplistic dialogue and immature sense of humour. But whereas in Team America the childish jokes provided an ironic counterpoint to the serious subject matter, Jackboots doesn’t have that excuse.
There’s something in our received culture, be it from our grandparents’ war stories, or the war films we’ve all seen, that means we’re still happy to watch the Nazis being drubbed even in an alternate version of history. In this way Jackboots can be said be to be British both in terms of production and spirit, and it’s wholly appropriate that it was chosen as the opening film for this year’s Raindance Film Festival. This British spirit should carry Jackboots a long way, and in spite of its flaws it is an impressive debut feature. However, it will be interesting to see how its subject matter and technical achievement fare against the similar, child’s toy based Belgian stop-motion animation A Town Called Panic, which is released the same day, and while less technically accomplished, is more original, surreal and has a superior sense of comic timing.
Jackboots on Whitehall opened the Raindance Film Festival on September 29. Raindance runs until October 10, for more information go to the Raindance website.
Cast: Nathaniel Brown, Paz de la Huerta, Cyril Roy, Olly Alexander
France/Germany/Italy 2009
155/137 mins
You can’t fault Gaspar Noé‘s ambition, give him that: even if the audio-visual overkill, gutter-level mise en sc&232;ne and sheer unpleasantness repulse you, not many filmmakers attempt to kill you, take you through hell on earth and get you reincarnated in 135 minutes. From the hardcore techno assault of the titles onwards, Noé attempts to take you places that cinema rarely goes. The pre-film warning ‘likely to trigger a physical reaction in vulnerable viewers’ was appropriate, even if you’re unaffected by the strobe effects and camera motion…
We are Oscar (Nathaniel Brown), a young American drug dealer (LSD, MDMA) living in Tokyo with his sister Linda (Paz de la Huerta). I say ‘we’ because the whole film is shot from Oscar’s point of view (Enter the Void is probably the first full-length film to attempt this schtick since the Marlowe misfire Lady in the Lake in 1947). So, we are in Oscar’s head when he smokes DMT, has intense psychedelic visions and then heads out to meet his violent doom with hippy mate Alex (Cyril Roy). Post mortem we are floating between life and death, a spirit or soul observing the fates of Alex, Linda, the snitch Victor (Olly Alexander) and others who had a hand in our life and death as they suffer the legal and psychological fallout from the killing. We are also travelling backwards and forwards through Oscar’s largely tragic existence, in scenes of increasingly nightmarish quality. He has made a solemn promise to Linda as a child that they would never leave each other, and thus he is tethered to this world, and we are tethered with him, unable to alter events as they progress, as death, grief, sexual exploitation, abortion and all manner of psychological distress are played out before us. And there’s not a damn thing we can do about it, until a resolution to Oscar’s state in the afterlife is reached… We are reminded that DMT is a chemical released by the brain at the time of death, and Enter the Void plays with the suspicion that this is all Oscar’s trip, based upon his reading of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, that he is showing himself the worst world he could imagine…
I’m sure the question many film-goers will be asking is, ‘if we have to die, and go through heaven and hell, couldn’t we go with nicer people?’ Psychedelics are noted for inducing a state of euphoria, but there’s precious little joy to be found here. We are among losers, victims and low-level criminals. There isn’t much in the way of witty banter, and dialogue is mostly given over to delivering information. This is an artificial, candy-coloured world of coercion, tension, and lurking horror. Noé describes Enter the Void as a ‘psychedelic melodrama’ and this seems about right: the story is not especially complex or unpredictable, the characters generally run to type, and the whole thing has the momentum of an inevitable tragedy. We never see Tokyo in daylight, and only see glimpses of the natural world in flashbacks to Oscar’s youth in Montreal. We fly through walls but rarely soar, moving from tiny drug dealers’ apartment to strip club to mortuary to sleazy ‘love hotel’ in one long continuous flight - it’s a nasty world to witness so intently. Linda’s story especially is upsetting. She barely seems, at times, to have a will of her own; the shape of her childhood has led to her desperate desire for affection, and the way this vulnerability is exploited by the men around her is almost unbearably emphasised by the film’s unique point of view. It’s curious that the ‘god shot’ camera angle, normally considered a distancing device, should seem so intimate here.
If I’ve made this sound like just another French wallow in the sewer, that’s because Noé’s artistry lies not in the story as such, the words on the page, or even in the performances, but the way the story is related. It’s the most immersive audio-visual experience I’ve ever had in the cinema. The woozy shifting viewpoint from unfamiliar angles, the vivid acid neon-drenched visuals, the dense soundtrack with its background chatter and heavy yawning, rumbling bass frequencies, the flights into and out of lights, bullet holes and everybody’s heads make the film a dark, oppressive, utterly involving experience. Noé wants you to feel Oscar’s childhood pain, his adolescent trauma, the sweaty, jealous, too-close relationship with Linda, so he makes you a backseat driver in his skull. It’s clearly a vision that has been worked on for many years: some of the camera technology was first tried out in Irreversible, and to an extent that film was a dry run for what’s being attempted here. I found Irreversible astonishing, but ultimately unbearable because of its trajectory, but while Enter the Void is an equally tough watch in places, you are never in doubt that Linda loves Oscar and Oscar loves Linda; there is tenderness, and even a little hope here. The film’s visual language is rich in colour and symbols; Oscar’s life is linked to water, his death to light, and Tokyo’s neon seems to be full of messages, ENTER SEX MONEY POWER LOVE… While it seems wilfully abstract in places, and avoids conventional linear sense, it rarely loses sight of story or character, though after the full-on headfuck of the first hour or so, the film does lose power (partly because we can guess where it’s headed) and drifts somewhat. It has lost 20 minutes since its screenings at the London Film Festival and Cannes in 2009, and frankly I’m glad, but it never, for this viewer at least, becomes comfortable or dull.
Any way you shake it, and I suspect that many are going to loathe it, Enter the Void is an extraordinary piece of work, continually working miracles with picture and sound from beginning to end, a heady, grimy, powerful trip created through pure cinema. If you judge the worth of films by vision and ambition, and by the sheer effect on the audience then Enter the Void is a goddamn masterpiece. The screening I attended had a few walkouts, and a number of clearly irritated critics, but the majority seemed astonished and stunned, shell-shocked and floating off into Soho’s neon embrace, with their eyes wide open.
Cast: Willem Dafoe, Michael Shannon, Grace Zabriskie, Chloë Sevigny, Udo Kier, Brad Dourif
USA 2009
91 mins
‘David Lynch presents: A film by Werner Herzog.’ Opening credits really don’t get any better than that.
My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? is based on the true story of Mark Yavorsky, a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego, who was inspired to kill his mother with an antique sword after being cast as Orestes in a production of Aeschylus’s The Eumenides. But that’s neither a spoiler nor essential knowledge. Producer and director have chosen Yavorsky’s story because ‘Woman killed with sword’ is exactly the kind of set-up you’d find in a police procedural TV show and they use it for ironic effect and as the base from which to mount an expedition into something more horrific.
Procedure, by its very nature, is boring. There’s no CSI-style DNA swabs or keyhole camera angles here. Arriving at the scene of the murder, Willem Dafoe’s homicide detective is so concerned with the direction each coffee cup is facing that he fails to notice he bumped into the murderer a moment earlier, as one of the witnesses points out. Not only that, but the killer, Brad McCullum (Michael Shannon), lives across the street, has barricaded himself inside his house and can be heard shouting something about hostages. Mystery solved.
While a SWAT team tries to resolve the situation, Dafoe’s detective interviews McCullum’s family and friends, and the audience is given flashbacks of events leading up to the standoff. Here it’s worth thinking of My Son as a companion piece to Herzog’s much bigger recent release Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (My Son was scheduled for production in summer 2008, but was pushed when Herzog got the Bad Lieutenant gig). Both films feature cops played by lead actors who excel at going off book, giving brilliant readings of otherwise mundane dialogue, which makes Dafoe’s dramatically functional, by-the-book ‘Good Detective’ all the funnier.
Herzog’s interviews around the film don’t make the extent to which Lynch was involved very clear. It seems the Lynchian elements - long pauses between dialogue, a creeping jazz score, a dwarf, a killer with a rhythmic, non-sensical catch phrase, ‘Razzle them. Dazzle them.’ – are in homage to the director’s friend. Of course, Herzog doesn’t need Lynch to be weird and his old theme that nature is bigger than man soon emerges when we find out that McCullum hasn’t been the same since he returned from a canoeing holiday in Peru. On the trip, McCullum refused to go in some rapids in which the rest of his group subsequently drowned. By cheating death McCullum believes he can commune with nature and it’s the frustration of this belief that eventually leads him to kill his mother (‘mother’ taking on a special meaning in the context of ‘nature’). It’s here that the Aeschylus reference comes in as in the Oresteia the fall of the House of Atreus was arguably brought about by dealing with the gods and the furies directly. For Herzog, the idea of communing with nature is itself hubristic, as seen in his other films such as Grizzly Man.
Aside from the main plot, there are brilliant little visual touches and musical cues that make the film a great pleasure to watch. It is supported by excellent performances: Michael Shannon (the film-stealing lunatic from Revolutionary Road) is perfectly cast as McCullum and great support comes from Chloë Sevigny, Udo Kier, Brad Dourif and Lynch regular Grace Zabriskie (Sarah Palmer in Twin Peaks) as McCullum’s mother. This is a must for Herzog and Lynch fans.
Screening as part of the František Vláčil season at the BFI Southbank
DVD release date: 23 August 2010
Distributor: Second Run
Director: František Vláčil
Writers: Vladimir Körner and František Vláčil
Cast: Petr Čepek, Emma Černá
Czechoslovakia 1969
98 mins
The end of the 1960s was a time, in several countries, for seeking a corrective to comfortable views about the Second World War. In France, Le Chagrin et la pitié caused outrage with its documentary revelations about attitudes to collaboration in Vichy France. Meanwhile in America Catch-22 was being filmed, and in Italy Luchino Visconti unleashed a frontal assault on memory and taste with The Damned. Britain took a little longer - we were still ‘enjoying’ fare like The Battle of Britain, though this was countered by the Brecht-meets-music-hall satire of Oh! What a Lovely War! (our revisionism had only got as far as the First World War).
It is immediately clear that Adelheid is more subtle and sombre than any of these in its treatment of the war, or rather of its moral and emotional aftermath. (Not that this subtlety helped director František Vláčil win official approval: it was six years before he made another feature film.) The film opens memorably with a view from a train as it follows the curve of birch-wooded hills, accompanied by the transcendent sound of a choral work by Bach. The viewer is jolted out of this Germanic idyll as the train is halted by a group of armed men emerging from the shadows at the mouth of a tunnel: the atmosphere of doubt and unease is established and remains unbroken.
Adelheid has other features distinctive of this time. It shares with contemporary American films like Five Easy Pieces not just a palette of dull earth tones but a slow-moving taciturn realist style and a sense of depressed purposelessness. These are particularly suited to the aims of Vláčil’s film, with its evocation of loss, desolation, and estrangement.
In general, it seems to me that what a work of art is expressing cannot be satisfactorily stated in words. It is diminished as an aesthetic experience if you try to reduce it to a message. But in this case, for once I believe it is possible to be quite explicit about what the film is ‘saying’ without undermining its effect. The male lead Viktor represents the Czech people. He returns from the war sick and troubled, feeling out of place in the new order that has been established. He seeks to recover in a place once beautiful, but which has been taken over, degraded, and seized back: this place now needs to be opened up, restored to light, made to work again. The female lead Adelheid is a representative of the Germans of Czechoslovakia: she has a proprietary relation to this place, where she has always lived, but her right to be there is now no longer recognised. She is connected to those who have committed crimes against the Czech people, though she is not represented as herself implicated in those crimes. She is in Viktor’s power: he finds her presence disturbing but compelling, and he seeks uneasily to establish a relationship with her, though this seems transgressive and improper. They feel their way to some sort of human companionship and mutual trust. But this endeavour is blighted by their situation: for her it leads to despair, for him to emptiness.
Adelheid is a reminder that the moral dimensions of war and what follows are not simple. It was not the case that being on the right side made everything OK again, and it was not appropriate for Czechs to be complacent about their moral standing. But the film doesn’t seem knowingly contentious in the way that the films I mentioned in the first paragraph were. This is partly because the moral challenge of its subject matter was not so simple. And perhaps because a quiet, intimate human drama like Adelheid is a better way to make an audience feel unwelcome emotions without resentment.
Venues: Curzon Soho/Renoir/Richmond (London) and nationwide
Distributor: Artificial Eye
Director: Debra Granik
Writers: Debra Granik, Anne Rosellini
Based on the novel by: Daniel Woodrell
Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, John Hawkes, Dale Dickey
USA 2010
100 mins
Winter in the Ozark Mountains. Timber-framed houses litter a rust-coloured landscape, the yards full of abandoned cars, washing machines, years of accumulated junk. In this incestuous community, where the families are all linked by blood ties and a terrifying patriarch is king, Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) is trying to raise her two younger siblings, while her mother, mentally locked inside a world of her own, barely acknowledges their existence. And then the sheriff arrives: her father, who cooks meth, is missing ahead of a court appearance. If he skips the hearing, their home, posted as bond, will be seized. But when Ree tries to find him, there’s no one who will help - instead, she’s chased off people’s property, threatened, and taught the hard way not to interfere in other people’s business.
Directed by Debra Granik and based on a novel by Daniel Woodrall, Winter’s Bone paints a portrait of a remote community mired in poverty and drug addiction. These are people who have fallen through the cracks, who live by a different set of laws and deal out justice with their own hands; the women, protecting their loved ones, are even more sinister and ruthless than the men. It’s a gripping film that reminds the audience that there is a world far away from Hollywood or the bright lights of New York, or even the majestic Midwest that usually stands in for rural Americana. Chillingly authentic, this is a place that few outsiders will ever see.
But the film’s biggest assets are two terrific performances. Lawrence, in her mud-stained, ill-fitting clothes, her hair knotted, exudes grace and a rough, unvarnished beauty (she’s already been cast in both an upcoming Jodie Foster-directed film and the next X-Men movie). She’s completely convincing as the foolishly brave 17-year-old who is determined to ensure her family’s survival, with no money, no job and little hope.
Another surprise is John Hawkes, who plays Teardrop, her father’s brother and a violent, unpredictable addict who belatedly tries to do the right thing by Ree. Although he was endearing in films like Me and You and Everyone We Know, if a sometimes surprising love interest, here his craggy features and thin, worn-out frame blend perfectly into the landscape; he’s a man ravaged by abuse, who’s been given one last shot at redemption.
But the deeper Teardrop and Ree dig, the more tangled things get. Meth - using, selling or supplying - has corrupted the whole community, including the law, and a father who first appears to be the story’s villain may not be such a bad man after all. But even Ree is finally forced to accept that rough justice is the only way to protect what little community she has.
Granik’s film is part social realism, part mystery and part tragedy. But as bleak as it sounds, Winter’s Bone has a special quality that makes it an unmissable film, and deserving of the Grand Jury Prize that it received at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.
Read Debra Granik’s text on the closing shot of Werner Herzog’s Stroszek in The End: An Electric Sheep Anthology, to be published in November 2010.
Venues: Apollo Piccadilly Circus, Cine Lumiere, ICA, Watermans Brentwood (London) and nationwide
Distributor: Eureka Entertainment
Director: Fritz Lang
Writers: Thea von Harbou (based on her novel), Fritz Lang
Cast: Brigitte Helm, Alfred Abel, Gustav Fröhlich, Rudolf Klein-Rogge
Germany 1927 (2010 re-release with 25 minutes of lost footage)
145 mins
From its inception, Fritz Lang’s science-fiction spectacle Metropolis was a film destined to be talked about in nothing less than superlatives: with over 300 shooting days and 60 nights, 36,000 extras and a budget of 5 million Reichsmark for the effects, it was the most expensive silent film of its time. Even today, it remains one of the most copied, analysed and written about films in cinematic history - everything, so it seems, has been said about it. The fact that the original copy of the film was lost shortly after the world premiere in Berlin in 1927 only helped feed the myth surrounding Lang’s best-known (although not best) work. So it was no surprise when the newly restored version of Metropolis, which premiered at a special gala screening at the Berlin Film Festival in February, turned out to be the most exciting and astonishing film on show in an otherwise rather uninspiring 60th anniversary edition of the festival. Viewing the film in its almost complete form and with a new score based on Gottfried Huppertz’s beguiling original made for an entirely unique and captivating cinematic experience.
Getting past all the hype surrounding the restoration and reconstruction of the film, it has to be said that, despite all the advances in digital technology, the condition of the newly added scenes to the 2001 remastered print is fairly poor. One sequence of the 16-mm negative of the film that was miraculously found in Buenos Aires in 2008 was too damaged to be included and therefore approximately six minutes of footage are still lost and had to be narrated in explanatory intertitles. Still, it’s striking to see how naturally the extra 25 minutes of worn-out film stock, with all its scratches, dirt marks and fogged-up images, blend in with the narrative continuum and not only increase the visual and rhythmic density of the film but play an important role in clarifying the relationship between visual imagery, characters and plotlines.
Up to this point, the epic story of Lang’s futuristic tale about the struggle between workers and bosses in a capitalist dystopia was somewhat confusing. Lang intertwines the universal story with individual fortunes that shake up the system, most notably that of the iconic heroine, Maria, played by Brigitte Helm in a mesmerising performance. The master of Metropolis, Jon Frederson, rules over both an army of men and women who labour away underneath the earth at massive machines and a small, rich elite. But his power and control over the industrial city are threatened when his son Freder falls in love with Maria, a working-class girl and preacher of love, who is held in high esteem by her peers. The inventor Rotwang, a rival of Frederson because they once vied for the same woman, Freder’s mother, creates a wanton robot in the shape of Maria who, on her mission of destruction, eventually causes the flooding of the city’s underworld. Yet, in the end, there is hope and reconciliation in Lang’s bleak but enthralling vision of the city of the future.
In addition to the extended scenes at the end of the film, when the robot Maria incites a mob of discontented workers to attack the critical Heart Machine, the new content throws light on some peripheral characters whose presence seemed somewhat vague in previous restored versions and contributes to more fully developing the male melodrama that underlies the film. For example, there are sequences depicting Freder’s friendship with his father’s dismissed secretary, Josaphat, and we can now follow the misadventures of Georgy, a worker at the underground machines who, after trading places with Freder, falls prey to the temptations of Metropolis’s red-light district, Yoshiwara. Other new scenes deepen the conflict between Fredersen and Rotwang, including one taking place at a monument dedicated to Hel, the woman both men loved, and finally reveal the motive for the rivalry between the two men, which was only outlined in the truncated 2001 screen version. Most importantly, however, taken as a whole, the restored footage forms a chain of exciting moments that interlock the endless pursuits and disaster scenes in the final part, locating them in an overall coherent temporal and spatial framework.
The result is a version of Metropolis that has a different tone and feel. This accomplishment is partly owed to the additional material, but equally as much to the revival of the grandiose original score, performed by the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, which was used as the most important source for the recreation of the original cut of the film. Nonetheless, Lang’s visionary thinking (which is evident in scenes involving a videophone or when he portrays machines as the new masters of mankind) and his stylish, dark, yet hopeful conjuration of a heartless and starkly divided urban dystopia are still key and feel just as powerful as ever. Now clocking in at 145 minutes, Metropolis remains a dazzling, heady blend of fantastic expressionistic set design, eye-popping cinematography and deft special effects that deserves to be seen (and heard) on the big screen over and over again.
Venues: Cineworlds Shaftesbury Avenue, Wandsworth, Vue West End (London) and nationwide
Distributor: Optimum Releasing
Director: Daniel Stamm
Writers: Huck Botko and Andrew Gurland
Cast: Patric Fabian, Ashley Bell, Iris Bahr, Louis Herthum, Caleb Landry Jones
USA 2010
87 mins
It’s that old Penn and Teller sketch. First you show them how it’s done - how it’s usually done, how those other schmucks would do the trick - then you do the trick again, only this time you do it differently, better, and with such élan, such verve, that no one’s going to work out how you did it, even though you just told them how. Oh, and just like Penn and Teller, make sure you add a bucket-load of fake blood into the bargain, just to seal the deal.
The Last Exorcism tells the story of Reverend Cotton Marcus, a man from Baton Rouge, practically born into preacherdom, whose faith was shaken by the near-death of his only son (‘The first thing I thought of to say was, “Thank you Doctor†not “Thank you Lord‒). As we meet him, he’s been reluctantly carrying on the family business of spreading the Good News and exorcising evil spirits, all the while telling himself that he was at least performing some psychological good, even if he no longer believed in the letter of the ancient screeds he spouted.
Having resolved to quit, he accepts the call for one last exorcism, this time taking a documentary film crew along with him in order to expose all the little tricks of his trade to the world. So we see him setting up wires in the bedroom of the girl to be exorcised, little hidden loudspeakers to emit demonic wails and moans at just the right moment, even showing off the smoke-emitting ducts on his crucifix. But when Cotton Marcus gets to the Sweetzer farm in rural Louisiana, he finds himself face to face with a little more than he bargained for.
Coming from the production stable of Hostel director Eli Roth, The Last Exorcism, predictably, has its fair share of moments to be labelled ‘not for the squeamish’. Director Daniel Stamm similarly took the mockumentary format into macabre territory with his 2008 feature debut, A Necessary Death, which claimed to follow the final preparations of a suicidal volunteer. Under his hand, The Last Exorcism is clearly as comfortable manipulating its audience’s emotions as it is manipulating its own generic format. As with The Blair Witch Project, however, one can’t help but feel that, were you to strip away the shaky cam conceit of the frame, you’d be left with a remarkably formulaic script. That is not to say it is not grimly effective.
In the end, perhaps the most consistently disturbing feature of this film is not the apparently psychotic teenage girl, or the demon that is supposed to be possessing her, but her control freak fundamentalist father. And it is in the light of this that The Last Exorcism is very much an Exorcist for our times. For the Reverend Marcus’s attitude towards his profession is, to a large extent, that of every one of us, in these decaffeinated, supposedly post-modern times. We all know very well that the big Other does not exist, that democracy is a sham, that our actions at work and in the supermarket are contributing to the wholesale destruction of the planet; and yet we carry on, operating under the flimsy protective gauze of a layer of reflexive cynicism. It is not the gods that we ourselves believe in that we fear, but the - always more fanatical, always more fundamentalist - belief of the other that threatens us. And so we cross ourselves and vote for measures that curb our own freedoms and perform our little absurd rituals in order to protect ourselves from the other’s belief, fully aware that it is only these futile litanies that keep the threat alive in the first place.
We are pleased to announce that the winner of our July film writing competition, run in connection with the Electric Sheep monthly film club at the Prince Charles Cinema is Adam Lowes. Our judge was blaxploitation specialist and Electric Sheep contributor Joel Karamath, who said: ‘The recognition of cinema’s existence before Tarantino is always reassuring and that the reprocessing of styles and themes, so central to his oeuvre, have always been an integral part of the reasonably short, inter-textual, history of what is arguably the first post-mordern art form. Great to see someone remembering The Rockford Files, could that be the next QT homage?’
Here’s Adam Lowes’s review:
Regardless of how you feel about Tarantino the filmmaker, his obsessive perseverance in bringing trash cinema to the masses (further enhanced by casting Blaxploitation queen and star of this film, Pam Grier, in Jackie Brown) has undeniably made a dent in many a cineaste’s subconscious. His reverence doesn’t end there either.
Like hip-hop producers who use obscure hooks and melodies (from sometimes equally obscure artists) to construct a song, watching Foxy Brown is like seeing the visual interpretation of this process, with Tarantino having ‘sampled’ themes and images from here, only to cut and paste them into his own oeuvre. Elements of Kill Bill Vol. 1‘s rape and revenge tale are instantly recognisable in this film, alongside more throwaway visual flourishes (Foxy Brown‘s psychedelic, low-rent Bond-esque opening credits are lovingly recreated for the training montage in Kill Bill Vol. 2).
Foxy Brown isn’t high art by any means (the aesthetic at times is akin to a souped-up episode of The Rockford Files, bathed in a 70s floral hue) but the real enjoyment derived from a film like this – similar to unearthing the source music behind the sample – is the opportunity to see the original article and not just some slick recreation of that era.
Cast: Dieter Laser, Ashley C Williams, Ashlynn Yennie, Akihiro Kitamura
Netherlands 2009
92 mins
As a rule, I try to hear/read/see as little as possible about the films I’m going to write about, but in the case of The Human Centipede - if one moves in sleazy circles - it was difficult to avoid the advance word, and the advance word was ‘yeeuch!’
The film’s selling point is a nasty idea - that a mad surgeon, Dr Heiter (Dieter Laser), will capture three human subjects and sew them in a row, mouth to anus to mouth, so that they effectively become one creature with one digestive tract. I sincerely hope you’re grown up enough to realise the icky connotations of this operation, because I’m sure as hell not going to spell it out for you. I also don’t think I’m spoiling anything for prospective viewers when I reveal that the operation doesn’t end well for anyone concerned.
Tom Six’s film is, in many ways, exactly what you expect. The set-up is perfunctory B-movie cheese, straight out of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and countless others, with two dumb American teenagers, Lindsay and Jenny (Ashley C Williams and Ashlynn Yennie), stumbling into a madman’s house after their car breaks down in the woods at night. It’s clearly cheap, the cast is small, locations are few, script and acting hover around porn movie standard, and, following the rules of exploitation, any characters that aren’t crazy are stupid. Audience sympathy for Lindsay and Jenny’s characters greatly increases post-operation, partly because of the horror of their predicament, and partly because they are now unable to voice any more idiotic dialogue. Anyone wondering why Dr Heiter has this elaborate, sick obsession will be disappointed. We know he doesn’t like people, he used to separate Siamese twins, and he’s crazy. That’s it, and without any real reason given for his insane desire, Heiter comes to resemble the arse-obsessed doctor in South Park. THC exists to show a number of horrible things happening to a number of people for 92 minutes. Pretty much everybody dies. That’s what it’s about, and you can’t say you weren’t warned.
This utilitarian gross-out approach actually makes the result more watchable. We don’t see the doctor kidnapping Katsuro (Akihiro Kitamura) to be the head of his centipede, because it’s only important to the tale that he turns up. In fact, we don’t see much of the world outside Heiter’s house at all - a motorway side road, some woods, an anonymous hotel room - because we don’t need to see more. When the cops inevitably turn up, they’re at the doctor’s front door at once; we never see a police station, or the witness that is overheard screaming ‘in an American accent’, because Six isn’t really interested in anything outside his hermetically sealed medical nightmare. It’s as if Heiter’s house, with its clean, ordered furnishings and bleached hospital cellar, exists outside of any recognisable place in the world. This, together with the unreal, stilted nature of some of the dialogue, gives the film an off-kilter weirdness, and good thing too. If we were convinced that any of this was happening to real people it would be unbearable.
How much of this weirdness is simply down to budget, and how much was through Six’s design is uncertain, but the film is designed, in a European minimalist fashion. This is not a Texas Chainsaw freakout, there’s none of your Rob Zombie hand-held nonsense here, the camera work has been composed: all tripod, pan and dolly, with none of Saw or Hostel‘s tricksy editing or industrial Gothic flourishes. This may sound crazy given its subject matter, but the film is actually pretty restrained. The expected sexual angle isn’t exploited, bar a little un-eroticised nudity. The soundtrack is unobtrusive and uncluttered. Likewise, anyone expecting fountains of gore and scatological filth will be surprised at how much the film doesn’t show.
While it’s cracked in concept it’s not entirely devoid of thought. There’s a recurring motif about communication; with the two girls unable to comprehend Heiter’s German, and no one speaking Katsuro’s Japanese, the doctor has, perversely, given his centipede a head he himself cannot understand (and oddly, Katsuro’s longest, most dramatic speech goes untranslated). What’s Six trying to say here? That perhaps, y’know, we might all learn to get along as a species if a mad doctor would only sew us together? Hell if I know. He was one of the original directors of the Big Brother TV phenomenon. Which seems to make perfect sense.
So, are there any reasons to watch The Human Centipede, other than grotesque novelty? Well, there’s Dieter Laser’s performance: he suggests absolute gibbering insanity through clenched body language and measured language, overacting and restrained at the same time, like Christopher Walken on Thorazine. He pretty much screams ‘mad scientist’ even before donning the regulation white coat and shades, and his utter impatience and irritation with every other character on screen make his scenes genuinely amusing. Then there’s the title creation itself, which is both a sick and unsettling idea, and an undeniably surreal spectacle, like something that’s crawled out of Bosch’s garden of earthly delights, or Pasolini’s Salí², or 120 Days of Sodom.
But, frankly, there’s not much to The Human Centipede, really. It’s as if once he’d conceived of the central idea (apparently as an appropriate punishment for convicted paedophiles), Six couldn’t come up with much to do with it. It’s better than it ought to be, I had some evil chuckles, and it will get a following. The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence) is already on the way, god help us. Can I be the only one hoping for a whole new direction in which the human centipede comes to terms with itself as a new organism, learns to love its own body, and we end with a tap dance routine on Broadway that the audience will never forget? C’mon! Now that’s entertainment!
Venues: ICA Cinema (London) and selected key cities
Distributor: Metrodome
Director: Ben Wheatley
Writer: Robin Hill, Ben Wheatley
Cast: Julia Deakin, Robert Hill, Robin Hill, Mark Kempner, Michael Smiley
UK 2009
89 mins
Bill and his son Karl are members of a seemingly normal family living in a terraced house within a nondescript suburb of Brighton. Following an acquittal from an unspecified court case, the two return home to the familiar staple of chores to be completed, tension between the family’s women to defuse and their own tempestuous relationship to address. Beneath this surface, however, lies a far more sinister and interesting truth; the members of this family are career criminals, and are now on a blood hunt for whoever grassed them up.
Welcome to Down Terrace, the feature debut from Ben Wheatley. Far from being merely an episode of The Sopranos directed by Mike Leigh as many reviews have suggested, the film is a fascinating look at the mechanics of a family, focusing on the little things that at once enthrall and irritate, exposing harboured truths and the ties that bind people together. Blazing arguments are abruptly ended by bursts of perfectly timed humour and assumptions about characters are turned on their head at the least predictable moments. Wheatley’s script, co-written with star Robin Hill, is a brilliantly original take on the familiar British crime genre, infusing each character with depth and compassion. We care deeply for each of these characters, which increases s the impact of their irrationally violent reactions towards others. A particular scene of pure visual humour resulting from a sudden action from Karl typifies this perfectly.
It comes as no surprise that Robert Hill (Bill) and Robin Hill (Karl) are real-life father and son, sharing a painfully realistic chemistry that’s as heart-wrenching as darkly amusing. An ex-hippie and regular drug user, Bill is prone to twisted philosophical musings that are highly enjoyable, and at times it’s difficult not to sympathise with the familial and professional weight on his shoulders. Karl is also blessed with some unfortunate situations to challenge his ever-shredded nerves, not least an ex-girlfriend who turns up at the door bearing his child. While plot devices such as this could possibly be viewed as contrived, they perfectly highlight the domestic pressures that bear on the family to the same extent as their illegal exploits.
Featuring a host of familiar faces from cult British comedy, such as Julia Deakin and Michael Smiley, combined with non-professional actors, the film is undoubtedly a lo-fi affair, though at no point is it hindered by its budgetary constraints. More so, the claustrophobic atmosphere is largely achieved through the film’s almost singular setting of the family home (the Hills’ real-life home, no less), and a sense of realism is attained through the use of minimal crew and equipment.
In a genre that boasts as many forgettable flops as Michael Caine or Bob Hoskins classics, it’s refreshing to see a film that finds something original to say without relying on clichéd one-liners or stock characters. Down Terrace has already proven itself to be a hit across the festival circuit, winning Best UK Feature at last year’s Raindance among others.
The Raindance Film Festival runs from September 29 to October 10 in London. More details on the Raindance webiste.
James Merchant
A Deviant View of Cinema – Film, DVD & Book Reviews
