The winner of our April film writing competition, run in connection with the Electric Sheep monthly film club at the Prince Charles Cinema, is Adam Powell. Our judge was John Berra, editor of Directory of World Cinema: Japan. This is what John said:
Battle Royale was burdened by the ‘Asia Extreme’ banner when it was released in 2000, but more recent discussion of Kinji Fukasaku’s controversial cinematic swansong has focused on its underlying social commentary, which considers the ‘collapsed class’ syndrome that is affecting the Japanese education system and the cut-throat world that awaits students upon graduation. The reviews submitted for this competition strived to place the horrific imagery into social-political context, carefully considering this aesthetically visceral and culturally complex film from a variety of perspectives. Adam Powell’s winning review references many of the most graphic moments of Battle Royale as a means of illustrating Fukusaku’s critical stance towards both the modern media and the almost sacrificial manner in which young people are sent to war by their government, while identifying some of the elements that make the film a uniquely Japanese experience.
Here’s Adam Powell’s review:
A scrum of outstretched microphones and flashbulbs attempt to reach an almost idyllic lone infant sat soiled by endless flecks of blood. A hysterical media satire, Battle Royale plays out like a dystopian Japanese game show where the grizzly body count is confirmed constantly through a subtitled scoreboard. Japan’s favourite game show host Takeshi Kitano even oversees the bloodbath, appearing as himself by way of the morose and scorned sensei of the supposedly delinquent children. The school kids are dispatched by government order, screaming and tearful in their prim uniforms to do battle on an island where waves collide against the rocks and fog streams across empty landscapes like a warzone. The children die as soldiers among rapturous gun fire, crossbows, swinging axes, sickles and samurai swords. A fable for history’s children of war, it wallows in the bitterness of its graphic executions and suicides with a romantic and lushly melancholic classical score. A boy’s decapitated head is thrown mouth stuffed with grenade, a pretty schoolgirl repeatedly stabs a randy classmate through his genitals, playground confrontations become terminal and one boy learns of justice and honour in a senseless situation. As Kitano says, ‘Life is a battle, so fight hard for survival!’
Next screening: Wednesday 12 May – Midnight Cowboy + Q&A with London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival programmer Emma Smart. More details on our events page.
Cast: Christos Stergioglou, Michelle Valley, Aggeliki Papoulia, Mary Tsoni, Hristos Passalis, Anna Kalaitzidou
Greece 2009
94 mins
The well-deserved recipient of the Un Certain Regard award at last year’s Cannes festival, Dogtooth (Kynodontas) is the strikingly bizarre and genuinely mind-blowing second feature from Greek writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos. Taking place almost entirely within a single location, a spacious house with a garden and a swimming pool surrounded by a tall wooden fence, the film centres around a married couple and their three grown-up children, who have never set foot outside and are confined to the ludicrous universe created by their tyrannical parents. Peculiarly innocent and eager to make sense of the skewed world they live in, the siblings are subjected to a regimented daily life that includes rigid exercise sessions and competitions as well as lessons from home-made tapes on which the parents teach them perverted definitions of words. The only outsider allowed to penetrate this insane domesticity is Christina, a female security guard at the father’s factory who is employed to have sex with the son but seems to have her own agenda.
Proving to be the chink in the family’s armour, Christina’s intrusion sets off a chain of events that has increasingly nasty and tragic consequences. To elaborate further would give too much away, but the madness and cruelty of the father’s plan to raise his kids in a completely sheltered existence is exposed as the three ‘children’ characters slowly forge ahead to explore their growing curiosity about the outside world. The relationships between them are superbly performed in a matter-of-fact style that is at times shocking, yet unashamedly funny too, as when the brother is forced to choose one of his sisters to relieve him of his sexual urges when Christina stops coming to the property. And although determinedly not a horror film, there are a few moments that are sure to make the audience gasp.
Set on the borderline between the real and the incredible, Dogtooth plays on everyone’s perception of the family while offering a glimpse of the distorted dynamics that are set in motion by over-controlling parents. Yet, the film has a lot more to offer than a psychological survey into the shoals of family dysfunction. Contributing to the parents’ outrageous stories about the dangers that lie beyond the garden fence, the isolated country home gives the film a claustrophobic feel and a consistently troubling atmosphere of hilarious otherworldliness and lurking evil. But the film’s truly brilliant achievement, and what makes this odd fable all the more effective and original, is the deftly balanced mixture of raw and uncompromising realism with a dark and absurd sense of humour and occasional, unpredictable moments of cruelty. Marking Lanthimos out as a great talent to watch, Dogtooth is a bold and unsettling mini-marvel that first sneaks up on you before biting you to the bone.
Venue: ICA Cinema (London) + preview BFI Southbank April 16
Distributor: Manga Entertainment
Director: Mamoru Oshii
Writer: Chihiro Itou
Based on the novel by: Hiroshi Mori
Original title:Sukai kurora
Japan 2008
122 mins
A glorious return to form for director Mamoru Oshii after the innovative but impenetrable Amazing Lives of the Fast Food Grifters in 2006, the pointless CGI remix of Ghost in the Shell (as version 2.0) in 2008, and the overly complicated and visually crowded Innocence in 2004. The Sky Crawlers is a languid tale of young fighter pilots in a near future that evokes both real world conflicts, such as the 1940s War in the Pacific, and fictional ones, such as the perpetual warfare in George Orwell’s 1984.
Although not explicitly located in the same fictional universe as Oshii’s ongoing ‘Kerberos saga’, which includes the aforementioned Amazing Lives, Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade (for which he wrote the script) and a number of manga and live action films, this is another depiction of alternate history that explores Orwellian themes of continually ongoing, distant warfare against a vague enemy and a retro future in which the development of culture is stalled due to the priority given to war. Set against the backdrop of conflict, The Sky Crawlers resembles American live action movies that use the Second World War as the historical setting for generic romance, but Oshii uses these tropes as a springboard for meditations on youth, memory, the fetishising of technology and the war against terror.
The above might suggest this is a dark, heavily laden movie about war and death, but this is far from the case. The Sky Crawlers is a dreamy, beautiful film that gently weaves its way around the lives of various young fighter pilots as they learn their skills, romance local girls, clash with authority and take part in graceful, exhilarating dogfights with the enemy. The general look of the film is inspired by the 40s and 50s but with a hard SF twist that I won’t reveal here, which adds additional poignancy to the notion of the brief lives of the (handsome) young when pressed into military service. Many of Oshii’s films unwind at a deliberate pace, but the elegiac animation of sky, land, sea and aircraft here also seems inspired by younger filmmakers such as Makoto Shinkai, whose melancholy style suits the material and is echoed as Oshii captures memories of long, golden, youthful summers that now seem alien and impossible.
But it is not simply a wistful, nostalgic film and there are clear parallels with the real world, starting with the so-called war on terror: the young pilots are kept ignorant of all but the skills required to do their jobs while the long, pointless war with a foreign enemy serves as almost another form of entertainment in the media. There are also parallels with the dumbing down and narrow focus of modern education and entertainment and the resulting short attention span of audiences, but all of these themes are subtly dealt with and never mentioned explicitly or heavy-handedly. Wherever these ideas come from, be it from Hiroshi Mori’s original novel or Chihiro Itou’s screenplay, it is interesting that they should fit so well with the worldview expressed in the rest of Mamoru Oshii’s filmography.
The Sky Crawlers is Oshii’s finest film since 2001’s underrated Avalon and his best animé since the original Ghost in the Shell. The familiar subject matter of wartime romance may even attract new fans to the director’s work who might not have initially warmed to the cyberpunk thrillers and Gothic siege warfare found elsewhere in his oeuvre. My only concern is that the gentle pace of the film might put off viewers who expect more ‘bangs for their bucks’ after the violence of Ghost in the Shell, Patlabor and the director’s various other war movies.
The term ‘sequel’ suggests a cinematic safety net for filmmakers and audiences alike; bigger and better than before, but immediately familiar and easily accessible. Sequels are, of course, also associated with the role of cinema as a commercial enterprise, and it is rare that Hollywood invests in a follow-up to an unsuccessful film, unless there is a palpable sense that the core market was not adequately targeted. In fact, sequels are so synonymous with the Hollywood mainstream that they represent the antithesis of American independent cinema, which is defined more by its social-political sensibility and aesthetic experimentation than it is by box office returns. However, some American independent filmmakers have navigated the cinematic territory of the sequel; Richard Linklater revisited the characters of his backpacker romance Before Sunrise (1995) with Before Sunset (2004), while Kevin Smith caught up with the convenience store slackers of his debut feature with Clerks 2 (2006). Both directors were able to comment on the passing of time through characters that were already familiar to their small but loyal audiences.
Life during Wartime finds Todd Solondz attempting a similar trick, revisiting the dysfunctional family of his jet-black comedy Happiness (1998) to explore the theme of forgiveness through reference to the seemingly irredeemable acts committed in the earlier film. The work of Solondz, which also includes Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995) and Storytelling (2001), has always been more divisive than that of Linklater and Smith due to his exploration of such subjects as child molestation and statutory rape and his strangely sympathetic attitude towards paedophiles and obscene phone callers. The director must be commended for finding financing for a sequel to a film that many viewers struggled to sit through on its initial release, although Happiness has since become a cult favourite and the subject of some discussion with regards to the suburbanisation of American culture. Solondz also breaks with sequel convention by refusing to bring back the actors from the previous film while aiming to achieve tonal consistency through his finely observed screenplay.
Life during Wartime opens with Allen (Michael K Williams, formerly Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Joy (Shirley Henderson, formerly Jane Adams) celebrating their first wedding anniversary, only for Joy to discover that her husband is still a pervert, prompting a move to Florida where her mother and sisters have relocated. She finds Trish (Allison Janney, formerly Cynthia Stevenson) moving on with her life following the incarceration of her ex-husband Bill for sex crimes and embarking on a romance with the older but ‘normal’ Harvey (Michael Lerner), while Helen (Ally Sheedy, formerly Lara Flynn Boyle) is now writing screenplays in addition to novels, but remains mean-spirited despite receiving attention from Keanu Reeves and Salman Rushdie. Joy struggles to reconnect with her family, and receives ‘visitations’ from former suitor Andy (Paul Reubens, formerly John Lovitz), who committed suicide after being jilted by Joy ten years earlier. Although the early scenes seek to establish Joy as the emotional anchor of Life during Wartime, the focus shifts to the more grimly compelling story strand of Bill (Ciarí¡n Hinds, formerly Dylan Baker), who is released from prison and visits his son Billy, now a college student majoring in sexual deviancy in the animal kingdom, to make sure that the sex crime gene has not been passed on to the next generation.
Solondz’s stab at subverting sequel conventions through re-casting is sometimes distracting, but serves to underline his oft-stated view that, as much as people may try to change, they remain fundamentally the same. Some of the casting changes are more successful than others; Paul Reubens mines the same tragicomic depths as John Lovitz, while Ciarí¡n Hinds is a hulking, haunting presence, a self-declared ‘monster’ who physically embodies the potential threat that was so expertly disguised behind Dylan Baker’s buttoned-down suburban facade. Unfortunately, Ally Sheedy does not so much take over the role of Helen from Lara Flynn Boyle as deliver an exaggerated impersonation of her predecessor, and Michael T Williams is not afforded enough screen time to establish a dramatic link between his interpretation of Allen and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s earlier incarnation.
The title of the film refers to the current political climate in the United States, and there is discussion of terrorism, which Solondz links to the topic of paedophilia, and references to Bush and McCain. Perhaps surprisingly, the director is less interested in criticising the Republican regime than he is in finding forgiveness in its aftermath, while Trish’s insistence that ‘sometimes it’s better not to understand’ suggests that the director may even be questioning the necessity of his own brand of cinematic provocation. While there have been subtle shifts in the cinematic universe of Todd Solondz, there have been more noticeable readjustments in the world of American independent film; in 1999, Happiness received a release through Universal subsidiary Good Machine, while Life during Wartime will rely on the comparatively guerrilla strategy of IFC. It is arguable that Solondz has been somewhat marginalised in recent years, but this ‘sequel’ exhibits a newfound mellowness that those who lost interest following the middle-class mockery of Storytelling may find oddly endearing.
Cast: Gemma Aterton, Martin Compston, Eddie Marsan
UK 2009
100 mins
J Blakeson’s feature debut is a taut, low-budget British thriller about two men, Danny and Vic, who kidnap a young woman named Alice. As they wait for the ransom, locked together in a small flat, tension mounts and details emerge about who they are. The relationship between the three characters develops in unexpected directions as they all try to manipulate the situation to their advantage. Below, Pamela Jahn and Virginie Sélavy discuss the film and what it shows about current British filmmaking.
Pamela Jahn: What I liked about the film is that, for what it was, a hostage story, it was pretty tight and well performed. But there were some twists that were beyond plausibility, and I thought it started more strongly than it played out in the end.
Virginie Sélavy: The way that some of the revelations about the characters were brought on showed that the plot was weak. They just felt like a cop-out, like a way out of the plot that Blakeson had built. They weren’t really justified in any way and were quite unconvincing as a result.
PJ: The opening scenes where Danny and Vic set up the kidnapping and take Alice to the flat were really tense and really good. You don’t know the motivations behind Danny’s weird behaviour at first.
VS: That’s true, the beginning is excellent because it’s very sparse, it doesn’t explain anything. The two men are very purposeful and they are brutal without hurting her, which is very unsettling and very effective. You don’t quite understand what’s going on.
PJ: But then I found the first twist laughable. Alice’s reaction wasn’t worked out properly.
VS: I expected the film to be cleverer, but in the end what you have is yet another film that focuses on a female victim who is stripped naked and humiliated, but is not smart enough to get herself out of the situation. Although she is constantly trying things, she doesn’t make anything happen - everything happens outside of her control. That annoyed me, and I know this is partly to do with my own expectations, but I don’t think you can have just another female victim film without having a little bit of a twist, so that she’s more than that.
PJ: Yes, I totally agree, but given the fact that she is under so much pressure I think that at least it’s realistic. I thought her character was convincing in the way that she tries to get out of her situation.
VS: But did you think that she was an interesting female character?
PJ: No.
VS: That’s my point. Danny is probably the most interesting character because he’s manipulative and complex and you can’t quite figure him out, whereas she just reacts to situations. She’s a very passive type of character. I expected more of a battle of wits, which I don’t think you really get.
PJ: What annoyed me more was that it became predictable, that I could actually foresee the end. In terms of the characters, I thought what was interesting is that Danny seems weak at the beginning and he turns out to be quite strong. And even though I didn’t have as much of a problem with Alice as you, I think it’s a bit of a shame that Blakeson did not put more effort into creating her character. He does concentrate on the two guys and their relationship a lot more, but she’s just the victim, she doesn’t have to be anything other than that.
VS: I think the other problem in the film is the way information is revealed.
PJ: It’s quite clumsy.
VS: Yes. I always remember what Hitchcock said about suspense and surprise, and in this film Blakeson went for surprise. If he had given his audience more information about the characters, he would have been able to create much more effective tension by making the audience aware of what is being played out in front of them. That said, the relationship between the two men is better dealt with, there is a more interesting power struggle between them.
PJ: Absolutely. That’s because Blakeson keeps things simple - one location, three characters - it’s a different sort of tension that keeps the film together and makes it enjoyable.
VS: I did find it enjoyable in spite of my reservations. I think for a first feature film with a very low budget, they did well. The kidnapping set-up was a good idea to justify the one location, which is so important to keep the budget down. But the problem I have with it, and in that respect it made me think of Exam, which is also a one-room low-budget British thriller, is that these new directors try to make films that they can sell, and as a result I think that there is something a bit formulaic about them. Ultimately, they are fairly empty films because they don’t really have much to say. They seem to make a film for the sake of it, rather than because they have something to say or show. But maybe this is a step for those first-time directors towards making the film they really want to make - I hope so.
PJ: One of the reasons for this might have to do with the funding. They have to show that they can make a film within a tiny budget that looks good and is saleable and not too controversial.
VS: Yes, the funding is the problem. Of course you have to be realistic when you make your first film, but you have to have a story to tell, not just a narrative device that is a pretext to make a film.
PJ: They may not be empty, but they’re flat. A lot of these films pretend to be interesting but they’re not thought through properly. In both films, there are probably one or two twists too many, which keep the audience going, but are too obvious.
VS: You could have done something more interesting with the power games in this scenario, but Blakeson doesn’t really explore that deeply enough. The film doesn’t tell you anything of substance about the dynamics of power in this triangle, because of all those twists.
PJ: In terms of the performances, I thought Eddie Marsan was the best one. He’s totally convincing as Vic, the older kidnapper, and I can take all the plot twists that involve him because of his performance. I think the performances carry the plot to a certain extent. Whenever the plot weakens, there is still a fantastic quality to the acting and it keeps you interested to the end.
Venue: BFI Southbank, Curzons Mayfair, Wimbledon (London) and key cities
Distributor: Soda Pictures
Director: Johan Grimonprez
Writer: Tom McCarthy
Cast: Ron Burrage, Mark Perry
UK 2009
80 mins
Scroll down to watch the trailer
Somewhere in Belgian artist Johan Grimonprez’s film - a vast montage of Hitchcock’s television appearances, Cold War footage and coffee commercials - is an adaptation of a Jorge Luis Borges story by art world luminary and novelist Tom McCarthy. Borges described meeting his younger self in ‘The Other’ and returned to the idea in ‘August 25, 1983’. Here it is Alfred Hitchcock who meets the 1980s version of himself during the filming of The Birds in 1962, which leads him to plan the perfect murder. ‘If you meet your double, you should kill him, or he will kill you,’ one tells the other.
This war between doubles is mirrored in the cultural tensions of the late 50s and early 60s. In the dialectic battle for supremacy we have: communism v capitalism, television v cinema and instant v ground (coffee that is). Hitchcock is an odd (but somehow perfect) choice around whom to build such a film - a seeming mass of contradictions who fails to add his weight decisively to either side of any argument. To him the Cold War was a handy plot device, a MacGuffin. Soviet agents, like the Nazi spies in Notorious (1946), or even the birds in The Birds, were simply the faceless danger to set the plot in motion. In the latter film, the apocalyptic fear of the Cuban Missile Crisis is stripped of any political content and turned into an animal class war (aves v mammalia). And yet, in contrast to the rest of Hitchcock’s oeuvre, it is a film that seems to invite allegorical readings. Is mankind’s faltering position at the top of the evolutionary tree a reflection of the Red Peril or perhaps even of cinema’s battle for the biggest share of the market place with television (that smaller, less intelligent but more numerous and successful upstart)? Among the highlights in Double Take is some excellent footage of Vice-President Richard Nixon defending his country in a ‘good-humoured’ debate with First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev: we may be losing the space race, he argues, but we have colour television.
Although it would take some years before television began to gain artistic credibility, the small screen was by the early 60s commercially (in America at least) whooping ass. And with the advent of colour it must have seemed that cinema’s days were numbered. Although Hitchcock appears to sneer at the new technology - there is a great joke about adverts being specially placed throughout the programme to stop the audience from getting too involved - he was, as always, adaptable - after all, he had already made the move to sound, to colour, to widescreen and even shot Dial M for Murder (1954) in 3D. And with Alfred Hitchcock Presents and its follow-up The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (the hilarious intros from these make up the bulk of Hitchcock’s appearances in this film), he became for a while more famous, certainly more recognisable, as a television host than as a director of films.
It seems that in Double Take Grimonprez is not really interested in Alfred Hitchcock the artist - there is no mention of voyeurism or the manipulation of the audience that dominate other studies. The Master of Suspense is reduced to a figure of his time - as much a 2D representation as the famous line drawing from his TV show. And yet this is somehow refreshing. Perhaps because he is ‘cinema’s greatest artist’, his art has dominated discussions and the socio-political context of his films has been often overlooked. This may also be because Hitchcock himself was as disdainful of when and where his films were set as he was of the plausibility of his plots. And yet he was forever setting his films amid contemporary political turmoil; the Cold War itself serves as background for both Torn Curtain (1966) and Topaz (1969).
Read our Reel Sounds column on the Psycho soundtrack.
It must also be said that Double Take is a very entertaining film and is at times very funny - aside from the Hitchcock intros, there is also the strange comedy double act of Nixon and Khrushchev. The pleasures the film offers are perhaps not unlike those of an ‘I love 1962’ compilation, but at the same time it is intelligent and complex with enough layers of reality to rival the Curb Your Enthusiasm ‘Seinfeld’ episode; we see the actor and Dead Ringers star Mark Perry practising Hitchcock’s voice and reading from Truffaut’s interview book (based on recordings made in 1962) and celebrity look-alike Ron Burrage, who shares a birthday with the filmmaker, posing with Tippi Hedren.
For those who need reminding of history’s relevance to the present we also have the true story of a plane crashing into the Empire State Building in 1945, among other references to 9/11. But such forced links are hardly necessary; we still have a capitalism v (Chinese) communism conflict; television and cinema are now both fighting a battle with newer media; but Folger’s ground coffee is still a bestseller stateside and, ‘as good as fresh perked’ or not, the instant variety remains as popular as instant tea in Britain. Perhaps what is genuine and authentic will prevail if only we can recognise it.
In connection with the Electric Sheep Film Club at the Prince Charles Cinema every second Wednesday of the month, we run a film writing competition in which film students and aspiring film writers are invited to write a 200-word review of the film on show that month. The best review is picked by a film professional, and Careful producer Greg Klymkiw was the judge of our Guy Maddin March competition. The prize for the best review is publication on the Electric Sheep website. We are pleased to announce that the winner is Tony McDougall. Greg Klymkiw said: ‘Good review. Remember - always ask yourself questions about everything you write. Poke and prod yourself. Answer your own questions. It can make for very good copy.’
Here’s Tony McDougall’s review:
Careful is a film out of its time. Guy Maddin uses techniques long since forgotten from old school cinema to create a fascinating and truly unique movie. Maddin successfully employs such methods as damaged film, sudden cuts, excessive make-up as well as over-dramatisation when it comes to the acting to create a surreal masterpiece. Any nostalgic feelings are limited to the aesthetic quality of the movie as the taboo subject matter of incest would never have featured in the visually similar films of yesteryear. The story takes place in a 19th-century French village in the Alps where all the residents are afraid to make any noise in case they start an avalanche. This dominant fear that casts a shadow over all the villagers causes high anxiety among them, which we see when the lead character is told to put his name on his toothbrush before there is an accident. This is a brilliant metaphor for the world we currently live in where the most mundane of tasks seems to involve some sort of risk. This is a strictly rare movie in that it is not only evocative, but also unique and above all else relevant.
You can read more reviews by Tony McDougall on his blog.
Next screening: Wednesday 14 April – Battle Royale + Q&A with anime expert Helen McCarty. More details on our events page.
Venues: BFI IMAX, Odeon Leicester Square (London) and nationwide
Director: Tim Burton
Writer: Linda Woolverton
Based on the novels by : Lewis Carroll
Cast: Johnny Depp, Mia Wasikowska, Helena Bonham Carter, Anne Hathaway
USA 2010
108mins
In Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, up is down and down is up in a satirical inversion of the real world, of literature, of maths and puzzles. In a suitably Carrollian scenario, I’ve found myself agreeing with the point of view of a right-wing columnist in the Mail on Sunday whose work I normally despise. In Peter Hitchens’s one-paragraph dismissal of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, he wrote: ‘We live in the age of deconstruction and the post-modern. Burton… appears to have turned [Alice] into Willy Wonka meets Lord of the Rings.’ Unfortunately I think he’s right, and Disney’s new live action adaptation may come as a surprise to audiences familiar with the studio’s 1951 animated version of the story. This is not to say that Tim Burton’s made a bad film, more that this is a missed opportunity.
This new adaptation is both a reimagining of, and sequel to, the Alice novels. I suppose audiences shouldn’t be too surprised that this is a film aimed at older audiences than the single-digit ages the original Disney Alice was made for, as even Burton’s most child-friendly films as director/producer - Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, The Nightmare before Christmas, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - had a level of darkness and subversion to them. However, the delight in whimsy, ideas and neologisms that typifies both the original novels and the Disney cartoon only appears infrequently here, which is a shame because the parts of the film that are faithful to the original story show that Burton could have made the definitive live action version. The Alice adaptation everyone was expecting in the 00s was an even darker sequel based on the computer game American McGee’s Alice - to have been scored by the likes of Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson and directed by Wes Craven. Burton’s Alice is halfway between American McGee’s Alice and Disney’s original. It’s aimed at teens rather than tweens, and it features an early scene showing Alice gored by a razor-mouthed and clawed Bandersnatch, which has an eye plucked out by a mouse wielding a rapier.
In conjunction with the release of Tim Burton’s new film, BFI Southbank are presenting the many previous adaptations of Alice in Wonderland in March. More information on the BFI website.
While fans of Disney’s original Alice may be dismayed by this Fighting Fantasy approach to the material there are still plenty of lines of dialogue from the original intact and the CGI rendering of anthropomorphic animals - talking horses, frogs and dogs - is the most impressive I’ve seen on screen so far - although bizarrely the CGI rendering of humans on horseback looks like the jerky movements of marionettes, which makes you wonder why they didn’t use real stuntmen. The technical necessities of converting the film into 3D mean there is a lush primary-coloured hue to many of the characters and scenes - except when Burton goes into goth mode and juxtaposes the familiar characters with dark, monochromic backgrounds. However, many scenes have an incongruous roaming camera designed to accentuate the 3D thrills of the cinematic presentation and the conversion into 3D has necessitated the blurring of backgrounds, limiting the tools of wide-angle lenses and long-shots available to the cinematographer. In terms of sets, costumes and characters, Alice is a more rewarding film than the recent Avatar, where the incomprehensible budget was tempered by the very average imagination and plot. Alice, of course, even when made needlessly dark for this adaptation, is fuelled by one of the most outlandish imagination in Victorian fiction and it’s terrific to see this rendered by the latest technology on the highest resolution - IMAX - format possible.
The greatest strength of the film is the acting, with Alan Rickman voicing a louche Blue Caterpillar in the centre of a terrific British-centric cast that includes Matt Lucas, Stephen Fry, Paul Whitehouse, Timothy Spall and Burton favourite Christopher Lee as the voice of the Jabberwocky. While Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter are reasonably entertaining, though perhaps becoming over-familiar and overused in Burton’s films, Mia Wasikowska is a terrific adult Alice, a rebellious debutante and ingénue who becomes a thoughtful woman and reluctant warrior over the course of the film. With such performances, it’s noticeable that the scenes centred around humans - the awful pomp and ceremony of a 19th-century engagement party at the beginning, the hilarious prosthetic-wearing retinue of the Red Queen - are actually some of the best in the film. In contrast, the sword and sorcery subplot shoehorned into the narrative sits uneasily with the original characters.
This a film of various beginnings - Carroll, Disney, 21st-century computer games - and endings - an armour-clad Alice in a dark wasteland fighting a Jabberwocky only marginally less scary than Terry Gilliam’s and an invigorated Alice back in the real world, making the most of the British Empire. The first ending closes a world I wouldn’t particularly want to return to, the other one opens possibilities I’d be happy to see Burton explore further…
Bahman Ghobadi’s exploration into the world of underground music in Tehran is a welcome antidote to the blasé, pedestrian, apathetic state of the music industry in the West. While we gorge ourselves on MP3 downloads and bit torrents to a point where music is seen as a free commodity, made virtually valueless by a virtual world, in Iran, any acquisition, enjoyment or creation of music (especially Western music) is forbidden by the authorities. So as the film follows a couple of indie kids (Ashkan and Negar) trying to form a band by meeting different musicians around the city, they’re not just chasing the rock’n’roll dream, they are fighting for their lives.
No One Knows about Persian Cats is an interesting hybrid of drama infused with truth, although it could easily have been a documentary. The director’s passion for music saturates every frame of the film and he even appears in the opening scene singing in an underground studio, which sets the tone for the rest of the film. Amidst the drama and the perpetual sense of danger, there are some fantastic comic scenes as well as a lot of musical set pieces. At points it seems as if the whole purpose of the film is to showcase various Iranian bands, with the story being secondary. Although a lot of the music is actually quite good, with each new band or musician comes another set piece and another ‘promo video’, which sometimes seems a little obvious. Many of them feature flashing images and scenes of the darker side of city life (especially in the hip-hop scene).
Special screenings with the lead actors + a live PA with their band Take It Easy Hospital followed by a set from DJ Shahram on the following dates: March 23, Ritzy Brixton Cinema @7.30pm + March 31, Ciné Lumií¨re @ 8.00pm.
Yet this is conversely one of the most endearing aspects of the film. As Ashkan and Negar explore the depths of the underground scene, they see a surprising array of different genres, and music snobbery doesn’t get a look in. They meet a singer-songwriter with wonderfully poetic lyrics about the struggle for freedom and a heavy metal band who practise in a cowshed as they were forced out of their village; they go to a rave at a house party and meet an indie-funk band who rehearse in a space built on the roof of a building (whose neighbours constantly report them to the authorities so they keep getting arrested).
Encounters with the authorities are par for the course for these musicians. Ashkan and Negar have recently been released from prison and have been invited to play a gig in London but have no band and more crucially, no passports or visas with which to make the trip. It’s hard to believe that their twee, casio-based indie pop would rile up the authorities too much, but the mere fact that they are expressing themselves artistically and touching on subjects outside of the rigorous Iranian dogma means that they have to be very wary. Negar is even more at risk as women are forbidden from singing due to the emotions they can stir.
No One Knows about Persian Cats also screens at the Flatpack Festival in Birmingham on March 24.
Things start to look up when they meet local DVD bootlegger and all-round blagger Nader; he introduces them to a forger who can help them with visas and passports. This scene is flecked with gentle touches of humour as the old forger asks Nader for bootleg DVDs of films with more action and less romance. As every commodity is bought and sold on the black market, Nader has a good little niche for himself copying films and music from the West, and he becomes the musicians’ ally in trying to help them both escape Iran and set up a concert in order to raise funds. One of the other really masterful scenes in the film is when he gets arrested and talks his way out of a flogging, prison and a fine with quick-fire dialogue and perfect comic timing.
The film opens up a world that even most Iranians don’t know exists. These indie bands look like they’ve just stepped off the pages of the NME, yet are in constant fear of that knock on the door, and we follow them through tunnels, up stairs, down basements and back alleys as they insist on creating art and having a voice despite the dangers. The dream of going to the West, or in Ashkar’s case, of going to Iceland to see Sigur Rí³s, seems like an endless struggle when you are constantly looking over your shoulder. Despite all of the obstacles, rock music is still being created in Iran by these rebels with a cause.
This bold and inspiring film was obviously a great risk to make but it is ultimately rewarding for its audience. Recommended for all music lovers but especially to struggling musicians who should know that however tough they think things are, they can’t be nearly as bad as they are for these Persian Cats.
Venue: Curzon Soho, Odeon Panton St (London) and key cities
Distributor: Axiom Films
Director: Pablo Trapero
Writers: Alejandro Fadel, Martín Mauregui, Santiago Mitre, Pablo Trapero
Original title:Leonera
Cast: Martina Gusman, Elli Medeiros, Laura García, Rodrigo Santoro
France 2008
113 mins
A woman wakes up in a trashed apartment, covered in bruises, with deep, painful scratches carved into her shoulder. In the shower, blood streams off her aching body. Still in shock, Julia (Martina Gusman) only realises hours later that two men are in the flat with her - one, her boyfriend, has been stabbed to death, the other - Ramiro, her boyfriend’s lover - is badly injured but still alive. Unable to remember what happened, she’s thrown into jail by the police, where she soon discovers that she’s pregnant.
Lion’s Den, the fifth film from Argentine director Pablo Trapero, could not be further from the exploitation films that characterised the women in prison genre in the 70s. The movie is named for the penitentiary units where women with children are housed during their incarceration. In Argentina, the children are allowed to remain inside with their mothers until the age of four, when they’re removed by the Court and either placed with a relative or in state care.
Julia finds herself in a shockingly decrepit cell. The other mothers are mostly uneducated, peasant women, in sharp contrast to Julia’s rebellious but upper-class character. Trapero captures all the gritty realism of life in prison, but the film also has the feel of a slow-burning thriller - as Julia adjusts to life on the inside, her case pits her against Ramiro (played by Rodrigo Santoro), who accuses her of being solely responsible for his lover’s death.
With her life shattered, Julia struggles with motherhood. Unable to breastfeed after her son, Tomí¡s, is born, she’s helped by her cellmate Marta, who intervenes when the baby’s cries begin to drive the other mothers and children over the edge. Older and more experienced, Marta takes Julia under her wing, eventually leading to a relationship between the two women, who manage to find some small comfort in the confines of the prison.
But the wheels of justice are grindingly and appallingly slow: Julia gives birth and raises her baby behind bars without ever going to trial. As Tomí¡s gets older and approaches the all-important age of four, Julia’s distant, beautiful and unwelcome mother (played by the singer and actress Elli Medeiros) intervenes, returning to Buenos Aires from her life in Paris to take over the role of looking after her grandson, with disturbing and dramatic consequences.
Filmed almost entirely within an existing women’s penitentiary, using real inmates and guards as extras, Lion’s Den is a deeply harrowing film. Martina Gusman, who won the FIPRESCI International Critics’ Prize for best actress, delivers a powerful performance as a determined mother who will do anything to keep her child. While the film, released so soon after Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet, may not be as polished, or as entertaining as the French thriller, it is a more brutal, realistic and morally ambiguous portrayal of life in prison.
Although the film’s ending may seem a little unconvincing, Trapero never offers the audience any easy answers. We never really discover the truth behind the murder, and are left to decide whether a mother’s love for her child is more important than an innocent child’s right to freedom and a life outside prison.
Sarah Cronin
A Deviant View of Cinema – Film, DVD & Book Reviews
