Format: Cinema

Release date: 24 April 2009

Venues: Cineworld Haymarket, Curzon Soho (London) and nationwide

Distributor: Metrodome

Director: Eran Creevy

Writer: Eran Creevy

Cast: Riz Ahmed, Daniel Mays, Jason Flemyng, Nitin Ganatra

UK 2008

85 mins

Eran Creevy’s debut feature follows two former childhood friends reunited by chance, regret and the need for mutual consolation. Riz Ahmed plays the eponymous protagonist, a Muslim drug dealer who earns í‚£3000 a week, has as much casual sex as he can manage and lives at his older brother Rez’s, who gave him a second chance when their parents disowned him. His life is spent dodging the local addicts and the threats of a ruthless rival dealer while trying to ensure that his brother doesn’t find out about his secret business empire.

Enter Chris (Daniel Mays), Shifty’s estranged best friend who left their small town without notice four years earlier, leaving his accomplice to take the fall after a tragic incident involving his own sale of drugs. In the intervening years, Chris has cleaned up his act, with a job in recruitment and a steady mortgage, while Shifty has spiralled further into the business, selling crack to pensioners and gaining fresh young customers by force. Over 24 hours, Chris follows his old friend, rediscovering the life he left behind and finding out what’s become of the people who stayed, while attempting to counter the criticism levelled against him for his past actions.

From the outset, Creevy’s undeniably gritty drama distances itself from similarly themed tales set in small-town Britain. His protagonist is played neither for cool nor to deliver a moral lesson, but there’s a great depth to Shifty’s character, helped in part by a breathtaking performance from Ahmed, who inhabits the role with a sense of urgency and experience. At times there’s an unbearable intensity in his eyes, contrasted with the calmness of his voice, that convinces the audience, and perhaps Shifty himself, that he has what it takes to be a drug dealer. He also displays a beautifully underplayed vulnerability. For his part, Mays breathes some sensitivity into Chris, who spends the film walking the line between saviour and hypocrite, and the two share an undeniable chemistry. This is typified in a scene where they recapture memories of their youth in a children’s playground, the mood aptly complemented by Molly Nyman and Harry Escott’s delicate piano-driven score.

The film’s greatest strength lies in its structured fragility, much like the relationship between the two leads, which allows for reassuring banter to switch in seconds to uncomfortable and potentially threatening situations. This is perfectly exemplified in an early scene where Chris is invited into Shifty’s kitchen, considerately asked if he’ll eat Halal sausages, playfully mocked by Rez, then slammed with the question as to why he left. Moments such as this drive the film emotionally; in spite of their actions, the characters aren’t presented as devoid of compassion, and Creevy never condones the way they choose to lead their lives.

One of the first films to be funded by Film London’s Microwave, whereby selected filmmakers are challenged to shoot a feature film with a budget of í‚£100,000 with support from established industry figures (Creevy’s mentor was Asif Kapadia), Shifty is an accomplishment for both its filmmakers and the new scheme itself.

James Merchant

Format: Cinema

Release date: 6 March 2009

Venues: BFI IMAX, Odeon Leicester Square (London) and nationwide

Distributor Paramount

Director: Zack Snyder

Writers: David Hayter and Alex Tse

Based on the graphic novel by: Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore (uncredited)

Cast: Malin Akerman, Billy Crudup, Matthew Goode, Jackie Earle Haley, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Patrick Wilson, Carla Gugino, Matt Frewer

USA 2009

163 minutes

While Watchmen hasn’t received the same amount of publicity as last year’s The Dark Knight, it has generated a level of anticipation unprecedented for comic book adaptations in recent years. After all, we’re talking about the ‘Citizen Kane of graphic novels’. Even the sober journalists of The Guardian Film Blog don’t seem to be immune and a recent roundup of early reviews of the film flirts with applying the Orson Welles comparison to the movie adaptation too.

I don’t intend to harp on about the fidelity of the film to the book as it has to stand on its own merits and based on these, Watchmen the movie is fairly average. Zack Snyder is an accomplished visual director, which was demonstrated to an even greater extent in his earlier 300 (2006), but is not the best director of actors. Paradoxically, the strongest aspect of the film is the plot, but its original author, Alan Moore, has had his name removed from the credits. As presented on screen, the story, set in 1985, is relatively simple. After an ageing vigilante is murdered, members of the superhero community worry that there might be a ‘cape killer’ loose on the streets while the world around them faces nuclear Armageddon. Recent attempts to bring Watchmen to the screen included revisionist takes that intended to relocate it to the post 9/11 world. Snyder sticks to the original period, and the 80s seem a particularly appropriate decade for the film, as it was an era that was book-ended by the first great superhero films Superman II (1980) and Batman (1989). The influence of those two films are writ large in the characterisation here, with Patrick Wilson’s Dan Dreiberg / Nite Owl played emphatically as a cross between Christopher Reeve’s nebbish Clark Kent and Michael Keaton’s introspective Bruce Wayne.

The 80s were a kitsch decade, in which gaudy outfits, neon lights and synthesised jazz didn’t seem too incongruous. This is something that Snyder recreates well, helped by comic book artist Dave Gibbons’s original drawings. Snyder also captures the violent 80s aesthetic of urban decay and riots, although not as well as Terry Gilliam did in Brazil at the time the original comic was published (in the history of great unmade superhero films, Gilliam’s Watchmen is neck and neck with Orson Welles’s Batman…). But the 80s aesthetic doesn’t always work well. One of the film’s most important emotional moments – the sex scene between Nite Owl and Silk Spectre – is shot and directed like something out of 9 킽 Weeks (1986) and is the weakest, cheesiest scene in the movie. The use of music makes things worse, the soundtrack mixing Philip Glass with Nena Kerner and Simon and Garfunkel. In the hands of a director with a better understanding of the possibilities of music as a counterpoint to action, this scattershot approach could have worked well – after all Quentin Tarantino has based his career on it – but in Watchmen the juxtaposition of ‘The Sound of Silence’ with a funeral scene and ‘Hallelujah’ with the Nite Owl/Silk Spectre coupling ranges from mawkish to downright embarrassing.

Snyder is a director who excels at stylised ultra-violence and his accomplishments in this field in both 300 and his remake of Dawn of the Dead (2004) led to his being hired for the Watchmen project. The high body count in 300 was tempered by painterly visuals that gave the film an almost abstract and otherworldly quality. Here the breaking of bones, spurting blood and entrails hanging from a ceiling seem excessive for a superhero movie. Alan Moore’s Watchmen may be known as a superhero comic for adults, but that reputation is based on its writing and structure, not on gratuitous violence. With much of the ironies and subtleties of the original graphic novel removed from the film, Snyder’s Watchmen is not much more than yet another superhero movie, and as such, its potential audience is largely adolescents. Yet, by upping the violence on screen, the director has excluded that audience from cinemas (unless they live in Ireland, the Baltic States or New Zealand, where it has a lower rating).

At the risk of damning the film with faint praise, it’s as good as the third films in the Batman and Superman franchises – mixing hysterical visuals with faux gravitas and absurd situations. The character that most resembles an early 80s reject, Jackie Earle Haley’s Walter Kovacs / Rorschach, is surprisingly the most engaging and likeable character. He may be an amoral and violent psychopath but he has the no-nonsense charm and gravely voice of mid-career Clint Eastwood. For all the debate about fidelity to the original graphic novel, it is Alan Moore’s unwilling input that rescues the film and stops it from being as bad as it could have been and often threatens to be. Watchmen the film is loud, kitsch, violent and flashy, like the decade it’s set in. For those reasons, it’s an enjoyable 1980s superhero film. But no way is it the Citizen Kane of superhero movies.

Alex Fitch

Watchmen can be seen on the BFI IMAX’s 20-metre high screen from March 7 to April 2. More details on the BFI IMAX website.

Read our comic strip on the Watchmen film adaptation in the new print issue of Electric Sheep. The spring issue focuses on Tainted Love to celebrate the release of the sweet and bloody pre-teen vampire romance Let the Right One In, with articles on incestuous cinematic siblings, Franí§ois Ozon‘s tales of tortuous relationships, destructive passion in Nic Roeg‘s Bad Timing, Julio Medem‘s ambiguous lovers and nihilistic tenderness from Kôji Wakamatsu. Also in this issue: Interview with Pascal Laugier (Martyrs), Berlin squat cinema, screen vamps, the Polish New Wave that never existed and much more!

Format: Cinema

Release date: 6 March 2009

Venues: Cineworld Wandsworth, Vue Shepherd’s Bush (London) and key cities

Distributor: Optimum Releasing

Director: Nanette Burstein

Writer: Nanette Burstein

Cast: Hannah Bailey, Jake Tusing, Colin Clemens, Mitch Reinholt, Megan Krizmanich

USA 2008

95 mins

Nanette Burstein’s 2002 documentary The Kid Stays in the Picture took a riveting look at the rise and fall of the legendary Paramount producer Robert Evans, who was responsible for some of the biggest movies to come out of Hollywood during the 70s. For her latest film, Burstein has shifted her focus from the rich and famous to the altogether more banal lives of suburban teens. The subjects in American Teen are five high school students from Warsaw, Indiana, and the film’s Breakfast Club-style poster is the first indication that Burstein’s documentary owes a debt to John Hughes – which for many film-goers might be no bad thing.

The stereotypes are all here: The Rebel (Hannah Bailey), The Geek (Jake Tusing), The Jock (Colin Clemens), The Heartthrob (Mitch Reinholt) and The Princess (Megan Krizmanich). Burstein’s team tracked the 17-year-olds throughout their senior year, and the result is an entertaining, and sometimes painful, reminder of the agonies of adolescence. Of the five students, the most compelling are easily Hannah/The Rebel and Jake/The Geek. Hannah gets dumped, works on her art, plays in a band, hooks up with The Heartthrob and gets dumped again when his friends dismiss his ‘outsider’ girlfriend. She’s desperate to get out of the small, narrow-minded town and move to California after graduation. Jake, cursed with acne, braces and a near-total lack of social skills, is desperate for a girlfriend. Watching the film, you wish you could pull Hannah and Jake aside and tell them that the geeks and the rebels are the ones who end up starting companies like Facebook and becoming filmmakers.

But the other students have their own problems too: Colin’s a star basketball player on a struggling team, and while his popularity is in little doubt, the pressure on him to secure a scholarship is intense – it’s his only hope of being able to make it into college when his dad, who has a sideline in Elvis impersonation, can’t afford the tuition. It’s a lot harder to have sympathy for Megan, the poor little rich kid who wants to please her surgeon father by making it into Notre Dame, his alma mater. But by scratching below the surface, Burstein reveals that even The Princess has had her share of tough breaks.

There’s always going to be an audience for this kind of teen biopic, if the popularity of Gossip Girl and the resuscitation of 90201 is anything to go by. American Teen may not have the immediacy of Frederick Wiseman’s classic cinema verité documentary High School (1968), and in some ways it feels less realistic than Antonio Campos’s fictional Afterschool (2008), one of the highlights of last year’s London Film Festival. But Nanette Burstein’s documentary is a fun, engaging look at a bunch of kids stumbling over the universal pitfalls that all teenagers struggle with.

Sarah Cronin

American Teen is also screening at the Birds Eye View Film Festival on Saturday 7 March at the ICA. More information on the Birds Eye View website. Read our preview of the retrospective strand of Birds Eye View on screen vamps in the new print issue of Electric Sheep. Our spring issue focuses on Tainted Love to celebrate the release of the sweet and bloody pre-teen vampire romance Let the Right One In, with articles on incestuous cinematic siblings, Franí§ois Ozon‘s tales of tortuous relationships, destructive passion in Nic Roeg‘s Bad Timing, Julio Medem‘s ambiguous lovers and nihilistic tenderness from Kôji Wakamatsu. Also in this issue: Interview with Pascal Laugier (Martyrs), Berlin squat cinema, the Polish New Wave that never existed and comic strip on the Watchmen film adaptation + much more!

Format: Cinema

Release date: 20 March 2009

Venues: Curzons Mayfair and Soho, Renoir (London) and key cities

Distributor: Artificial Eye

Director: Paolo Sorrentinon

Writer: Paolo Sorrentino

Cast: Toni Servillo, Anna Bonaiuto, Giulio Bosetti, Flavio Bucci

Italy 2008

117 mins

Il Divo, which translates as ‘The Divine’, is just one of the nicknames given to Giulio Andreotti, who was Prime Minister of Italy seven times between 1972 and 1992. The others, including ‘The Man of Darkness’, ‘The Black Pope’ and ‘Beelzebub’, give a good indication of Andreotti’s notoriety. Tried on several occasions for murder, corruption and Mafia involvement, he escaped conviction each time due to a lack of evidence. Director Paolo Sorrentino borrows the aesthetics of a crime movie – for example, the Reservoir Dogs-style slow motion shot where, on the day of their appointment, the members of the seventh Andreotti government walk down the corridors of power – but he does not try to uncover the truth behind the accusations; instead, Sorrentino chooses to focus on the cloak of ambiguity that Andreotti wove for himself. This distance between style and content is ironic, and it is central to Sorrentino’s films.

In order to portray a character with Andreotti’s supreme level of self-control, you need an actor of equivalent status. Toni Servillo is that actor. Sorrentino is careful not to judge Andreotti through the development of the plot, but Servillo’s characterisation tells a different story. Before shooting, Sorrentino prepared piles of footage of the real Andreotti for the star of his acclaimed 2004 feature The Consequences of Love, but Servillo chose not to watch it, preferring instead to play the character as written in the script. Servillo portrays Andreotti with remarkable precision through movements so small that they have to be measured in millimetres, conveying Andreotti’s impressive impassivity. This, coupled with his protruding ears, hunchback and long white fingers – all exaggerated characteristics of the real Andreotti – recalls Murnau’s Nosferatu, implying that Sorrentino sees Andreotti as a vampire who fed on the blood of Italy.

In keeping with the ironic style Sorrentino has developed, the formal beauty of the film and the music are often used to undermine the emotion of a scene or to create incongruous contrasts. Framing Andreotti in extremely deep shots, accompanying the images with a cosmopolitan soundtrack that takes in classical, electronica, indie and pop music, Sorrentino uses the cinematography and the score to mock the politician subtly, constantly undercutting his idea of himself and of all the power he has amassed.

Sorrentino has previously said that ‘life is tragic enough and irony is the best antidote’. It is therefore perhaps unsurprising that in a film full of actual Andreotti quotations, the most resonant line should be, ‘Irony is the best defence against death’, an Andreotti-style aphorism invented by Sorrentino and delivered by Servillo with a pan so dead it is as if it has been encased in concrete then dropped in the ocean to ‘sleep with the fishes’.

Alexander Pashby

Format: Cinema

Release date: 13 March 2009

Venues: Cineworld Haymarket, Empire Leicester Square, Odeon Covent Garden (London) and nationwide

Distributor: Vertigo Films

Director: Nicolas Winding Refn

Writer: Brock Norman Brock

Cast: Tom Hardy, Kelly Adams, Katy Barker, Edward Bennett-Coles

UK 2009

92 mins

Bronson is an odd film: compelling in places, ineffectual in parts, it has a number of powerful scenes, but is full of loose ends and strange omissions, with an unconvincing artistic apotheosis at its climax. Most of its problems, though, are pretty much inevitable given the real life story that Pusher-man Nicolas Winding Refn and co-writer Brock Norman Brock are trying to document. Charles Bronson (born Michael Peterson) has spent 34 years out of a 57-year life behind bars, 30 years of which in solitary confinement. His criminal career consists of little more than a couple of unspectacular robberies, but the time served is down to some idiosyncratic character traits, such as: a) a tendency to beat the holy crap out of anyone around him at any time for ill-defined reasons; b) a complete failure on his part to comprehend why this could be a problem.

Whilst the details of his career as ‘Britain’s most violent prisoner’ are lurid enough to fuel any Brit gangsta flick, the shape of his existence defies any conventional narrative treatment. There is no grand character arc, no rise and fall: ‘bloke gets banged up… stays there’ does not really lend itself to a three-act structure, and a life in solitary offers a limited number of roles for the supporting cast. Nicolas Winding Refn attempts to surmount these problems through aggressive stylisation. We are part of a shadowy audience watching Bronson, an unreliable narrator in variety hall make-up, tell his story. And whilst the settings and dialogue of his tale are authentically grimy, everything else is decidedly non-naturalistic. The performances are mannered, the photography is archly composed, the soundtrack consists of lush classical and synth pop music. Bronson resembles a cross between Andrew Dominik’s 2000 Chopper and Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (DP Larry Smith worked on Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, and on this evidence was paying attention), and is too narrowly restricted to that glib description to prove wholly satisfactory. Its attempts to portray Bronson as an artist without a canvas deprived of his liberty by a cold and uncomprehending world are decidedly undermined by its own depiction of the man as a living train wreck.

The film’s worth mainly lies with its version of Bronson as a terrifying, unpredictable and ludicrous individual utterly lacking in self-awareness, a rebel without a clue, a kidnapper without demands. Tom Hardy is terrific in the part, and the sequences showing his brief period of freedom in 1988 are fantastic, tense and weirdly hysterical. He stomps around Luton in a three-piece brown suit, like a human special effect, fists and body permanently clenched, baffled by even the most mundane domestic interaction. Many of the film’s most vital scenes come from this section. But he was free for only 68 days, and we are soon imprisoned with him again. What a life.

Mark Stafford

Wild Japan: Sex in Japanese Cinema of the 60s and 70s

1-30 December 2008

BFI Southbank, London

BFI website

Among the rare delights offered by the Wild Japan season that ran at the BFI Southbank last December, three films stood out for their boldness, ambition and originality. Kan Mukai’s 1969 Blue Film Woman (Burû fuirumu no onna) was a delirious mix of grotesque horror, stylised sex, psychedelic visuals and 60s exuberance. The story centres on the family of a ruined stockbroker forced to acquiesce to the demands of the loan shark he is indebted to, a repulsive man called Uchiyama, who requests sexual favours from the wife as payment. After having his way with her, Uchiyama takes her to his house where he lets her be raped by his monstrous idiot son; her suffering ends tragically when she is run over by a car on her way home. Mariko, the daughter, takes up employment as a go-go dancer in a nightclub to provide for her father and herself. After he commits suicide, she becomes a call girl and records her sexual encounters with a group of wealthy businessmen, using the films to bring them down in revenge for the ruin of her family.

The plot takes a sinuous, unexpected path, and Uchiyama’s comeuppance is meted out not by Mariko but by his own son in a shockingly brilliant twist. Mariko aims higher, focusing not so much on the sleazy loan shark who is simply a middleman, but on the legitimate businessmen at the very top who think nothing of destroying whole families through their reckless actions (sound familiar?), an idea emphasised by shots of the enormous stock exchange building towering over people on the streets below. Add to the implied social criticism the rich, horrific inventiveness of the scenes involving the blubbering maniacal son, throw in the swirly sounds and stroboscopic lights of a hip, late 60s Tokyo nightclub, and you have one of the most unpredictable and pleasurable films of the Wild Japan season.

For this writer, however, the unquestionable highlight of the programme was the pair of films from the independent Wakamatsu Pro company, including Kôji Wakamatsu’s Secret Acts behind Walls (Kabe no naka no himegoto, 1965), and Gushing Prayer: A 15-Year-Old Prostitute (Funshutsu kigan: 15-sai no baishunfu, 1971), written and directed by Wakamatsu’s long-time collaborator Masao Adachi. Both films were made as pinku eiga (pink film), a genre of soft-core porn that emerged in Japanese cinema in the early 60s. Wakamatsu and Adachi found in the erotic film industry an alternative distribution network that allowed them to get their uncompromising work shown. Sharing the same radical spirit and aesthetics, fascinating, articulate and beautifully filmed, Secret Acts behind Walls and Gushing Prayer are closer to European art films than to Western sexploitation of the same period. For both Wakamatsu and Adachi, sex is a crucial indicator of social relationships and as such, is political. Through their characters’ sexual encounters, the directors probe the state of post-war Japan, the repressive hypocrisies of its patriarchal society and the bitter aftermath of the student leftist protests.

Filmed in black and white, Secret Acts behind Walls opens with bleak shots of concrete blocks of flats before closing in on a couple in bed, injecting drugs, the woman caressing her lover’s keloid scar, calling him ‘an emblem of Hiroshima, of Japan, an anti-war emblem’. This confrontational opening is followed by a tightly framed study of the oppressive lives led by a number of the block’s residents. The couple are revealed to be disillusioned lovers whose youthful ideals have come to nothing. In the opposite building, a young student is driven mad by sexual frustration while his attractive sister has her first relationship with a man. Obsessions and dissatisfactions heat up slowly, bringing the characters together in a violent dénouement.

The sex acts are constantly associated with political and social events. The central couple read newspapers in bed, the man fondling his lover’s breast while reading an article about the Vietnam war. Their initial passion was linked to their shared beliefs in pacifism and their involvement in the student movement: in a flashback, they are seen making love in front of a poster of Stalin. He is now a stockbroker who makes money from the war, and she is an alienated housewife struggling to escape the confines of the small flat she shares with her husband, disenchanted by her lover’s increasingly cool, cynical detachment. He has no qualms about his current employment and seems happy to call their affair – and possibly their former activism – a ‘momentary passion’, in somewhat callous disregard to the momentous sacrifice she made to what she believed was their eternal love (she chose to get sterilised because his irradiation meant they could not have children). A sense of profound despair hangs over the residents, born of an awareness of the changes that could have been but never materialised, and of the characters’ resulting imprisonment in a claustrophobic present that offers no hope for the future and no solace in the past.

The opening of Adachi’s Gushing Prayer is as startling as that of Secret Acts behind Walls, framing the body of the vacant-eyed teenage Yasuko lying on the floor in a series of close-ups as she is fondled by two boys who ask her, together with another girl sitting nearby, what she can feel as they touch her. The four teenagers spend the film debating sex and their attitude towards it with the kind of dogmatic intensity and moral rigidity displayed by revolutionary students in other Japanese films of the same period. To establish whether Yasuko has betrayed their rules by sleeping with an adult (their teacher), and whether this means she is a prostitute, they decide she should begin taking payment to perform sex acts with strangers. What follows is a succession of bizarre, random, dispassionate couplings that are observed and discussed by the rest of the group. When Yasuko says she is four months pregnant, the group decide she should keep the child. Having managed to finally escape the overbearing attention of her friends, she ponders the words ‘prostitute’ and ‘mother’ in an effort to find her identity, but in a patriarchal society that restricts women to those two roles, her only way out seems to be suicide. This is emphasised by the soundtrack: throughout the film, disembodied voices read the suicide notes of teenage girls, grimly hinting at where Yasuko’s sexual exploration might lead.

Just as in Secret Acts behind Walls, sex is a social transaction and a political act. The film explores how what one does with one’s body, especially when female, defines their relationship to their community or society, and how that community may try and claim ownership of the body, controlling its perceptions and desires. The four teenage friends constitute a small, marginal social group trying to construct their own set of rules, different from the ones that prevail in what they dismissively call ‘the adult world’. In that sense they are social revolutionaries, akin to the rebellious students of the post-war years, and the genius of the film is to explore politics obliquely through the characters’ teenage anxieties and sexual experimentation. More cerebral and verbose than Secret Acts behind Walls, with a looser, rambling, experimental style that allows for the unfettered investigation of ideas, Gushing Prayer offers just as searing a depiction of a suffocating society with nothing to offer to its defeated youth.

Virginie Sélavy

Format: Cinema

Release date: 13 February 2009

Venue: Apollo Piccadilly Circus, BFI Southbank, Renoir (London) and key cities

Distributor: New Wave Films

Director: Nuri Bilge Ceylan

Writer: Ebru Ceylan, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Ercan Kesal

Original title: í¼í§ maymun

Cast: Yavuz Bingol, Hatice Aslan, Rifat Aslan

Turkey 2008

109 mins

In just five films, Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan has become one of the most intensely discussed directors and every new work he brings out sparks debate as to whether he excessively favours style over substance. Even though his 1997 debut The Small Town and the follow-up Clouds of May (1999) were for a long time unavailable to UK audiences (in addition to his 2006 film Climates, Artificial Eye released a double-disc set of Ceylan’s early work on DVD in May 2007), his third, award-winning feature Uzak (2002) propelled Ceylan to fame beyond the international film festival circuit. An individual stylist determined to make a mark on the viewer’s consciousness, he composes avowedly personal and sombre meditations on human alienation and the fragile temporal nature of even the most intimate relationships. However, as is often the case when a work is so stylistically distinctive, Uzak and his fourth feature Climates (2006) divided the audience into those who were seduced by the poetry and artistry of the imagery and those who were left cold and unsatisfied by it.

With Three Monkeys, Ceylan takes things a step further, pushing forward into much darker, more expressionistic territory in an intoxicating tale of bad faith, deceit, murder and simmering fears and desires. He maintains an orchestration of motion and stillness that feels more claustrophobic than in his previous films although here again, suspense is mainly built upon the character’s inability to communicate in moments of visual ecstasy that come close to repealing the cinematic laws of gravity.

Three Monkeys is much more obviously dramatic than Ceylan’s preceding works: the story starts with driver Eyí¼p (played by Turkish singer Yavuz Bingí¶l) being asked by his boss, a local politician facing elections, to take the rap for the killing of a pedestrian who was run over by his car one night. Eyí¼p agrees to go to prison for a brief period of time in exchange for a pay-off to his wife Hacer and his only son ísmail. During the hot summer of Eyí¼p’s incarceration, Ismail drifts into dubious friendships while Hacer strays into an affair with the politician after requesting more money from him. Although ísmail discovers his mother’s betrayal he is unable to act, but when Eyí¼p returns tension erupts, revealing an almost unbearable lack of understanding between the three tortured souls who have never been entirely comfortable in their roles within the family.

Seemingly intent on reviving the spirit and film language of the ‘greats’ such as Tarkovsky, Antonioni or Ozu for the 21st century, Ceylan’s work has always been remarkable for its sheer ambition and cinematographic proficiency. His win of best director award for Three Monkeys at the Cannes Film Festival last year is entirely justified for this angst-ridden drama is perhaps his most accessible as well as most consistent film, revealing an impressive maturity and a rigorous visual sense to match it. Three Monkeys is not without certain melodramatic flaws, but they are absorbed by the film’s stylistic plausibility, by the way the framing and the stunning use of digital photography creates its own sort of psychological reality. It is in the long pauses between words that the film creates tension, in the anxious, sorrowful glances subtly reinforced by the irruption of the ever-present soundscape that mixes thunder, train signals and cell-phone ring tones. Those who go beyond the film’s imperfections will find an exquisitely composed cinematic experience that offers as many wonders as subjects for debate.

Pamela Jahn

Format: Cinema

Release date: 27 February 2009

Venue: London and key cities

Distributor: Contender Films

Director: Gerald McMorrow

Writer: Gerald McMorrow

Cast: Ryan Phillippe, Eva Green, Sam Riley

France/UK 2008

95 mins

Young British director Gerald McMorrow’s debut feature certainly does not lack ambition, with an intricate plot that mixes a fantasy world with the multi-stranded reality of modern London. Franklyn opens as Preest, a mysterious masked vigilante, is searching for his nemesis amongst the seedy bars and dark, neo-Gothic streets of a sprawling cyber-metropolis called ‘Meanwhile City’, which is run by an í¼ber-religious/totalitarian state. These ‘future’ fantasy sequences are inserted into a realistic story involving three present-day characters; Esser, who is looking for his missing son amongst the homeless of London; Milo, a heartbroken, idealistic young man who is searching for his one true love, and Emilia, a nihilistic artist whose masochistic and extreme ‘art installations’ involve multiple, failed suicide attempts.

These two parallel strands/universes are meant to mirror and affect each other in a variety of ways, but it is only in the last quarter of the film, and with the final twist that concludes the story, that we begin to ascertain what has actually been going on. This is a major problem with Franklyn: it is too fashionably, willfully obscure throughout most of its running time and it flaunts its over-stylised Gothic renderings – in the future sequences – too obviously; these reminded me of other, slightly pretentious and flawed cyber-noirs like Brazil and Dark City. Franklyn is undeniably original, thanks to an experimental narrative that (albeit unsuccessfully) blends four separate plots and characters together, the most powerful and affecting of which involves the luminescent but neurotic Emilia (Eva Green) and her bizarre suicide rituals. The other characters just don’t pass muster though, and you never feel any empathy for what are, essentially, cyphers for the writer-director’s cod-philosophical musings.

The fantasy scenes appear to be a slightly camp pastiche of film noir, with a grizzled, over-emphatic voice-over spoken by Preest, immediately recalling the Chandler-esque private investigators of the 40s and 50s (or indeed the inferior, ‘studio-cut’ version of Blade Runner). It is not made clear – until the very end – that this self-consciously narrated segment is meant to be clichéd, ironic and flimsy – and because of this, we don’t take the realistic, present-day sections of the film seriously; the ‘Preest’ sequences don’t add resonance to the other integrated plot-strands, they just bleed incredulity into them. It would have helped the overall suspension of disbelief if this conceit had been more clearly signified earlier on in the film.

Perhaps Franklyn deserves – and needs – to be seen more than once, to glean something deeper from its many facets. At least, it tries to be inventive and to do something different, fusing fantasy elements with current social concerns such as schizophrenia, depression, suicide, post-traumatic stress, homelessness and the striving for love. Rarely do British films attempt to mix genres in this way, and for this Franklyn should be applauded, even if ultimately, it just tries to hard. Here’s to hoping that this promising writer-director will mature and fine-tune his vision for his next venture.

James DC