Format: Cinema

Release date: 5 December 2008

Venue: Odeon Panton St, Ritzy (London) and key cities

Distributor: Verve Pictures

Director: Steven Sebring

USA 2008

109 mins

Part of the fascination in Steven Sebring’s affectionate documentary portrait Patti Smith: Dream of Life comes from the way it strives to be as elusive as its subject. As one would expect from a filmmaker who is first and foremost a high-end fashion and pop photographer, Sebring’s film is full of wonderfully moody black and white shots, superbly composed and often at once hauntingly beautiful and desperately sad. Essential to the film’s dark charm, however, is the melody of Patti Smith’s own language: in slow, hypnotically gentle, yet radiantly emphatic voice-over she briefly compiles key biographical data as well as momentous events and significant encounters that shaped her life, her narration underpinned by a vigorous force that makes every word sound like it is carved in stone. Applied to a different persona, Sebring’s approach might seem disturbingly self-indulgent, but for the most part it suits this portrait perfectly. The enormously influential punk rock poet, her music and poetry, and the times in which she flourished are indeed best served by a cinematic style that remains determinedly impressionistic.

Yet, Dream of Life is undoubtedly driven by the need to make sense of the enigmatic and overpowering figure at its heart. Sebring met Patti Smith in late 1995, one year after the deaths of her husband, the guitarist Fred Smith, and her only brother Todd, when she decided to return to the stage after an absence of 16 years. He followed her with his camera in utter devotion for over a decade, shooting Smith at home or while touring around the world, visiting the graves of the poets she reveres from Alan Ginsberg to William Blake and Shelley, or checking in at her parents’ house in Deptford, New Jersey. Interwoven with these glimpses of her past and present life, there is a recurring, essential image, in which Smith is sitting in a white, sparsely furnished room amidst her greatest personal treasures, at one point showing off her favourite childhood dress before picking up her guitar and giving away secrets like her crush on the late author William S Burroughs.

Clearly a labour of love, Dream of Life is a tremendously visceral composite whose strength lies in letting the look, the sound and the mystique of Patti Smith speak for themselves. Though Sebring is no doubt guilty of glamorising his subject and often meanders instead of providing deeper insight or even just plain facts, he edits his film in much the same wildly emotional, attentive yet open-ended way Smith performs. Although there is no denying that mild self-complacence makes this an imperfect film, it remains in the mind as a slow-paced, beautifully shot and softly nostalgic documentary, a stylised capsule of an artist’s free-floating, intense and troubled life. It is an apt celebration of Smith’s extraordinary spirit and of her continued willingness to encounter the world with undying creative desire, even after being battered by fate time and again.

Pamela Jahn

Format: Cinema

Release date: 12 December 2008

Venue: ICA (London)

Distributor: Eureka Entertainment

Director: Yôji Yamada

Writers: Yôji Yamada, Emiko Hiramatsu, Ichirô Yamamoto

Based on: novel by Shûhei Fujisawa

Original title: Bushi no ichibun

Cast: Takuya Kimura, Rei Dan, Takashi Sasano, Mitsugoro Bando

Japan 2006

121 mins

Following The Twilight Samurai (2002) and The Hidden Blade (2004), director Yôji Yamada has capped his masterful samurai trilogy with another rich and involving study of day-to-day life in feudal Japan. As before, Yamada has looked to the historical fiction of novelist Shûhei Fujisawa whose fifty books explore, in intricate detail, the country’s Edo period (1603-1867) – a time of peace when the samurai’s code struggled to find a place within the emerging political structure. Love and Honour amplifies their plight, focusing on a blind samurai cast out by society, struggling to keep a sense of honour but discovering how love can be a much stronger force.

Samurai Shinnojo (Takuya Kimura) dreams of teaching children the art of sword-fighting but is reduced to serving as a food taster at the Lord’s castle. He lives a simple life with his wife Kayo (Rei Dan) and ageing servant (Takashi Sasano) who bears the brunt of Shinnojo’s frustrations. One of Yamada’s many strengths is in portraying the mundane, token traditions the samurai are left to perform as near peasants, drawing parallels to modern life where ambition so often gives way to the necessity of earning a crust. Whether it’s intentional or not, the subtitles also allude to British working-class melodrama with the use of ‘Missus’ and the occasional ‘Aye’ in agreement. The film’s atmosphere of rigid properness even gives it a Jane Austen air, but although it is a period piece it is one that any runner in the rat race can relate to.

After Shinnojo loses his sight from food poisoning Kayo convinces him against seppuku, but she must find a way for them to survive. Reluctantly she seeks out an admirer, the Chief Duty Officer at the castle (Mitsugoro Bando), who agrees to keep paying Shinnojo, in return for certain favours. As Kayo hides her secret, Shinnojo becomes more and more isolated and suspicious, the possibilities gnawing away at him. This is all familiar territory – think Ali MacGraw getting Steve McQueen out of the slammer in The Getaway (1972), or more recently, Turkey’s Cannes winner Three Monkeys – but Yamada approaches it with delicacy and heart, his fragile Kayo driven by love to do anything for her husband while Shinnojo cannot shake his need to maintain honour.

Think of a blind samurai movie and Takeshi Kitano’s Zatôichi (2003) might spring to mind, but unlike Kitano, Yamada has no interest in making Shinnojo a cartoon character. When he does pick up the blade again the film eschews ridiculous theatrics; Shinnojo’s driven to it as a last resort, a way of preserving his last shred of honour. The single, climactic duel may be short but it’s tremendously exciting thanks to Yamada’s investment in making his characters believable. It may go against the usual Japanese exports of slick martial arts action but Love and Honour is a much more satisfying look at the samurai’s existence, showing them as real people trapped in their own daily routine. Honour may be part of that life, but Yamada shows it’s love that truly defines everyone, transcending rank or class.

Richard Badley

Format: Cinema

Release date: 21 November 2008

Venues: London West End and key cities

Distributor: Artificial Eye

Director: Ari Folman

Writer: Ari Folman

Israel 2008

90 mins

You’d have to be made of granite not to be moved by Waltz with Bashir. From the first frame it explodes with the overwhelming energy of unleashed hounds snarling and roaring through a city, like an invading army or a black tide of anger, regret or perhaps guilt, only to end up baying for blood from the street below their human target. As a friend tells him about his recurring nightmare, Israeli director Ari Folman feels compelled to unlock its meaning. Visiting psychiatrist friends, he’s urged to reconnect to former army buddies. Each one Folman meets transports him and us inside their fractured, surreal recollections of their time as young men in the Israeli army. Folman’s choice of the fantastical properties of animation, rather than live action, perfectly suits his autobiographical psychodrama as he sets about recovering painful memories of his military service in Lebanon, buried deep but rising to the surface again. He gradually pieces together what he witnessed in Beirut in 1982 of the massacre of an estimated 3,000 Palestinian refugees by the ‘Phalangist’ Christian militia, fuelled by a desire for revenge for the assassination by unknown hands of their recently elected charismatic leader Bashir Gemayel.

Art director and illustrator David Polonsky’s style of animation is striking and stark, close to the grittiness, chiaroscuro contrast and bold flat colouring of DC Vertigo graphic novels. It’s no coincidence, as Tomer and Asaf Hanuka, of Bipolar fame, are among the artists behind the scenes, and a graphic novel is released of the movie in December from Metropolitan Books. Human movements seem occasionally unnatural and computerised, certain passages repeat largely unchanged, but there are some riveting sequences, such as the nude giantess from the sea who cradles one soldier to safety as his ship is blown up, or the soldiers wading naked onto the beach in the golden glow of rocket flares overhead.

Like those flares, illuminating dark places, Folman’s probings into the past gradually shed light on what he saw. He needs to confront what transfixed him, what he can’t see before waking. When he does, it is at this climactic point, that (SPOILER ALERT) the animation is abruptly replaced by archive film footage of what was before his eyes, the wailing wives, mothers and grandmothers fleeing the killings. Finally, however, Folman goes no further. He gives us no inkling of how this revelation affects him, whether he feels complicit in these horrors, or who should be blamed, aside from an anecdote about Defence Minister Sharon’s blasé attitude and slow response to the horrific news. It’s here that for me the film falls short in its reticence, its reluctance to follow through. It works undeniably as a general indictment of war, especially from the ordinary soldier’s perspective, but ultimately, leaving the words screamed by those Palestinian refugee victims un-subtitled only underlines that their cries of injustice are still not being heard. Unlike the sympathetic but removed Folman, they were there, they lived it, they survived it and they can never bury their awful memories.

Paul Gravett

Paul Gravett is the author of Graphic Novels: Stories to Change Your Life and The Mindscape of Alan Moore. To find out more about his work on comics, go to paulgravett.com.

Waltz with Bashir is also showing as part of the Jewish Film Festival at the Tricycle, Kilburn, on November 9, at the Irish Film Institute (Dublin) on November 11, and at the Bradford Animation Festival on November 12. David Polonsky will be discussing the use of animation in documentary with Elizabeth Wood, director of DocHouse, at the ICA (London) on November 10.

Format: Cinema

Release date: 14 November 2008

Venue: Curzon Soho, Odeon Covent Garden, Vue West End (London) and key cities

Distributor: Momentum Pictures

Director: Uli Edel

Writers: Uli Edel, Bernd Eichinger

Based on the book by: Stefan Aust

Original title: Der Baader Meihof Komplex

Cast: Martina Gedeck, Moritz Bleibtreu, Johanna Wokalek, Bruno Ganz

Germany 2008

150 mins

An enormous amount of effort, on both a stylistic and technical level, has been poured into The Baader-Meinhof Complex, and – unfortunately – it shows. The craftmanship is so strenuously neat that each scene seems designed to get the movie nominated for best foreign language film at the Academy Awards. Produced by Bernd Eichinger (Downfall), directed by Uli Edel and assembling an impressive cast of top-rated German actors, the film painstakingly chronicles the rise and fall of the Red Army Faction (RAF), better known as the Baader-Meinhof Group, who rocked the West German democracy of the 1960s and 70s with a series of increasingly violent attacks against targets identified by the group as representing capitalism and American imperialism.

More than 30 years after the notorious German Autumn, the fascination and horror sparked by the Red Army Faction (RAF) remains darkly resonant and continues to inspire artists. Based on Stefan Aust’s bestselling non-fiction book of the same title, The Baader-Meinhof Complex prides itself on its historical accuracy. However, the film’s style is somewhat conservative for a filmmaker who is best known abroad for his astonishing, controversial 1981 debut Christiane F, a grim, ghastly look at the real-life case of a 13-year-old girl who turned to heroin and prostitution, and his striking adaptation of Hubert Selby Jr’s novel, Last Exit to Brooklin, both of which were also produced by Bernd Eichinger. A shame, then, that there isn’t a breath of spontaneous life and so little genuine emotion in The Baader-Meinhof Complex to back up the fast-paced plot.

Focusing on the active history of the RAF, there are, as there ought to be, a number of action sequences, from the bloody escalation of the 1967 Berlin demonstration against the Shah of Persia to the various bombings, fire attacks, bank robbery campaigns and gruesome assassinations, culminating in the Lufthansa hijack and the kidnap and eventually murder of German industrialist Hans Martin Schleyer in October 1977. The Baader-Meinhof Complex is Germany’s contemporary history told in fast motion, frantically and violently edited, while a multi-layered wall-to-wall soundtrack pumps up the energy.

The crucial problem lies with the clumsy, cluttered storyline that is meant to string together the harrowing events. ‘When you are dealing with historical events where people have been killed and others have become killers, you have a responsibility as a filmmaker to be as precise and as thouroughly researched as possible’, said Eichinger, who co-wrote the script. ‘The RAF decided to turn their back on political debate and to resort to violence; therefore it’s only logical that the film follows suit and concentrates not so much on what the RAF said, but what they did. I firmly believe that we don’t define ourselves as humans by what we say but by what we do.’

If historical accuracy means echoing original conversations between the group’s leading members and counting the number of bullets fired in each murder, the film certainly feels authentic. But in its over-ambitious attempt to encompass the wide-ranging series of events that occurred between the first explosions in department stores in 1967 and the deaths of Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe in Stammheim prison a decade later, the film ends up being nothing more than a series of striking but overly stylised images. Edel rushes from one set-piece to the next, giving his cast hardly any time to fully develop their characters beyond chic, style-conscious terrorists. Moritz Bleibtreu as Baader and Johanna Wokalek as Ensslin lack the charisma necessary to be convincing in these roles. However, Martina Gedeck is outstanding in the central role of Ulrike Meinhof; a fallen angel as depicted in Aust’s book, she leaves her two kids and brittle marriage behind and gets fatally caught in the whirlpool of events. As likeable as the Meinhof character is, any kind of initial empathy with the terrorists slowly turns to indifference, an awkward feeling that intensifies over the course of the film, until the intended message emerges in the last sentence: ‘You didn’t know them. Stop seeing them as they never were’, admonishes Brigitte Mohnhaupt (Nadja Uhl), one of the following generation of terrorists.

Perhaps the film suffers from its huge budget as well as from comparisons with the documentaries and features that have dealt with the legacy of Baader-Meinhof in the past, the first and arguably most intelligent of those being Germany in Autumn (1978), a provocative mixture of reportage, autobiography and melodrama by the foremost German filmmakers of the time. In the end, however expansive, action-packed and powerfully shot The Baader-Meinhof Complex undoubtedly is, it remains a disturbing hybrid that leaves the viewer jaded, bizarrely perplex and ultimately unsatisfied.

Pamela Jahn

Format: Cinema

Release date: 14 November 2008

Venues: ICA Cinema (London)

Distributor: Third Window Films

Director: Yosuke Fujita

Writer: Yosuke Fujita

Original title: Zenzen daijobu

Cast: Yoshiyoshi Arakawa, Yoshinori Okada, Yoshino Kimura

Japan 2008

110 mins

‘Cute’ may not be the most inspiring adjective used to describe a film. But Fine, Totally Fine, the first full-length feature from Yosuke Fujita is cute – as well as offbeat, charming and very funny. Set in the Tokyo suburbs, far away from the neon lights of Shibuya, the film is a laid-back, quirky look at the slightly surreal, everyday lives of three misfits struggling to grow up as they approach the traumatic age of 30.

Yoshiyoshi Arakawa (who was in the equally funny 2002 film Ping Pong) is Teruo, a part-time groundskeeper who spends all his spare time devising elaborate and gory tricks to scare the life out of his friends and family (think lots of severed heads), while dreaming of opening a haunted theme park. He lives in a room crammed with spooky memorabilia above the second-hand bookstore owned by his father, who is suffering from depression and does little more than stay in bed all day watching television.

Teruo’s best friend Hisanobu (Yoshinori Okada) does have a real job supervising hospital cleaning staff, but he’s so desperate to be liked by everyone that he’s incapable of disciplining his workers, and even hires the cute but impossibly shy Akari (Yoshino Kimura) as a cleaner after she shows up in his office with her clothes torn and covered in mud. She’s so painfully clumsy that opening a box of Kleenex turns into a major ordeal. She is also something of an artist (with a taste for fish sausages) and spies on and obsessively paints an old, eccentric bag-lady, who makes colourful and bizarre sculptures of her own from found objects.

An endless number of light-hearted, comedic scenes arise from the intersection of the three anti-heroes’ lives. Finally let go from the hospital after a slapstick accident while cleaning up after a surgery, Teruo hires Akari to work in the bookstore after his father finally picks himself up and takes off to do some travelling (and finds a new calling as a lo-fi pop musician). While Akari is better suited to life in the shop, she’s still subjected to agonisingly awkward moments dealing with customers, especially those buying the hard-core porn mags on sale. This set-up lays the ground work for the classic love triangle, but Fujitsa mostly steers away from predictable clichés. The boys are such slackers that they only realise too late that they should pursue Akari at all.

While there isn’t a lot of dramatic tension in the film, or even a clear direction, Fujtsa draws us into the story with a series of perfectly captured, oddball moments. Great performances, plenty of physical comedy (especially from Yoshino) and some great gags make Fine, Totally Fine an entertaining, original and endearing film. And while Teruo never builds his haunted house, he and the others do take a few tentative steps towards adulthood.

Sarah Cronin

Format: Cinema

Release date: 21 November 2008

Venues: Cineworld Haymarket (London) and nationwide

Distributor: 20th Century Fox

Director: Clark Gregg

Writer: Clark Gregg

Based on the novel by: Chuck Palahniuk

Cast: Sam Rockwell, Kathryn Alexander, Anjelica Huston

USA 2008

89 mins

It’s hard to believe that almost 10 years have passed since the release of Fight Club. Adapted from the novel by Chuck Palahniuk, David Fincher’s wildly successful studio picture injected some much-needed grittiness and transgression into Hollywood. Although the film’s controversial nature and its huge cultural impact drew significant attention to Palahniuk himself and boosted Fincher’s already impressive reputation, it’s taken until now to get a second adaptation off the ground. Despite Palahniuk’s full endorsement and star names attached, actor-screenwriter-director Clark Gregg spent seven years pulling the project together, funding the film independently, before securing distribution through Fox Searchlight.

Sam Rockwell plays Victor Mancini, a misanthrope who works as a performer in historical re-enactments and sex addict, with a hospitalised mother who can’t remember his name, a best friend who masturbates 15 times a day, and a bank account so empty he’s forced into unthinkable acts of con artistry to support his mother’s staggering medical bills. In spite of these many drawbacks, he exudes a curious charm and is a likeable character. Victor’s journey centres on his mother Ida (a mesmerising Anjelica Huston), who harbours a deep secret regarding his estranged father and his unconventional childhood. It is this relationship that dominates the film, and the dynamic between the two characters is well observed and at times genuinely poignant.

The title refers to the serial acts of staged choking in restaurants whereby Mancini welcomes the empathy and occasional cheques from diners who unsuspectingly save his life. While these scenes are filled with the macabre humour that is to be expected from Palahniuk’s work, there is an element of sincerity in the comfort he receives from being held in a stranger’s arms.

Gregg, who himself appears as Victor’s despicably bureaucratic superior, directs with a surprisingly light touch. While those who enjoyed Fincher’s stylised Fight Club may be put off by the more conventional cinematography here, it is a look that suits the piece well, even in the darker scenes, which include a consensual rape gone wrong and a hilariously morbid incident involving missing anal beads.

At times, however, the tone of the film is uneven, and in many ways the strands of narrative in the novel don’t blend so well on film, particularly the scenes involving Victor’s work as ‘the backbone of colonial America’, which mark too distant a departure from his central quest. While the genre-bending nature of the piece is admirable to an extent, Choke doesn’t really find its feet until the final reel, which builds to a truly satisfying climax that is genuinely moving, aided by a fitting ending track in Radiohead’s ‘Reckoner’.

James Merchant

Format: Cinema

Release date: 7 November 2008

Venues: Curzon Mayfair and Soho, Renoir, Screens on the Green and Hill (London) + key cities

Distributor: Artificial Eye

Director: Agní­Â¨s Jaoui

Writer: Agní­Â¨s Jaoui, Jean-Pierre Bacri

Original title: Parlez-moi de la pluie

Cast: Agní­Â¨s Jaoui, Jean-Pierre Bacri, Jamel Debbouze

France 2008

110 mins

Agní­Â¨s Jaoui is a sharp observer of modern life, who not only writes and directs compelling films but also stars in them. Recent successes include Look at Me (Comme une image, 2004) and The Taste of Others (Le Goût des autres, 2000). Her latest film, Let’s Talk about the Rain (Parlez-moi de la pluie), is just as uncompromising in its portrayal of contemporary French society. Co-written with her long-term collaborator Jean-Pierre Bacri, Let’s Talk about the Rain explores the way in which people’s lives interweave and collide. It has a lighter, more overtly humorous feel than her previous features, yet it deals with two important issues: sexism and anti-Arab racism. It’s also a film about filmmaking – or about a film not being made.

The plot centres around the female protagonist, Agathe Villanova (Jaoui), a feminist and politician. She has reluctantly returned to her childhood home in the South of France to help her sister, Florence, sort out their mother’s possessions following her death earlier in the year. Agathe and Florence’s housekeeper, Mimouna (played movingly by non-professional and real-life friend of Jaoui, Mimouna Hadji), has a son, Karim, who is a young documentary maker working for TV. Karim’s mentor, Michel Ronsard (Bacri), persuades Agathe to be the subject of a TV series focusing on successful women.

Michel and Karim make a comic duo set against Agathe’s business-like presence: Michel is a hefty, middle-aged white man; Karim a diminutive, sparky young French-Arab. The plot is structured around frustratingly long sequences in which the pair try and fail to make their documentary – in one scene, shooting is interrupted by a flock of noisy sheep. Yet it’s because of these continual setbacks that characters are forced to listen to each other. Favouring sequence shots over close-ups and heavy editing, Jaoui emphasises the way in which relationships evolve. Characteristically, music plays a key role: key scenes are punctuated with excerpts from Schubert’s El Gondelfahrer, emphasising the polyphonic, ‘choral’ quality of the narrative. In other instances, Latin rhythms and bold brass melodies complement the film’s comic energy.

Ultimately, Let’s Talk about the Rain is about re-evaluation and reassessment. Even ‘tough’, authoritative Agathe is led to question her own attitudes to work and domestic life. Amorous relationships spring up and break down between other protagonists, too. Finally, the implied role reversal between Karim (evidently the more talented one, but hindered by racial prejudice) and Michel (the middle-class fool) hints at an uncomfortable truth: racial inequality is still prevalent in a country whose founding principles are ‘equality’ and ‘fraternity’. The film’s title is inspired by Georges Brassens’s song lyric, ‘Talk to me about the rain and not about the fine weather’. Like Brassens, Jaoui encourages us not to wait for the sun to come out, but to acknowledge the falling rain. As her film demonstrates, this attitude is just as important in making art as it is for living with others.

Marina Bradbury

Format: Cinema

Release date: 3 October 2008

Venues: Odeon Panton St, Ritzy (London) and selected key cities

Distributor: Metrodome

Directors: Charles Burns, Blutch, Marie Caillou, Richard McGuire, Pierre di Sciullo, Lorenzo Mattoti

Writers: Charles Burns, Blutch, Pierre di Sciullo, Jerry kramski, Richard McGuire, Michel Pirus, Romain Slocombe

Original title: Peur(s) du noir

France 2007

85 mins

Black and white seems to be the new colour when it comes to adult animated movies from France, especially those with a comics source or styling. Hot on the high heels of Marjane Satrapi, who co-directed Persepolis from her autobiographical graphic novel, and Christian Volckman, who put his future thriller Renaissance into motion-capture monochrome, comes Fear(s) of the Dark. This ensemble piece dares to allow leading innovators in French and American comics to transpose their motionless, soundless storyworlds to the animation medium.

The strong opener, Charles Burns, is the best known outside of France for his Black Hole saga, in development as a live-action film. His obsessions with the creeping unease of adolescence and uncontrollable bodily mutation resurface in his flashback about a timid biology student whose sweet first girlfriend changes after an insect bite into a terrifying sadist, overturning their male and female roles. Despite occasional awkwardness to the movements, it’s truly unsettling to experience Burns’s inhumanly precise outlines and saw-toothed feathering in motion and sound on the big screen. The other American participant, Richard McGuire, closes the film with a display of his elegant minimalism, conveying a man stumbling around an isolated ‘old dark house’, his silhouette sliding between shadows, his candle picking out hidden secrets.

Instead of these pure contrasts of chiaroscuro, three of the French-based teams opt for palettes of grey. Marie Caillou with writer Romain Slocombe take us into the disturbing memories of a bullied Japanese schoolgirl, driven by a samurai’s ghost to violence, the only flash of red in the film. Caillou’s greenish tones add a cold, clinical chill. Italian-born Lorenzo Mattotti and Jerry Kramski recall boyhood terrors about mysterious disappearances and an unseen monster. Mattotti’s evocative shading shimmers and shifts sublimely in this atmospheric, allusive folk tale, tinged in sepia. A fleshy pink infuses Blutch’s brushstrokes as a cruel squire unleashes his raging hounds, one by one, on the innocent, its closing twist something of a let-down. Least successful are the interludes by typographer-designer Pierre di Sciullo who abstracts a woman’s confessions of fears great and small into symbolic geometric patterns. Still, this is a haunting sextet of chillers, rich with such diverse, distinctive drawings emerging from that most fearful of dark places, the imagination.

Paul Gravett

Paul Gravett is the author of Graphic Novels: Stories to Change Your Life and The Mindscape of Alan Moore. To find out more about his work on comics, go to paulgravett.com.

Read this review and much more in our autumn print issue. The theme is cruel games, from sadistic power play in Funny Games to fascist games in German hit The Wave and Stanley Kubrick’s career-long fascination with game-playing. Don’t miss our fantastic London Film Festival comic strip, which surely is worth the price of the issue alone!

Format: Cinema

Release date: 24 October 2008

Venues: ICA Cinema and key cities

Distributor: ICA Films

Director: Won Shin-yeon

Writer: Won Shin-yeon

Original title: Guta-yubalja-deul

Cast: Cha Ye-ryeon, Han Suk-kyu, Jeong Kyeong-ho, Kim Shi-hoo

South Korea 2006

115 mins

‘Only fools abide by the rules’, arrogantly proclaims singing professor Park after jumping a red light while driving his pretty young student In-jeong back to Seoul after an audition. ‘You must be mistaken, I always abide by the rules’, grovels the same professor Park a moment later when stopped and given a ticket by incorruptible, stony-faced policeman Moon-jae. Ten minutes in, the film has clearly established the pecking order: policeman at the top, professor below, young female student at the bottom. Status, and the authority associated with it, is everything here, and to Park’s dismay, the flashy white Mercedes he is driving loses out to Moon-jae’s uniform. This is the start of A Bloody Aria‘s anarchic, absurdist, clever, complex and darkly funny investigation of the power games that dominate human relationships.

Humiliated by his encounter with Moon-jae, Park won’t leave it at that and his rash two fingers at the law forces him to take the Mercedes down a back road to the kind of psychotic bumpkin country mapped out by Deliverance or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Having stopped at an isolated creek by a river, Park and In-jeong are confronted by a gang of dim-witted thugs led by the insanely jovial Bong-yeon, who soon enough reveals himself to be a sadistic bully. Far more astute than he lets on at the beginning, he starts playing elaborately cruel games, not only with Park and In-jeong, but also with schoolboy Hyun-jae, his unfortunate habitual target.

This may sound like a predictable scenario but the plot wrong-foots the audience at every turn. Director Won Shin-yeon sets us up beautifully, playing with the familiar staples of the horror genre all the better to twist them. Key to this is the disorientating, incongruous sense of humour that accompanies even the most violent moments. Just as Bong-yeon teases his hapless victims, Won Shin-yeon toys with the audience, alternating moments of tension with a humorous release that feels both pleasurable and disturbingly inappropriate, playing a cat-and-mouse game with our emotions.

All the possible variations in the power relationships are explored, with the bully in one scene becoming the victim in the next. There are no innocents here, all play the game the best way they can. The girl and the schoolboy may seem like the most blameless characters, but – and this is one of the most chilling aspects of the film – it is not a moral choice; they simply lack the necessary strength to be bullies. When Hyun-jae gets a chance to turn the table on his tormentors, he does so with frightening gusto. And Park’s attempt to force himself on In-jeong comes after she flirtatiously tries to manipulate him into helping her singing career. ‘I had a huge crush on you when I was at school’, she says, before asking if he will coach her. In-jeong’s weapons in the game are her youth and beauty, but of course they are of no use against brute force.

For ultimately, everything comes down to who can bang their chest the loudest. The rural setting, together with the animal imagery that punctuates the film (the soaring bird of prey in the opening shot, or in a later scene, the half-witted thug crudely killing another raptor with a baseball bat), point to this essential truth: men are ruled by no other law than the brutal law of nature. Most disturbing of all, the final scenes suggest that the character who should best represent order and civilisation may well be the most savage of them all.

But the film’s truly brilliant touch, and what makes this mordant fable all the more effective and original, is its use of music. In an early scene, Park tries to use his professorial authority to force In-jeong into his arms by making her sing the Papageno/Papagena duet from Mozart’s The Magic Flute – basic animal urges masquerading as high art. And at the end, in a typical tonal shift, the sombre vision of humanity propounded by the denouement is relieved by a ferociously ironic coda: the utterly defeated professor is towed away in his wrecked Mercedes to the triumphant strains of the ‘Toreador Song’ from Bizet’s Carmen. What we’ve witnessed previously is no glorious struggle between bullfighter and beast, between savage and civilised: in A Bloody Aria, there are only beasts.

Virginie Sélavy

Read this article and much more in our autumn print issue. The theme is cruel games, from sadistic power play in Funny Games to fascist games in German hit The Wave and Stanley Kubrick’s career-long fascination with game-playing. Plus: interview with comic book master Charles Burns about the stunning animated film Fear(s) of the Dark and preview of the Raindance Festival. And don’t miss our fantastic London Film Festival comic strip, which surely is worth the price of the issue alone!

Format: Cinema

Release date: 3 October 2008

Venues: Odeon Panton St,, Ritzy (London) and selected key cities

Distributor: The Works

Director: Marianna Palka

Writer: Marianna Palka

Cast: Marianna Palka, Jason Ritter, Martin Starr

USA 2008

86 mins

You’d be forgiven for thinking that a film about porn and masturbation set in Los Angeles would be the latest release from the Seth Rogen/Judd Apatow school of romantic comedy. But Good Dick, written and directed by Marianna Palka, who also plays one of the main characters, is a subversive, refreshing take on the genre – a touching and funny look at the confused relationship between two highly damaged people.

Jason (son of John) Ritter plays a nameless character who works in a video store with a bunch of fellow slackers, filling the monotonous hours with pseudo-intellectual conversations about capitalism and the end of the world. Homeless, he sleeps in his car, washing himself with Wet Wipes and brushing his teeth using bottled water. Obsessed by the enigmatic, dishevelled young woman (Palka) who comes into the video store every day to rent hard-core porn, he begins to pursue her (you could call it stalking) by worming his way into her home, and essentially refusing to leave. Their relationship progresses inch by tortuous inch, from watching porn together on opposite sides of the sofa to sharing a bed (no touching allowed) to a twisted variation on the boyfriend-girlfriend relationship – just without any physical intimacy.

Palka refuses to pander to generic notions of romance and behaviour, and instead plays with the usual stereotypical gender roles. Ritter is needy, desperate for affection, and willing to take all sorts of abuse to be near the woman he cares about. He washes her hair, cleans the house, and cooks dinner, taking on traditionally female, submissive roles. Traumatised by some unknown event, Palka shirks away from any kind of emotional connection, insulting him constantly for being crazy enough to want to be with her, while at the same time craving his presence. She’s the dominant one, calling all the shots. But her emotional scars are obvious to Ritter and to the audience, and by the time her version of a happy ending rolls around we’re relieved rather than appalled.

What makes the film so refreshing is that Palka is unafraid of tackling female sexuality head on, and offers an entirely realistic – if perhaps surprising to some viewers – take on women’s attitude to porn and masturbation among other things. Very well written, the screenplay avoids the heavy-handed, expository dialogue rampant in other relationship films like Before Sunrise, or In Search of a Midnight Kiss – another LA-set indie film released a few months ago (Good Dick is the better film of the two). Thankfully, few male fantasies are indulged in the film, in contrast to so many comedies where the ordinary guy always ends up with a super model, or at least a woman who looks like Katherine Heigl.

Palka deservedly won the Best New Director’s Award at this year’s Edinburgh Film Festival. Let’s hope that Morning Knight, the production company she and Ritter recently co-founded, will continue to put out clever, entertaining indie cinema like Good Dick.

Sarah Cronin