Format:Cinema

Release date: 29 August 2008

Venue: BFI Southbank, London

Distributor BFI

Director: Terrence Malick

Writer: Terrence Malick

Cast: Martin Sheen, Sissy Spacek, Warren Oates

USA 1973

94 mins

As is the case with Orson Welles, Terrence Malick’s first film is also his best. Indeed, the reclusive director’s 1973 masterpiece can justifiably make a claim to be one of the greatest debuts ever made: by turns frightening, funny and deeply beautiful, there’s very little else like it, as this new print from the BFI proves.

Badlands is a fictionalised account of the 1959 Charlie Starkweather/Caril-Ann Fugate murder spree, and when Malick came to write his script Fugate was still in prison and up for parole, meaning that the 29-year-old director was forced to change their names for his version. Badlands instead presents the story of young rubbish collector Kit Carruthers (Martin Sheen) and his teenage sweetheart Holly Sargis (Sissy Spacek), who murder Sargis’s father before faking their suicides and lighting out for the badlands of Montana.

Made at the height of summer for little money ($300,000) with a non-union crew, Malick’s script was inspired by great American myths from Tom Sawyer to James Dean. But Malick was also influenced by Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou and its reworking of the classic tropes of film noir – the first-person voice-over, the doomed couple on the run (the film is dedicated to Bonnie And Clyde director Arthur Penn). Like Godard, though, Malick sidesteps any of the kind of moral judgements associated with the great films noirs. Unlike its many lesser imitations, this is a movie which is almost startlingly lacking in comment on the violence we are presented with. The strapline on the original movie poster proclaimed ‘in 1959, she watched while he killed a lot of people’. We’re forced to do the same, neither identifying with nor being forced to condemn the actions of the lead characters, instead being shown Kit and Holly alongside images from nature, perhaps suggesting that the world is a cruel place and that their crimes are just another product of that cruelty. Certainly that was the conclusion of Bruce Springsteen, the title track of whose 1982 album ‘Nebraska’ was inspired by the film and contained the lyrics ‘they wanted to know why I did what I did/well sir I guess there’s just a meanness in this world’.

A photo exists of the real Starkweather and Fugate – who killed eleven people over the space of six months across Nebraska and Wyoming – immediately after their capture. They’re both handcuffed, but are grinning into the camera. Badlands presents Sheen and Spacek’s characters as equally remorseless but far more solemn and self-obsessed. Spacek’s character is fixated with the fantasy world of celebrity magazines and there is a sense in which she has been bred to be a passive consumer of images, no matter how disquieting: at one point Carruthers shoots an acquaintance from his garbage truck route in the stomach (Holly: ‘Kit never let on why he shot Cato’) and the couple follow this futile and meaningless act of violence by watching him slowly bleeding to death.

It’s not exactly their fault: this is a world where moral authority is entirely absent from the moment that Holly’s father (Warren Oates) shoots her dog, where the bounty hunters and police who hunt Carruthers and Sirgis do so only for money or personal fame. Living out in the woods in a tree-house before their capture, we see Kit and Holly achieve a kind of innocence, before nature’s savagery forces them to set out again on their journey to the very end of the world.

Pat Long

Format: Cinema

Release date: 1 August 2008

Venues:Curzon Soho & Key Cities

Distributor: Icon

Director: James Marsh

Cast: Annie Allix, Ardis Campbell, Paul McGill, Jim Moore, Philippe Petit

USA/UK 2008

94 mins

Now that enough time has passed for movies about the World Trade Centre to be tinged with nostalgia rather than hysteria or pathos, the first post-post-9/11 movie is an intriguing docu-drama about high-wire walker Philippe Petit, who staged one of the most outrageous stunts in modern urban history. Intercutting between Petit remembering the events now and an actor (Paul McGill) recreating them in the past, Man on Wire tells the story of Petit’s 1974 riveting and illegal high-wire walk between the Twin Towers, 1,300 feet from the ground.

Filmmaker James Marsh seems equally confident making documentaries and dramatised films, having even approached Elvis from both angles: the documentary The Burger and the King and the fiction drama The King with Gael Garcí­Â­a Bernal. However, where his 1999 film Wisconsin Death Trip perfectly mixed drama and documentary, Man on Wire is not quite so successful and it seems like two different films are vying for attention in the same space. The suspense of drama doesn’t quite work here as the scenes of Petit in the present assuage any worry that he might not survive his architectural heist.

That said, it’s easy to see why the director was torn between the two approaches. The real Petit is an affable and engaging character who is obviously perfectly happy to tell his tale one more time while the dramatised Petit is reminiscent of a young Malcolm McDowell, complete with rakish insouciant charm. Both strands of the movie have a lot to offer, even if they don’t quite fit together. The straight-to-camera interviews with Petit and his associates reveal a variety of characters whose lives have irrevocably been changed by the event, mainly on the personal level, as the original gathering of Petit’s ‘team’ both forged and broke friendships. These relationships vary from touching to acerbic in the dramatised part and the film excellently conveys the feeling of lost youth of all these characters, a youth that remains forever crystallised in this news-making event.

The director films the dramatised scenes on a grainier stock with washed-out colours, using this as visual shorthand for a decade marked by the end of hippy subculture. When plot points approach a mythic quality, Marsh treats them like scenes from a fairy tale – the night before the event, shot in high-contrast monochromatic chiaroscuro with unconvincing clouds obscuring our vision, feels like an out-take from a Guy Maddin film – or the rehearsal for a production of The Wizard of Oz. The latter in particular seems to have inspired the sequence in which the real-life Petit moves back and forth from behind a curtain as he relates and re-enacts the incident where he hid from a security guard by following him around a pillar like a character in a 1930s screwball comedy.

Perhaps for American audiences Petit’s stunt is the second most famous thing to have happened to the World Trade Centre – indeed the cover of ‘The New Yorker’ on September 11th 2006 – had a silhouette of Petit on a wire but no buildings or landscape around him; the WTC represented by its absence. For international audiences though, the recreation of the stunt joins a distinguished group of comedies / dramas which use the high-rise building for dramatic potential from Safety Last to Die Hard.

As Petit’s life became defined in retrospect by this one act, we shouldn’t be surprised that the film should only cover it up to that point – but it’s frustrating that the documentary doesn’t tell us what happened next. A coda to his release from brief incarceration sees the tight-rope walker sleep with a fan to celebrate the joy of being alive. We can only speculate as to how the man responsible for this stunning act of aesthetic terrorism lived for the following three decades.

Perhaps this gap in the narrative, which could have been remedied by some on-screen text before the credits rolled, is meant to be as exasperating to the audience as the antics of the man himself were to the authorities at the time. It is, however, another element of the film that prevents it from being a classic. But while the film may be flawed, the combination of aspiration, humanity and courage in Man on Wire make its single iconographic stunt a worthy and welcome alternative to the interminable summer blockbusters that show characters forgettably defying gravity in almost every scene.

Alex Fitch

Format: Cinema

Release date: 29 August 2008

Venues: Odeon Panton St, Rich Mix, Coronet (London) + key cities

Distributor: Momentum Pictures

Director: Nic Balthazar

Writer: Nic Balthazar (from his novel)

Cast: Greg Timmermans, Laura Verlinden, Marijke Pinoy, Pol Goossen

Belgium 2007

93 mins

Ben X may seem like a predictably tragic computer nerd’s coming-of-age story but Nic Balthazar’s debut as a filmmaker is a smart, thoughtful tale about school bullying, mental distress and the social impact of online role-playing games. The ambitious themes are treated with great sensitivity and imaginative power in a tale that is both touching and beguiling, pushing beyond the form and frame of conventional feature-length fiction.

Sharing an apt (and somewhat detached) voice-over narration with other classic studies in teen angst such as Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting and Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park, Ben X opens with a powerful interweaving of lush 3D game graphics and live action. This, coupled with Ben’s commentary, beckons the audience in with an intriguing premise and then forces them to endure Ben’s painful reality by placing them right inside his head. Ben is affected by Asperger’s Syndrome and therefore is not able to communicate his thoughts properly through speech. He finds it hard to connect with the real world in any normal, straightforward way, making him the perfect target for the cruel games that his stronger classmates like to inflict on him. Incapable of striking back, Ben devises his own survival strategy by completely immersing himself in the 3D universe of ‘Archlord’, a massive multi-player game that allows one player to rise through the ranks to rule the world. His online avatar, Ben X, is as vigorous and brave as Ben’s real persona is introverted and anxious. In this custom-made fantasy world, even his wish for a friend seems to come true when online gamer Scarlite appears. Yet, still she cannot save him from the permanent bullying he faces at school and it looks like tragedy is inevitable.

Revisiting the source material of his own novel-turned-stage-play (based on true events), Balthazar has settled on film as the most suitable medium for the story. A dazzling blend of skilfully rendered computer graphics, punchy editing and impulsive sound makes for some extremely intense and powerful moments, especially at the beginning of the film. However, as the story progresses, leaving Ben with no choice other than to dive back into black despair, the pace decelerates and the final scenes succumb to over-the-top symbolism and pathos.

Ben X suffers most from Balthazar’s attempt to mix the animation and live action with a vérité documentary style. Snatches of interviews with Ben’s parents and friends are interspersed throughout the film, intending to enhance the story but failing to explain what we learn more poignantly through the deeply moving acting and narration. Played with spacey diffidence by Greg Timmermans, Ben never feels too comfortable in front of the camera but it is this very awkwardness that makes his character so endearing.

Despite the melodramatic overload, Ben X is wonderfully compelling whenever it relies on its lush visual and aural landscape. Not only does the semi-animated form allow Balthazar to comment on the desperation caused to young people by the horror of daily bullying in a manner that feels fresh and original, it also offers an astonishing insight into the adolescent mind. As such, Ben X is a film to savour, as soft-spoken, eccentric and smart as its main character and as satisfying in its visual details as it is in its larger intentions.

Pamela Jahn

Format: Cinema

Release date: 24 July 2008

Distributor: Warner Bros

Venues:Odeon Leicester Square (London) and nationwide (35mm print)/ Bimingham, Glasgow, London, Manchester (IMAX version)

Director: Christopher Nolan

Writers: Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan

Based on a story by: Christopher Nolan & David S Goyer

Cast: Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart, Michael Caine, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman

USA/UK 2008

152 mins

There’s a long-standing website called ‘Superhero Hype!’ which has covered the phenomenon of Hollywood’s growing interest in comic books over the last decade. This summer, more than ever, Superhero Hype seems the perfect catchphrase for the majority of the year’s blockbusters so far. Following Iron Man, The Hulk, Hancock, Wanted, Asterix at the Olympic Games, Speed Racer and inevitably the no-frills Superhero movie we have The Dark Knight, which opened in American cinemas on the 18th of July. There’s nothing wrong with the genre as a whole and obviously, within that list, there are good films and bad films – and I’m happy to report that The Dark Knight is a good film – but the level of hype and interest in this movie is phenomenally over the top. The film grossed $158,300,000 in its first weekend, breaking a record (unadjusted for inflation), and has made it to the #1 slot of the 250 best films ever made according to users of the internet movie database.

Something absurd is going on. At the risk of stating the obvious, TDK isn’t the best film ever made; it’s not even the best Batman film ever made, or the best film released in cinemas this month, being up against new films by Guy Maddin, Errol Morris and a re-release of Billy Wilder’s The Apartment. And yet reviewers are comparing it to The Godfather II and it’s had 70,000 votes on the IMDb after only 4 days of release. Perhaps the story of a vigilante who fights both with and against the system in order to pursue justice has struck a chord with audiences made insecure by constant reports of crime and terrorism.

I certainly don’t want to begrudge the film’s success. We live in a world where the blockbuster is king, where audiences like to see things blowing up on screen every five minutes and this is something TDK does well. As a spectacle, the film is astonishing. In fact you’ve never seen such beautiful explosions (though strangely, nowhere to be seen is the burning Bat signal on the side of a skyscraper that features on the poster), particularly as several sections of the movie are shot in IMAX format. The movie combines 35mm ‘widescreen’ sequences with IMAX ‘full screen’ sequences, switching between the two formats fairly seamlessly. So for instance, the opening credits have black bars above and below the image while the first scene of the movie, shot in IMAX, fills the whole screen. This continues intermittently throughout the movie, the IMAX format being used mostly for establishing shots as well as some of the more spectacular action scenes. Occasionally, the director cuts back and forth between high-res full screen and lower-res widescreen 35mm within the same scene. I didn’t find this distracting but rather an intriguing technical device that adds to the filmmaker’s set of tricks. IMAX is the highest resolution film format currently available, so if you see the film at an IMAX cinema, you’ll see these shots on the largest screens with the crispest image you can get. For that privilege you’ll also pay some of the highest ticket prices – but since the film runs over two and a half hours you certainly get value for money.

Paradoxically, the long running time is also the film’s downfall. At 152 minutes, it feels unnecessarily long, with some sections verging on repetition. As is the modern way, following the likes of Pirates of the Caribbean 2 and The Matrix Reloaded, it feels more like an instalment than a film in its own right and lacks structure. Of course, this is also because it is based on the Batman ‘graphic novels’, which are themselves collections of a myriad of stories and do not sit in isolation but are part of a continuing narrative. So instead of a well-defined beginning, middle and end, the result is two and a half hours of relentless middle with lots of little climaxes but no real sense of an escalating structure, even though the script keeps on telling us that events are escalating.

Despite this, most of the film is entertaining. The cast is uniformly excellent and the resounding praise aimed at the late Heath Ledger is deserved, excellent as the Joker and even eclipsing Jack Nicholson’s turn in the role. Aaron Eckhart is terrifying (look away now if you somehow didn’t know this) as Two Face with make-up redolent of Freddy Kruger, and dispels all memories of Tommy Lee Jones mugging for the camera in Batman Forever. Christian Bale is still an engaging lead even if he’s occasionally more James Bond than Batman in this film – particularly in a bizarre sequence set in China, in which the character, taken out of context, becomes somewhat generic. That said, Gotham City in this movie is almost indistinguishable from Hong Kong, and this only serves to remind audiences of what was great about the Tim Burton films. The Anton Furst sets, supported by Danny Elfman’s scores have left an indelible cinematic take on the story that is hard to improve on. Tim Burton’s films may have erred on the side of fairy tale, but Batman is a new mythology for our times and it is perhaps perverse and ill-judged of writer / director Christopher Nolan to try and make the new Batman films ‘realistic’ – is that really possible when you’re telling the tale of a kung-fu billionaire who fights crime dressed as a bat?

The tagline of the film and catchphrase of the Joker in the movie is ‘Why so serious?’ and ironically this is a question that should be asked of the production as a whole. Like Batman Begins and indeed Superman Returns (so, perhaps it’s endemic in current DC Comics adaptations) this is a dour movie with few moments of levity or normal human interaction to lighten the tone. The darkness is so relentless – although this film has ironically the most daylight in it of any Batman film since 1966 – that there is a point where the audience starts to feel browbeaten. When the funniest scene in the movie is when a serial killer in drag with pancake make-up on blows up a hospital, it begins to make you wonder if the audience is starting to feel as traumatised as some of the characters.

So my vote for best superhero movie of the summer so far goes to Iron Man (although I have high hopes for Hellboy II) because it mixed the adventures of another billionaire vigilante with stunts, explosions and daring-do, while striking a better balance between humour and pathos. I left Iron Man wishing the film had gone on for another half hour and didn’t leave the cinema numb from sitting or emotional and visual battering. Top marks to The Dark Knight for filmmaking acumen then, but not for its effect as a whole.

Alex Fitch

Format: Cinema

Release date: 18 July 2008

Venue: Curzon Soho (London) and key cities

Distributor: Sony Pictures

Director: Errol Morris

USA 2008

116 minutes

While his last film, The Fog of War, revolved around interviews with Robert S. McNamara, the much reviled Secretary of Defence during the Vietnam War, Errol Morris’s latest documentary is a study of soldiers at the bottom of the pyramid, themselves often victims of the botched war in Iraq. Taking as its starting point the photos of torture and humiliation shot at Abu Ghraib in 2003, and seen by millions worldwide, Standard Operating Procedure pieces together a fascinating, almost forensic study of the events depicted in the shocking images.

In an on-stage interview at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, Morris admitted that there is often a discrepancy between ‘audience expectations about what your movie should be’ and what it really is. So while audiences may have hoped to see George Bush or Donald Rumsfeld excoriated, Standard Operating Procedure doesn’t hold them to account for the horrific abuses that occurred at the Iraqi prison. The film’s not even an outraged attack on the war itself. Morris, who was a private investigator before he became a filmmaker, explained that he was more interested in understanding his subjects, in the ‘idea of people grappling with themselves’, rather than in eliciting the confessions his audience might crave.

Disturbing interviews with the notorious Lynndie England, as well as her fellow soldiers including Sabrina Harman, other investigators and interrogators, reveal a time-line of events that put the 270 photos of abuse into grim context. England’s best known for appearing in photos holding a prisoner on a leash, or grinning at detainees being forced to masturbate. Harman is seen in photographs smiling over the gruesome dead body of a tortured Iraqi. England talks about being a woman in a man’s world, fighting to be an equal. Harman wrote letters home to her partner describing the events in the photographs, many of which she took, in order to prove to people back home ‘the shit’ that happened at Abu Ghraib, things Americans would never believe if they couldn’t see it for themselves.

The humiliation in these photographs had little to do with the interrogations of the prisoners themselves. Soldiers like England and Harman, and other guards at Cell Block 1A, where the most notorious offences took place, were meant to soften up their subjects. They were supposed to ‘Gitmoize the operation’ and ‘treat the prisoners like dogs’. These low-ranking soldiers might have known that something wasn’t right, but they were either too ignorant or too powerless to defy the orders that came from above in a situation ‘where right and wrong was hopelessly blurred’. Military culture doesn’t tolerate dissent; these soldiers were screwed either way. They were forced by their superior officers, by the CIA and FBI, to become complicit in the crimes that were committed in the name of winning the war – something still unachieved five years later.

Standard Operating Procedure is as taut and compelling as any thriller, fuelled by Danny Elfman’s terrific score. Morris has mastered an interview technique that gives the appearance that his subjects are speaking directly to the audience, creating the illusion that we’re involved in a conversation as crucial as any we’ve ever had. Morris refuses to simply vilify soldiers like England and Harman, offering them a degree of sympathy instead. Ultimately, Morris leaves little doubt that the people responsible for the rampant, policy-driven abuse were never brought to justice: as he made clear during the interview, the photographs ‘deflected blame from the administration and gave people these visible culprits… these people took the stain of this entire war’.

Sarah Cronin

For more Edinburgh Festival coverage see: EIFF 08: Under the Radar, EIFF 08: Best of the Fest and Interview with Olly Blackburn, Jay Taylor and Rob Boulter (Donkey Punch).

Format: Cinema

Release date: 11 July 2008

Venue: Curzon Soho (London) and key cities

Distributor: Revolver Entertainment

Director: Tom Kalin

Writer: Howard A. Rodman

Based on: the novel by Natalie Robins and Steven ML Aronson

Cast: Julianne Moore, Stephen Dillane, Eddie Redmayne

Spain/USA/France 2007

97 mins

It is giving nothing away to reveal the eventual murder of the mother at the hands of her son in Tom Kalin’s excellent and utterly unsettling second feature Savage Grace since the film is based on a sensational real-life incident that shocked American society in 1972. A spellbinding tale of luxury, incest, madness and matricide, the film recounts the glittering rise and tragic fall of the aspiring American socialite Barbara Daly (a wonderfully versatile Julianne Moore), who married into the incredibly wealthy Baekeland family, and her unhinged relationship with her son Tony (Eddy Redmayne).

Adapted from the non-fiction book by Natalie Robins and Steven ML Aronson, and converted for the cinema by writer Howard A. Rodman and Kalin’s deft directorial hand, Savage Grace truly hits you like a stab in the heart. It’s a magnificent, superbly designed and consistently perplexing riddle, and a triumph for Moore and Redmayne, who bring deep reserves of feeling and grit to the film’s fabulously lush visuals.

Told in six episodes spread between 1946 and 1972, the film follows the decadent, but emotionally frail life of the Baekelands as they move from New York to Paris, and on to Spain in the 60s, where Brooks (Stephen Dillane) decides to put an end to his unhappy alliance to Barbara and leaves her for a much younger Spanish woman. After a glorious scene in which she treats her decamping husband to a ferocious blaze of fury, Barbara desperately struggles with selfish frustrations while her affection for Tony becomes increasingly suffocating. By the time mother and son move on to London, where the horrific climax takes place, Tony seems helpless to control his deeply damaged personality.

Savage Grace is wonderfully sly, intelligent and classily executed, but it undoubtedly makes for uneasy viewing. Deliberately sketchy and un-melodramatic, the episodic storytelling is linked through Tony’s insightful narration of the events. The tone shifts arbitrarily from scene to scene, making the script feel oddly unreal, though never less affecting. Kalin’s decision to strip the story back to key moments and emotions is a sound one, and it enables him to create and maintain a mood of intense, simmering tension and temperamental unpredictability, which ultimately erupts into the devastatingly powerful showdown.

Perhaps the film suffers from its provocative style and slick visuals, which leave the audience with a subliminal demand for some sort of emotional key in order to be able to cope with such extraordinary, inscrutable characters. That said, it is essentially up to Moore in the challenging role of Barbara to carry the film. While she never ages on screen throughout the 26 years covered – which makes the film feel even more like a romanticised memory in Tony’s disturbed mind – the colour and style of Barbara’s outfits are carefully chosen to reveal her inner moods: the lilac dress in the 60s, or the red Chanel suit at the end. Even so, Moore still finds unexpected shades in Barbara’s palette, not least an accumulating sense of emotional and physical exhaustion that remains with the audience after the credits roll.

Pamela Jahn

Read our interview with director Tom Kalin in the summer print issue of Electric Sheep. Also in that issue, a jazz and cinema specially-themed section to coincide with the re-release of Charles Burnett’s heart-rending gem Killer of Sheep, with articles on Shirley Clarke, John Cassavetes, Jim Jarmusch and Beat cinema among others. For more information on where to buy the magazine and how to subscribe, please contact amanda [at] wallflowerpress.co.uk.

Format: Cinema

Release date: 12 July 2008

Venue: ICA (London)

Distributor: Manga Entertainment

Director: Keiichi Sugiyama

Writers: Naoko Kakimoto & Nana Shiina

Original title: Gin-iro no kami no Agito

Cast: Ryo Katsuji, Aoi Miyazaki, Kenichi Endo

Japan 2006

95 mins

Recent animé seems to have become hyper-aware of the last couple of decades of genre filmmaking. Perhaps this is inevitable as animé creators struggle to find new cinema audiences in the West and seek to tap into tried and tested themes. Origin: Spirits of the Past shares with other recent releases Vexille and The Girl Who Leapt Through Time a jackdaw approach to the sci-fi and fantasy genres that the three films belong to. But while Vexille seems over-familiar to anyone who’s seen 1980s live action sci-fi such as Dune and Blade Runner, the recycling of ideas is not only forgivable but indeed works tremendously well in both Origin and The girl, perhaps because both contain aspects of time travel.

Origin is set in a post-apocalyptic future where the moon still orbits the Earth but has been blown up by an accident, the pieces drifting away into a ring of rocky fragments similar to Saturn’s. On Earth, humanity has managed to keep hold of some technology but has split into three factions, the druidic plant-worshippers who ‘protect’ a carnivorous forest, the low-tech inhabitants of the ruined city nearby who rely on the druids for their water supply, and the industrial warmongers who live in a settlement out in the arid zone. Into this strange new world, a girl from the past awakens (from cryogenic suspension), triggering a war between the three parties.

The style of the film combines slightly generic looking-characters (albeit with terrifically designed clothes), remindful of early Hayao Miyazaki, with beautifully rendered landscapes that look like moving oil paintings. This combination of stunning backgrounds with more traditionally ‘cartoony’ characters is a winning and aesthetically pleasing idea and Origin joins the likes of Metropolis / Metoroporisu (2001) and The Girl Who Leapt Through Time as a great example of the technique.

However, the brilliant animation work and intriguing narrative are somewhat let down by the clunky translation – if it is to follow in the footsteps of Princess Mononoke it could have done with a rewrite by Neil Gaiman or a writer of his calibre – and an inferior generic score. This film has so much going for it that it would be a shame if it doesn’t get the final polish that might ensure it reaches a wider fan base in the West. Considering the film has taken two years to cross nine time zones and comes from one of the artists of the most revered animé series of all time (Neon Genesis Evangelion), it would be unfortunate if it still doesn’t get the audience it deserves. An English dub or new translation and a reworked soundtrack would be enough to turn a film that is something of a curate’s egg into a classic of the genre.

Alex Fitch

Format: Cinema

Release date: 11 July 2008

Venue: Barbican (London) and selected key cities (from August 15)

Distributor Contemporary Films

Director: Tomí¡s Gutiérrez Alea

Writer: Tomí¡s Gutiérrez Alea and Edmundo Desnoes

Based on: Edmundo Desnoes’s novel Memí­Â³rias Inconsolables

Original title: Memorias del subdesarrollo

Cast: Sergio Corrieri, Daisy Granados, Eslinda Níºí±ez, Omar Valdés

Cuba 1968

97 minutes

Part of the Cine Cuba season at the Barbican

July 10-17

For more information on the programme, go to the Barbican website.

Sergio is a bourgeois dilettante who prefers to stay on in Cuba when his wife and family decide to leave the country for the United States in the aftermath of Fidel Castro’s Communist revolution in 1959. A man of leisure, he spends his days pondering his decision and his life; ruminating on the socio-politics of the country’s new leaders, and chasing – and finally seducing – a young woman, Elena. Like the classic flí­Â¢neur he wanders aimlessly about the streets of Havana, meditating on the true meaning behind the agitprop facade which continuously plays out on his TV. Was the human death toll worth it, and why are the philosophers and intellectuals rarely out there on the barricades, taking a bullet for the revolution like the proletariat?

These questions arise from Sergio’s sense of alienation – an existentialist self-examination and enquiry into not just Communist philosophy, but life’s meaning and its inherent ethical quagmire of politics, psychology, sociology, economics, gender and even evolutionary Darwinism, all in the best tradition of a Socialist symposium – an example of which he witnesses in a nonchalant, aloof manner.

Memories has no plot as such; the events play out like a semi-improvisatory fugue and the whiplash cutting, abstrusely edited soundtrack and neo-realist ambience remind one – perhaps too easily – of 60s Godard. Add to this the film’s overt political conceit and this sensibility could be construed as somewhat plagiaristic. Is Alea paying homage to Godard or is it just a case of him being responsive to the zeitgeist of the time and independently creating a Cuban corollary to the European New Wave? In retrospect it is hard to determine, and perhaps the film’s fragmented style is, after all, well suited to the first-person internal musings of the protagonist.

Sergio is at a crossroads in his life – he’s been unfaithful to his wife, doesn’t believe in the redemptive power of politics and finds life generally absurd – a bona fide mid-life identity crisis corresponding to the Cuban missile crisis which unsettlingly rumbles along in the background. He is disengaged from life (epitomised by the tape recordings he surreptitiously makes of his estranged wife), analysing the world around him, abstractedly, from a distance; but when he is wrongly accused of exploiting and raping Elena, the world suddenly closes in on him and he becomes re-sensitised to reality and his raw emotions. He feels incomprehension and fear when questioned in court and the chasm between class-driven, state-sanctioned blind ‘justice’ and a higher moral law is thrown into sharp relief. Sergio’s subversive and questioning attitude leads to a grim and unwarranted personal ordeal which ultimately reflects the wider social crisis and fundamental inhumanity contained within any dogmatic, autocratic political system like Communism.

Towards the end of the film Alea succinctly delineates the rising tension of the missile crisis by having Sergio continually play with his Zippo lighter – in a sequence interspersed with dramatic newsreel footage from the TV news – its rhythmic clicking sound acting as the countdown to a very possible apocalypse. Thankfully, reason prevailed in those surreal, knife-edge moments, and Memories is a lasting legacy of that transformative, chaotic and sharply focused era.

James DC

From July 10-17 Barbican Film presents Cine Cuba, a season that explores the heart of Cuban Cinema, with gems from the Havana archives plus new works and films which celebrate Cuba’s musical heritage. More information on the Barbican website.

Format: Cinema

Release date: 18 July 2008

Venue: Empire Leicester Square (London) and selected key cities

Preview: July 11, Rich Mix (London)

Distributor: Yume Pictures

Director: Nicolas Roeg

Writer: Dan Weldon

Based on: the novel by Fay Weldon

Cast: Kelly Reilly, Miranda Richardson, Rita Tushingham

UK/Ireland 2007

120 mins

Messy is probably the best word to describe Nicolas Roeg’s Puffball, his first theatrically released feature in twelve years, and by far the most questionable and simplistic film in the director’s canon so far. A lacklustre mishmash of voodoo humbug, pregnancy and domestic frustrations, set in a grey, desolate community in the Irish countryside, Puffball is carelessly plotted, haphazardly stringing together obscure scenes and all-too-obvious hints. At its best, the film is painted in appealingly vivid strokes, and on occasion, generates a passably sinister air, but the overall work is terminally dull and creaks under the weight of its own pretensions. Buried under the surface, traces of Roeg’s famously strong and original visual sense are still identifiable, but the presence of Donald Sutherland in the film only serves to remind the audience of the director’s past achievements, emphasising the abyss that separates Puffball from a masterwork such as Don’t Look Now.

Adapted from a novel by Fay Weldon, the narrative centres around Liffey (Kelly Reilly), an ambitious young architect who decides to leave her job and – modern – life behind, setting out on a mission to restore an old ruined cottage in the countryside for herself and her partner Richard (Oscar Pearce). Soon upon arrival in the valley she meets her neighbour Mabs Tucker (Miranda Richardson), who lives on the farm nearby together with her husband, three daughters and her brilliantly eerie-looking mother Molly (Rita Tushingham), and from that point things rapidly start to get out of hand. Liffey learns that she is pregnant, but instead of telling Richard, who had to return to New York for work, she gives vent to her fears and confusion in a brief encounter with Mabs’s husband. Once the adultery is revealed, Molly is convinced that Liffey is somehow carrying the ‘little baby boy’ that Mabs is so desperate to have and takes matters into her own witchy hands.

Although attempts to add psychological weight by inserting fragments of weird flashbacks are largely unsuccessful, Roeg does manage to capture the ennui of provincial life, and the sense that passion, mystery and violence lurk not far beneath the surface. But this is not enough to rescue the film and as the plot veers towards melodramatic hocus-pocus territory and symbols are wielded in staggeringly heavy-handed fashion, it becomes an increasingly frustrating experience. In the circumstances, the actors acquit themselves reasonably well, though stripped of much of their back story and psychological shading, the characters they play fail to engage our sympathies. In any case, there is not much they could do to salvage the over-familiar script, which has echoes of Rosemary’s Baby thrown into a sinister locals versus townies who don’t belong there type plot. Accompanied by an interfering score, the overall style is essentially prime-time television mystery-drama and it is sad to see a director of Roeg’s quality churning out such uninspired material, which strikes a duff note in his otherwise awe-inspiring body of work.

Pamela Jahn

Format: Cinema

Screened at Tiger Festival 2008

Director: Wang Fen

Writer: Cheng Zhang

Original title: Xiang zi

Cast: Wu Gang, Wu Yujuan, Wang Sifei, Wang Hongwei

China 2007

87 mins

Dank, dark spaces and untamed tropical nature encroach upon a remote Yunnanese inn, where the appearance of a mysterious, floating case signals the return of dormant, irrational desires for the mild-mannered protagonist He Dashang (Wu Gang). Wang Fen’s The Case is a playful black comedy, with more than just a nod to Freudian-Surrealist symbolism, accompanied by a suitably absurdist, theatrical sensibility. The film is an enjoyable satire on marriage and relationships as social institutions, exploring private notions of libido, desire, happiness and trust.

He Dashang is trapped in a stifling marriage and runs a quiet Lijiang guesthouse under the constant scrutiny of his brutally distrustful wife (Wu Yujuan). The crushing tedium of his life is disrupted when he fishes out the eponymous case from a stream. After impulsively hiding it from his wife he soon discovers its unspeakable contents; an obscenity that he scrabbles to conceal – or should it be repress? – from his wife’s knowledge.

Simmering tensions soon escalate when a strikingly coquettish Lily (Wang Sifei as a noir-ish femme fatale) checks into the guesthouse with her near-wordless husband (Wang Hongwei). Unable to restrain himself, Dashang embarks on a furtive relationship with Lily that involves equal measures of counselling and spying. Are the new lodgers connected with the mysterious case? Why does Dashang’s wife seem to know what he has done, unnervingly, even before he realises? While these questions hang in the air, events spiral out of control before the film reaches its cathartic, and utterly divisive, conclusion.

Wang Fen’s debut achieves thrilling levels of suspense with admirable efficacy, which owes much to the uniformly strong performances, particularly from Wu Gang and Wu Yujuan as the spouses. Wu Gang is convincingly downtrodden and guilt-racked as Dashang, and it is difficult to believe Wang Sifei is anything other than the feisty, phobic Lily that she plays with such relish. Even the location itself, China’s most south-westerly province Yunnan, plays a crucial supporting role, its vegetation infusing the film with a palpable sense of organic life, reminding the viewers of the lawlessness of nature and its accompanying urges.

The Case is the best known of the first ten films (all by women directors) produced by the state-funded Yunnan New Film Project. Initiated in 2001, the project was established to mark both the centenary of Chinese cinema and to stimulate a new crop of indigenous filmmakers. The film’s overt eroticism and daring immorality indicate perhaps that China’s relaxing grip on censorship is softening further, and allegorically that the nation itself is succumbing to its own irrational desires.

Edwin Mak