Format: Cinema

Screening: 21 October 2007

With Un chant d’amour + Querelle

Venue Barbican, London

Director: Kenneth Anger

US 1947

In the spring of 1947, Mr and Mrs Anglemyer travelled from LA to Pittsburgh to attend an uncle’s funeral, leaving their 17-year-old son home alone for 72 hours. The young man put the time to good use: he turned the family home into a movie studio and shot a 14-minute B&W film on his parents’ 16mm Kodak camera. The result was Fireworks, a landmark in experimental and gay cinema. And the budding filmmaker was Kenneth Anger, one of American cinema’s most influential artists.

At the 1949 Festival du Film Maudit in Biarritz, France, Jean Cocteau described Fireworks as ‘coming from that beautiful night from which emerge all true works’. And promptly awarded it the Festival’s Poetic Film prize. At its LA premiere, Tennessee Williams believed it to be ‘the most exciting use of cinema I’ve seen’. And Dr Alfred C Kinsey snapped up a print for his Institute For Sexual Research. Not bad for three days’ work.

The fresh-faced director plays the protagonist, The Dreamer. He awakes naked in bed with what appears to be a mighty erection: it is revealed to be an African talisman under the bed sheet. The Dreamer walks through a door labelled ‘GENTS’, he asks an acrobatic sailor for a light, and is savagely beaten by a group of chain-wielding sailors in a back alley. Blood spurts from The Dreamer’s smashed nose, milk runs down his chin and neck, and his chest is ripped open to reveal a ticking electric meter. Multiple photographs of The Dreamer in a sailor’s arms deteriorate in flames. In the final scenes a sailor ignites a Roman candle attached to his crotch, ejaculating a burst of sparks. The Dreamer is transformed into a levitating tinsel-covered Christmas tree. He is back in bed but this time with a naked lover, whose face is obscured by a bright halo.

Anger describes the film as ‘a dream of a dream’; the imagery of Fireworks came to him in his sleep. Its trance-like depiction of visceral brutality and sexual fantasy evokes a subconscious state in which external influences come into play. The Dreamer’s narcissistic mirror gazing is a nod to Cocteau’s 1930 surreal masterpiece Le Sang d’un poí­Â¨te, in which the sleepwalking protagonist dives into his reflection. And the film’s metaphorical search for light springs from Anger’s lifelong study of occult icon Aleister Crowley and Lucifer, the Bringer of Light; an obsession made explicit in later works such as Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969) and Lucifer Rising (1970-81).

Gangs of US sailors went on the rampage in 1944, attacking the snappily dressed Mexicans; these violent clashes became known as The Zoot Suit Riots. The strapping All-American boys in crisp white naval uniforms had a powerful effect on Anger. His striking fetishising of the sailor has since gone on to become an established queer aesthetic: from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Genet-adaptation Querelle (1982) through to Jean-Paul Gaultier’s ad campaigns. With 1963’s Scorpio Rising, Anger transferred his erotic stare to the leather-clad biker community, predating the dress code for gay S&M scenesters.

Fireworks is a deeply personal confession of liberated desire, orgasmic violence and salvation through love. But it is not just an on-screen ‘coming out’ party for Kenneth Anger the man. It is also a creative bursting forth of Anger the cine-magician.

Ben Cobb

Fireworks is screening on 21 October as part of the Barbican’s Sex and Censorship in Cinema, a season of films that were cut or banned by the British censors, which runs from Oct 18 to 25. We have 3 pairs of tickets to give away to any film of the Sex and Censorship season, subject to availability, courtesy of the Barbican. To enter, just spin our Film Roulette!

Format: Cinema

Release date: 7 September 2007

Distributor Yume Pictures

Director: Garin Nugroho

Based on:‘The Abduction of Sinta’ (from the Ramayana)

Cast: Artika Sari Devi, Eko Supriyanto, Martinus Miroto

Java 2006

120 minutes

You could call it long conception, short birth. Garin Nugroho imagined Opera Jawa five years ago, but shot it in just two weeks. Production companies weren’t interested in the idea of a modern day opera based on Hindu holy text the Ramayana and set to the sound of gamelan music. But then Peter Sellars – the man behind the staging of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro in the Trump Tower – decided to commission the film for the New Crowned Hope Festival. The festival, funded by the city of Vienna and curated by Sellars, commemorates the 250th Birthday of Mozart, who himself struggled to get his revolutionary work commissioned.

The intricate planning that Nugroho invested in his idea over those five years is clear in the final product, which is packed with layer upon layer of art installations, folk-inspired dance and constant movement. A series of musical vignettes tell the story of the destructive love triangle between married couple Setio and Siti, and the town bully Ludiro. The couple meet playing the leads in popular Hindu tale ‘The Abduction of Sinta’, but the artistic glamour of their single lives turns into conjugal drudgery after the wedding.

When their pottery business falls to pieces, in steps Ludiro, a long-haired Lothario who woos Siti with his proud masculinity and material wealth. It is a tough decision for Siti; the contrast between the Spartan marital home and Ludiro’s string of sumptuous lairs is clear to see. As Siti entertains the idea of being with him she becomes the focus of some of the most haunting sequences in the film.

But the personal becomes political when Setio’s patience snaps and he instigates a community offensive on Ludiro, whose tyrannical rule over neighbouring businesses – orchestrated by a mob of crab-like Mafiosi – has wreaked havoc on the hearts, minds and purses of the town.

Nugroho broadens the political scope even further by describing the film as a requiem for those who have died through natural and man-made disasters, suggesting that the love triangle of the film symbolises real-life power struggles over land for reasons of religion, natural disaster and greed. The point is made well: like the land itself, Siti rarely crafts her own destiny but allows herself to be the vessel of other men’s desires.

Both she and Setio dance stylised set pieces where their eerie movements convey their deepest feelings. But power-hungry Ludiro – played by one of Madonna’s former dancers – actively teases and taunts in his dance scenes. When first introduced, he appears from behind an animal carcass in his butcher shop to turn his all-encompassing megalomania into a violent, swiping dance routine. He later steps out a strutting flamenco-style dance atop the bar of a smoke-filled jazz joint, which reveals his dangerous allure and the depth of his desire.

In this way, Nugroho proves that a dance, like a picture, can tell a thousand words. In fact, words are where the film fails. For viewers not fluent in the Javan tongue – even those with a steely acceptance of subtitles – the impact of reading the opera lyrics pales in comparison with the sheer joy of seeing the saturated colours of Ludiro’s candle-lit oasis or the graceful coordination of the Javan classical dancers.

The idea of a feature-length gamelan opera is a hard one to accept, especially when it is politically charged and crammed with art installations. But the stunning beauty of the film means Nugroho gets away with it.

Lisa Williams

Format: Cinema

Release date: 21 September 2007

Distributor Momentum Pictures

Director: Quentin Tarantino

Cast: Kurt Russell, Rosario Dawson, Vanessa Ferlito, Zoí­Â« Bell

US 2007

113 minutes

Now released in an expanded stand-alone version after the US flop of the ‘Grindhouse’ double bill (which also comprised Robert Rodriguez’ forthcoming Planet Terror), Death Proof is Quentin Tarantino’s latest tongue-in-cheek homage to genre cinema. After heist movies, blaxploitation and martial arts actioners, now it’s the turn of the 70s exploitation flick to get the Tarantino treatment.

While the Asian-inspired Kill Bill was let down by misplaced ambition and a dismally dull second part, with Death Proof Tarantino is comfortably back on home ground. A cross between a car chase B-movie and a slasher shocker, the film stars the great Kurt Russell (in even more rugged form than in his Snake Plissken incarnation) as the psychopathic Stuntman Mike, who drives around in his sinister car of death in search of female victims. Cue feisty girl gangs, wiseass one-liners, wiggling hot pants, screeching hot rods and mucho unwholesome violence.

With his customary fetishistic attention to detail, Tarantino lovingly reproduces the rough-around-the-edges feel and general shoddiness of low-budget exploitation fare, down to the scratches, jump cuts and incompetent editing. The wonderfully grainy, sleazy texture of seventies cinema is perfectly recreated, making Death Proof a visual treat in this era of bland technologically-enhanced perfection. Even the women’s skin appears authentically 70s, with that look of real flesh that seems so provocatively sensual in contrast with the plastic feel of airbrushed bodies. While the film looks great, the plot, split into two repetitive parts, is surprisingly clunky and on the thin side. Of course, Tarantino could claim he was simply emulating his 70s models but this is one aspect of the film that actually feels unintentionally sloppy.

As usual, Tarantino’s fetishism means that he reduces the films he draws on to a collection of shiny pop culture artefacts entirely emptied of their original meaning. Death Proof feels like a best-of the genre, meticulously compiled by a geeky film buff stuck in eternal teenagedom. So while Vanishing Point is Death Proof‘s major reference point, all that Tarantino takes from that film is the car – the 1970 white Dodge Challenger, which two hard-ass stunt girls obsess over so much that it becomes a central part of the plot – leaving out the moody desperation and lonely landscapes that made the original something more than just another car chase movie.

However, Tarantino’s revisionist take on the crude sexual politics of the Grindhouse nicely brings the genre into the twenty-first century and makes it fun for the girls too. After the predictable maiming and murdering of some scantily-clad hot chicks, Russell’s unreconstructed macho psycho gets his come-uppance big time when he picks the wrong gals to mess with. The kind of girl who straps herself to the hood of a speeding Dodge for kicks, gutsy Zoí­Â« (played by real-life stuntwoman Zoí­Â« Bell, who was Uma Thurman’s body double in Kill Bill) is more than a match for Stuntman Mike and the film climaxes on an exhilarating, triumphantly old-school (no cheating with CGI here) high-speed car chase. While the sassy girl talk is no more than a collection of sub-Sex and the City clichés, the girl-power action is a blast.

Death Proof is yet another variation on Tarantino’s trademark pop cannibalism. His delirious enthusiasm for cult cinema is infectious – and almost endearing – and while the films he references so lavishly will always be superior to his own, Death Proof is a fun ride through cinema’s louche past.

Virginie Sélavy

Unlike Virginie Sélavy, Ben Cobb found absolutely nothing to enjoy in Death Proof. Read his review here and take sides!

Format: Cinema

Release date: 21 September 2007

Distributor Artificial Eye

Director: Christian Petzold

Cast: Nina Hoss, Hinnerk Schí¶nemann, Devid Striesow

Germany 2007

89 minutes

Written and directed by the German filmmaker Christian Petzold, Yella is an intriguing, suspenseful mystery with a singular clarity of vision. It is constructed like a jigsaw puzzle and each scene cleverly fits together to reveal a film that is much more than the sum of its parts. Winner of the Silver Bear for Best Actress at the 2007 Berlinale, Nina Hoss delivers an excellent performance as the title character – a disillusioned woman desperate to free herself from an oppressive, unsuccessful marriage. Hoss imbues her character with a sombre, haunted quality, perfectly attuned to the subtleties of Petzold’s screenplay.

Yella attempts to flee her threatening husband, Ben (Hinnerk Schí¶nemann), and their failed business venture in East Germany for a new career and a new life in the West German city of Hanover. After a nightmare journey across the Elbe, a promised job turns out to be non-existent, the company that hired her now bankrupt. Through self-interest or sympathy, Philipp (Devid Striesow), a charismatic, ambitious businessman staying in the same hotel, offers Yella a position as his assistant. She soon becomes entangled in the cut-throat world of venture capital, negotiating deals to extend financing to start-up business ventures. But although capitalism forms the backdrop of the film, Petzold isn’t interested in making judgements about the world of finance and big business. These negotiations are really sly, duplicitous games that mirror the very nature and complexity of human relationships.

There is much more to Yella than its plot, and both colour and sound contribute subtle clues to the film’s intricacies. Petzold weaves these aesthetic elements into the fabric of the film, compelling the audience, as well as Yella, to play detective. The palette is composed of luminous, iridescent tones of green and red, with a crisp quality to the colour that evokes a heightened sense of reality. Breaking glass, the sound of rushing water, the rustling wind, bird song: all remind Yella of what she has endured, nudging her ever closer to the truth. She finds herself returning time and again to the river that divides East and West, her old life from her new.

Yella, struggling to escape from her past, is haunted every step of the way by Ben. He follows her to Hanover, stalking her, emerging from the shadows to torment her. She is rescued once again by Philipp, who appears to be everything that Yella wanted from her husband: successful, confident, yet also gentle and considerate. He uncannily guesses that she left Ben because he was a failure, that she could no longer love someone who was ruined financially. Philipp holds a mirror up to Yella, forcing her to confront her desire for a big suburban home, a green Jaguar, a perfect child. She wants what she could never have on the other side of the river, what her husband could never have given her. Ben, like impoverished East Germany, is a ghost-like figure, left behind by those desperate for a better life in the West.

Yella is an almost metaphysical exploration that, frame by frame, spins out an intriguing narrative about the human condition. Petzold meticulously probes beneath the surface of Yella’s life, revealing universal truths about love, desire, greed and regret. It’s an intelligent, well-crafted and superbly acted film that lingers in the imagination long after the final credits have rolled.

Sarah Cronin

Format: Cinema

Release date: 14 September 2007

Distributor: Revolver

Director: Temur Babluani and Géla Babluani

Original title: L’Héritage

Cast: Sylvie Testud, Pascal Bongard, George Babluani, Augustin Legrand

France/Georgia 2006

83 minutes

Before embarking on his Hollywood career with a forthcoming remake of his debut film 13 (Tzameti), Géla Babluani has taken the time to collaborate with his father, noted Georgian filmmaker Temur, on a film set in their home country. The film echoes many of the themes of Babluani’s debut, albeit filtered through a lyrical, far less violent and arguably more mature aesthetic: the father reigning in the son’s excesses, at least until the tense climactic sequence.

The set-up is simple but intriguing: we know the tourists’ intervention is going to lead to trouble, but in what form it is impossible to say. The story unfolds at a deliberate pace, but never becomes boring – the unfamiliar landscape is beautifully photographed and there is a continuous, well-timed ebb and flow of incident and revelation, proceeding inexorably towards a terrible event which nobody even attempts to avert. A sense of tension is skilfully maintained, and as viewers we find ourselves in the same position as the three ambiguous leads: horrified by the inevitability of events, but eager to see how everything will pan out.

The political critique here is inherent and rather obvious. Western tourists fail to understand the cultures in which they find themselves, they are self-absorbed and ignorant, and ignore the struggles and realities of ordinary people in their pursuit of selfish ends. Filmmakers and news gatherers are equally guilty: they exploit such suffering for financial gain. This technique of allying the audience with likeable but morally reprehensible lead characters is also nothing new; there’s nothing here to rival, say, Michael Haneke’s expert viewer manipulation.

The characters remain frustratingly underdeveloped. As the tight-lipped young escort George Babluani essays much the same character as in Tzameti: an enigmatic holy innocent confronted with forces far beyond his control. The three students are amusing but empty, simple caricatures necessary for the plot. The only actors who manage to bring their creations to life are both familiar from Babluani’s earlier film – Pascal Bongard’s Nikolai is pleasingly uncertain, a sad-eyed working man buffeted by circumstance. And Augustin Legrand somehow manages to be simultaneously creepy and loveable as a travelling mute, the only character who ever seems to know what’s going on.

Much like Tzameti, Legacy is an entertaining drama hinging on a brilliant but frustratingly underdeveloped central idea. Both films lack character, and each builds tension expertly before dissipating it in a weak, disappointing final act. More interesting as travelogue than cinema, Legacy is never less than entertaining but never more than adequate.

Tom Huddleston

Format: Cinema

Release date: 31 August 2007

Special preview: 30 August 2007, Trafalgar Square, London, 9pm

Distributor: BFI

Director: Franz Osten

Original title: Prapancha Pash

Cast: Seeta Devi, Himansu Rai, Charu Roy

UK/India/Germany 1929

77 minutes

This silent romantic melodrama from 1929 is reissued by the BFI in a nice print, sharp but with considerable depth and subtlety of shade, including some pleasing murkiness. It is an extravagantly beautiful realisation of royal splendour in Rajasthan, inspired by the ancient Mahabharata but looking like what was then the fairly recent past. Anyone expecting an Indian Cecil B DeMille had better look elsewhere. The filmmakers (German director Franz Osten and Indian actor/producer Himansu Rai) deliver an elegant, pleasing, well-organised piece, admirably serious about its subjectmatter (love, desire, power, and especially gambling) but never pretentious or boring. Not a second is wasted nor a false note struck. Even the love scenes, even the children’s roles are acted with a restraint that one scarcely associates with cinematic epic.

I was rather dreading the new soundtrack by Nitin Sawhney, not being a fan, but I am pleased to report that it is mostly excellent. This is Sawhney in full orchestral mode: he proves to be a dab hand at sub-Rimsky orientalist doodling, very much the kind of thing that would have been popular at the time the film was made, and appropriately evocative of the never-neverish world in which the story is placed. The music is episodic but coherent, rich in melody and tone colour: it invigorates the action without ever going too far in dictating the mood – at least until the last fifteen minutes, when Sawhney gives in to the temptation to include some vocal numbers, which outstay their fit as action develops and mood changes.

Peter Momtchiloff

Format: Cinema

Release date: September 2007

Venue: BFI Southbank

Director: Andy Warhol



US 1964-66

Between 1964 and 1966, anyone who visited the Factory would be made to sit for a three-minute silent film portrait. Andy Warhol made nearly 500 of these Screen Tests and as part of their current retrospective of his work, the BFI Southbank are showing a staggering 279 of them.

The Screen Tests feature all degrees of celebrities rubbing shoulders on the celluloid: real stars (Dennis Hopper, Bob Dylan), Warhol’s ‘superstars’ (Edie Sedgwick, Ondine), underground personalities (Jack Smith, Taylor Mead), artists and cultural figures (James Rosenquist, Henry Geldzahler), and at the bottom of the celebrity scale, Factory wannabes. Under instruction to sit still for three minutes, some of the subjects calmly comply, some fidget uncomfortably while others defiantly disobey (Geldzahler undoes his tie, Rosenquist swivels on his chair).

It has to be said, sitting in a dark room watching more or less famous people stare at the screen for three minutes does not constitute the most exciting cinematic experience. In fact, like much of Warhol’s work, the Screen Tests are facile and hollow, and yet it is impossible to deny their perverse appeal. And although they are not as notorious as Sleep, Blow Job or Chelsea Girls, the Screen Tests do offer a striking insight into the slippery, ambiguous nature of Warhol’s art.

As the portraits succeed one another on the screen, watching them feels just like turning the pages of an autograph book. But while there is something of the star-struck fan collecting pictures of his idols here, these film portraits also show Warhol the star-maker at work, fabricating icons by removing what makes them human. By making his subjects sit completely still and remain quiet, Warhol freezes them in a state where they are reduced to pure image. Voiceless, motionless and expressionless, they are the perfect flat surface on which viewers can project their desires.

But through this star-making process Warhol is also constructing his own myth, engaged in a mutually dependent, self-serving relationship with his models: he gives them edgy, artistically-endorsed fame; they make him the ultimate pop guru. The Screen Tests show Warhol creating a world in which he reigns all powerful, the master who can make or break a star, the high priest of cool who decides who’s in and who’s out. Did anyone ever refuse to pose, I wonder? Did anyone, famous or not, risk being left out of Warholian history?

It is a measure of Warhol’s talent as a salesman, as a charlatan even, that no one could ignore him, not even the serious film critics and theorists. Even though he was one of the least inventive filmmakers of the period, his work has been much pondered over. Warhol shot the Screen Tests at 24 frames per second but had them projected at 16 FPS, elongating the viewing time to 4 킽 minutes. Just as in the eight-hour-long Empire, there isn’t much of an idea there. Yet, what would have been slated as shallow and slight in anyone else’s work was interpreted as a radically minimalist statement on duration in Warhol’s films.

A much better adman than he was an artist, Warhol somehow managed to sell his literal reproductions of celebrities as an ironic comment on our culture. Yet his very success, if not his work, exposes that culture for what it is. It is these contradictions that shine through in the Screen Tests. But that’s not reason enough to sit through 279 of them.

Virginie Sélavy

Format: Cinema

Release date: 31 August 2007

Distributor: Buena Vista International

Director: David Mackenzie

Cast: Jamie Bell, Sophia Myles, Ciaran Hinds, Clare Forlani

UK 2007

95 minutes

Both thriller and comedy, Hallam Foe is an enticing coming-of-age film about love, grief and redemption. Directed by David Mackenzie (Young Adam), and based on the novel by Peter Jinks, it’s dominated by Jamie Bell’s exciting performance as the title character – a screwed-up teenager addicted to voyeurism.

Grieving over the mysterious death of his mother, Hallam is an almost feral creature, hunting his prey on the family estate in Scotland. Rejecting the luxury of his stately home, he lives instead in a tree house, surrounded by his mother’s photos, clothes, even her make-up. Obsessed by sex, he compulsively spies on his family and neighbours, furiously detailing his observations in a diary. His father (Ciaran Hinds) has re-married after his wife’s death; his new bride and former secretary (Clare Forlani) is a gorgeous, enigmatic temptress. Shamed by an erotic encounter with her, Hallam flees his home for anonymity in Edinburgh, where fate leads him to Kate (Sophia Myles), a woman who looks almost identical to his mother. He soon charms her into offering him a job as a kitchen porter at the hotel where she works. Hallam takes to life on Edinburgh’s stunning rooftops, spying on Kate in her home, piecing together the minutiae of her personal life, desperate to be near her.

A humorous current runs through the film, from the opening credits (animated by the much loved off-kilter illustrator David Shrigley) through to the very end. But at its heart, Hallam Foe is something of a thriller. Echoes of Hitchcock permeate the film’s style and narrative. In Edinburgh, Hallam’s pursuit of Kate, and her blonde hair, pulled back tightly, recall Kim Novak in Vertigo; so too do the vertiginous views of the city as Hallam clambers over the slate rooftops to spy on her. There is also something Rear Window-like in his insatiable voyeurism; not physically bound in a wheelchair as Jimmy Stewart is, he’s handicapped instead by his grief. Spying on other people is Hallam’s way of escape, of submerging his pain over the loss of his mother. But it’s also an addiction that spirals out of control; seeing only fragments of the big picture, Hallam, like Stewart, comes to suspect that a murder’s been committed. The suspicion that his stepmother might be involved in his mother’s death becomes an obsession, tormenting him until he has no choice but to act. The film unravels, like Hitchock’s movies, as part mystery, part thriller, and part romance.

The claustrophobic camerawork forces us to see through Hallam’s eyes. On the family estate, sweeping views of the Highlands are almost conspicuous by their absence. Rather Hallam’s world is close up and uncompromising: writhing, naked bodies are seen through an entangled web of trees; the glassy lake where Hallam’s mother drowned dominates the field of vision, forcing Hallam and the audience to confront the mystery of her death. We see Kate as Hallam sees her, framed by windows, seen through binoculars. But instead of making us feel alienated by Hallam’s behaviour, Mackenzie compels us to share in his pain and desire. Though Hallam’s voyeurism is pathological, his violation of privacy frightening and disturbing, Bell imbues his character with a humour and wit that makes him both charming and vulnerable, even innocent. He’s an outsider, just a teenager trying to fit in.

While Bell so thoroughly dominates the core of the film, the characters on the periphery somewhat languish in their supporting roles. The women are especially two-dimensional, and come perilously close to serving as little more than the ‘mother, sister, whore’ triptych all too often found in popular culture. Hallam’s devotion to his own mother borders on the religious, while the villainous stepmother uses sex to manipulate both Hallam and his father to achieve her own ends. Kate is both enigmatic and vulnerable, an object of desire who is characterized by her affair with a married man and her vampish attitude towards sex. Though Hallam’s relationship with her is central to the film, her character is never really flushed out – would he fall in love with her if she didn’t resemble his mother? It’s a shame that the female roles aren’t stronger, and more complex, but it’s a common fault, and one that Mackenzie is also guilty of in Young Adam.

Though the film celebrates Edinburgh, this is one British film that is not trying to earn its success by being a tourist promotion for the UK, unlike the objectionable Notting Hill, or even Woody Allen’s Match Point, which pander to American audiences by creating a false, idealised view of Britain. Instead, Hallam Foe is a touching, funny and intelligent portrayal of a teenager stumbling through his grief in the cold, inhospitable climate of a grey country.

Sarah Cronin

Format: Cinema

Release date: 17 August 2007

Distributor: Dogwoof

Director: Alanté Kavaí­Â¯té

Cast: Emilie Dequenne, Ludmila Mikaí­Â«l, Mathieu Demy, Bruno Flender

France 2005

87 minutes

Ecoute le temps is the promising debut feature from young French director Alanté Kavaí­Â¯té, whose previous work includes the noted 2002 short The Carp as well as the co-directed documentary Childhood of a Leader, about Boris Yeltsin. Set in rural France, the film is a subtle thriller about a sound recordist, Charlotte (Emilie Dequenne), whose mother (Ludmila Mikaí­Â«l) is murdered in her home. Upon visiting the old house, Charlotte soon realises that she knew little about her mother’s life in the tiny village, a place where sinister locals eye Charlotte with suspicion. A police enquiry begins, but Charlotte decides to investigate on her own. Using her sound equipment, she starts recording noises in the house, but events take an uncanny turn when sounds of the past blend with sounds of the present.

The thriller narrative has a supernatural dimension as the recorded voices of the past, which ultimately lead Charlotte to the murderer, take the story beyond reality and beyond the conventions of the genre. This could be perceived as simply a clever gimmick, but Kavaí­Â¯té treats the subject matter with sensitivity; the ghostly voices also help Charlotte relive moments from the past and explore her troubled relationship with her mother. As such, Ecoute le temps is as much about grief as it is a murder mystery. This is also evident in the mise en scí­Â¨ne; the rural landscape shrouded in perpetual autumnal rain creates a mood of melancholy, which is intensified by Charlotte’s isolation in the house, an ominous place full of secrets.

Sound, both a central theme and a narrative trigger, is elemental in the film’s development. Coppola’s 1974 classic The Conversation (or even De Palma’s Blow Out) is an easy comparison to make here, but it is the way Kavaite turns the abstract sound into something tangible that is really striking. The voices of the past have no chronological order in the house but rather depend on the position of the microphone in space. Charlotte marks spots of sound by stretching thread between all four walls of the room. She eventually weaves a web so complex that she can barely move. This intricate maze is visually arresting (if a little confusing), and adds dynamism and physicality to both the narrative and Dequenne’s performance as Charlotte.

Dequenne is a versatile actress who has enjoyed great success in France in a number of films, including Rosetta, which won her the best actress award at the 2001 Cannes festival. Her performance as Charlotte is understated: she is diligent and has an air of cold distance (she has reason to be suspicious of the locals), but her warmth is visible in her relationship to Jérôme (Flender), the simple but sweet childhood friend and neighbour. Perhaps a little unexpectedly it is the old house that is the strongest supporting character. Charlotte is intrigued by the cracks in the walls that creak and moan as though exhausted by years of secrets and deceit. As Charlotte delves deeper and skeletons come out of the closet, the house slowly begins to succumb.

By the film’s conclusion it is clear that the identity of the murderer isn’t the only revelation. The ending suggests that the ineffectual police investigation is symptomatic of a deeper-rooted problem within the small community: a sense of apathy towards crime and a denial of responsibility, and Charlotte’s mother is a victim of their attitude. Like the secrets within the crumbling old house, Charlotte exposes the shortcomings of the community, though perhaps it is too little too late. Kavaí­Â¯té has turned her original screenplay into an atmospheric and often innovative film, and is probably a director to keep an eye out for in the future.

Lindsay Tudor

Format: Cinema

Release date: 17 August 2007

Distributor: Artificial Eye

Director: Corneliu Porumboiu

Original title: A fost sau n-a fost?

Cast: Ion Sapdaru, Teodor Corban, Mircea Andreescu

Romania 2006

89 minutes

At 12:08pm on December 22, 1989, the Romanian dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, fled the capital city of Bucharest in the face of overwhelming protests against his authoritarian regime. That moment is heralded as the collapse of communism in the Eastern Bloc country, and the beginning of an uncertain transition towards democracy. Corneliu Porumboiu’s Caméra d’Or winner for best debut feature, 12.08 East of Bucharest, is a sparsely elegant, humorous film that reflects on those events sixteen years on.

As the snow falls lightly across the desolate streets in a small town in eastern Romania, three men prepare to commemorate the anniversary of that fateful day. Jderescu (Teo Corban) is something of a local celebrity; a presenter and owner of the small, local television station, he is struggling to find guests willing to come on his talk show to discuss their recollections of the revolution. Manescu (Ion Sapdaru), one of the guests, wakes up hung over, his memory of the night before erased, to a call from Jderescu reminding him about the show. He is a drunk, a history professor who carries around a bottle of booze in his briefcase and is in debt to what seems like the entire town. The other, last-minute guest, Old Man Piscoci (Mircea Andreescu), is a lonely widower, known for playing Santa Claus at Christmas.

Jderescu’s talk show turns into an awkward, painfully comedic disaster. The topic up for discussion is whether or not there was a revolution in this obscure, modest town, or whether people merely took to the streets after 12:08 to celebrate Ceausescu’s flight. (The film’s Romanian title translates as ‘Was There or Wasn’t There?’) Manescu insists that he was present in the town square before 12:08 on that day in 1989 – and that he and a small band of colleagues (now all dead) played a small but essential part in the protests that toppled the communist regime. The irate townspeople who call in to the show contradict his version of events: a drunk now, he was a drunk then, and could never have taken part in such a momentous event. Insulted, Manescu clings to his story, desperate to believe that, once in his life, he performed a heroic act. Piscoci seems unconcerned with the debate, contenting himself with making origami sailboats. Full of regret over the loss of his wife, he has little interest in portraying himself as a hero. Ultimately, the acrimonious debate is inconclusive.

Shot in muted tones of brown and khaki, the film evokes not nostalgia, but the impression that little has changed in the years following the victory of the pro-democratic movement. The town itself is drab and barren; ugly concrete apartment blocks line the treeless streets, the architecture unmistakably communist. Long, uninterrupted takes filmed at a distance from the action with a single camera convey the impression that this film is of another era, composed much like a state-controlled television programme might have been. This realist cinematography roots the characters in the past for most of the film. It is only during the real-time filming of the talk show that the station’s young cameraman, standing in for Porumboiu, becomes involved in both the debate and the film itself. Framing the men in close-up, exposing their awkwardness, penetrating their truthfulness and remorse, he finally injects a touch of modernity into the reminiscences of the past.

12:08 East of Bucharest is undeniably an esoteric film that will appeal to a small, but avid film-going audience. A perfect example of Eastern European art-house cinema, it offers an intelligent reflection on the nature of memory and the collapse of communism in a small Romanian town.

Sarah Cronin