Format: Cinema

Release date: 27 April 2007

Distributor: Optimum

Director: Shane Meadows

Cast Thomas Turgoose, Stephen Graham, Andrew Shim

UK 2007

100 minutes

You know what you get with a Shane Meadows film; more certainly than even Mike Leigh or Ken Loach, his name on the credits tells you what you’re in for: a Midlands-set working-class drama scattered with moments of real comedy and genuinely disturbing flashes of violence. Although he is still to have a commercial hit (even the ‘star-studded’ Once Upon a Time in the Midlands flopped) Shane Meadows is becoming one of this country’s major filmmakers (South Bank Show special coming soon) and he has found his own niche in British cinema. Although he is very much part of the social realist element that has run from John Grierson and the GPO (via the kitchen sink to Mike Leigh and Alan Clarke) through to Trainspotting and The Full Monty, his is a distinct voice (even his adverts for McDonalds have this feel). The main difference between Shane Meadows and this tradition is his closeness to his subject matter. Unlike Loach and Clarke, Meadows is not a middle-class filmmaker looking in. A self-taught, seemingly ‘natural’ filmmaker, he is depicting something he understands on a more instinctive level. His working-class characters are more varied and complex, often contradictory, individuals driven less by their economic situation than by their inner (often Freudian) desires.

This Is England is Shane Meadows’ fifth proper feature film and his first period ‘costume’ drama (albeit skinheads in the 1980s) and perhaps he is treading over the same ground and themes (same people just shorter hair and bigger boots) but, unlike Calverton Colliery, there’s plenty more coal in this mine. This Is England marks a return, stylistically and thematically, to his earlier films, particularly A Room for Romeo Brass (not that he’d moved very far away). It features many unknown and unprofessional actors including many Meadows alumni such as Andrew Shim and Vicky McClure, the child stars of Romeo Brass.

Like that film it is another semi-autobiographical morality tale. At times it seems like an After School Special or a Play for Today to warn children against playing with racists. But it is far more complex. The chief racist, Combo (Stephen Graham), is himself mixed-race and at times a caring and appealing character. The racists aren’t demonised and the film is all the stronger for making them more human, less mindless; and the racism all the more disturbing. However, it is the racist swearing that has, somewhat controversially, earned the film its 18 certificate.

Although based on Shane Meadows’ own experiences growing up in Uttoxeter, it is set in a nameless provincial town complete with a mixture of regional, Midlands and Northern, accents. The film was largely shot in St Ann’s in Nottingham with a few incongruous visits to the Grimsby ‘seaside’. The main character, ‘cryptically’ called Shaun (Thomas Turgoose), is a 13-year-old who becomes a mascot-like figure to a gang of older skinheads. It is a bildungsroman or rites-of-passage film in a similar vein to Franí§ois Truffaut’s 400 Blows or Lasse Hallstrí¶m’s My Life as a Dog but of course very British. The child’s point of view device is used to similar effect. We allow the character more mistakes; even misguided racism is forgivable. But it also gives the viewer an outsider’s perspective. It is through this that we can see the desirable aspects of being a skinhead, of belonging to a gang.

This Is England shows a much greater understanding of skinhead culture than Alan Clarke’s Made in Britain (perhaps the only other well-known skinhead film). Most importantly it shows the sense of belonging that comes with being part of a gang, which Clarke’s film ignores. We see the skinheads through their shared identity and with all the contradictions that that entails. Combo claims to be an original skinhead from the late 60s and the soundtrack is packed with old ska tunes, mostly Toots and the Maytals. It is this paradox, how a culture based on black Jamaican music could embrace the National Front, that is central to the subculture. The late 70s and early 80s skinhead revival was based on a mixture of ska and oi punk. It is oi (well the oi-ish UK Subs) which plays as they drive off to the NF meeting in Combo’s car (complete with L-plates). At one point the contradictions seem to go too far; the scene in which Woody’s gang put on ridiculous fancy-dress costumes to go ‘hunting’ just doesn’t ring true. Do skinheads really behave like this? But then, I almost trust Shane Meadows enough to believe that it really happened – he’s such an honest filmmaker.

The film starts with a montage of 1980s iconography, a two-minute version of I love 1983, featuring Margaret Thatcher, Roland Rat, the Rubik’s Cube and the Falklands War. The footage largely comes from the ITN archives (it somehow seems fitting that Shane Meadows remembers the 80s through ITN and not the BBC). The period detail is exact and constant throughout (Ford Escorts, Grifter bikes) but without dominating the drama or playing for laughs as in Life On Mars. The period detail even stretches to attitudes. Combo asks Milky whether he feels English or Jamaican – his own version of Norman Tebbit’s cricket test. But perhaps what is most surprising is how little some things have changed, and not just the St Ann’s council estate location (not a satellite dish in sight). We have come from the Falklands War to the Iraq War, from skinheads to hoodies and from the wrong trousers (flares in 1983!) to the wrong trainers or the wrong phone. Perhaps that’s why it’s called This Is England.

It is a film full of great performances: first-time actor (in anything – including school plays) Thomas Turgoose holds the entire film together; Rosamund Hanson as Smell is hilarious and Stephen Graham deserves the skinhead equivalent of a BAFTA (an Oi! perhaps). It if wasn’t for the pleading acoustic guitars emphasising those introspective moments This Is England could be my favourite British film of the noughties and the eighties. Still, this is another great Shane Meadows film, and maybe his best so far.

Paul Huckerby

Format: Cinema

Release date: 27 April 2007

Distributor: Verve Pictures

Director: Stephen Kijak

UK/USA 2006

95 minutes

It’s difficult to think of another artist whose work has taken the same trajectory as that of the enigmatic Scott Walker (né Engel), from teen pop idol to avant-garde composer, from low to high art, from the universal appeal of the pop song to the altogether more uncompromising abstractions of industrial noise. Imagine if you will if Justin Timberlake were to grow tired of this pop lark, announce himself as a fan of one of the numerous wild and wonderful directors featured elsewhere on this site, and disappear from public life in order to dedicate himself to furthering Steve Reich’s work on phasing. It’s an astonishing transformation (Walker’s, not Timberlake’s – that hasn’t really happened, you can wake up now) when you consider that the Walker Brothers were little more than a boy band whose members wielded minimal artistic influence, albeit an extremely polished one thanks to Scott’s delicious baritone and access to the best songs by the best writers of the day.

Stephen Kijak’s documentary 30 Century Man tells the story of that transformation – the long and, at times, tortuous journey of artistic discovery that took Walker from accidental honey-voiced frontman to critically-acclaimed composer. It’s a story that’s difficult to fuck up, and despite a lack of period footage and any kind of flair in the storytelling, it sticks to its task and makes for compelling viewing. It’s helped enormously by the inclusion of an extremely rare interview with the man himself who comes across as likeable, articulate, intensely thoughtful and engaging. Back in the sixties Walker’s disguise of choice was a pair of shades, seemingly less of an affectation than that of most pop stars if the stories of his legendary shyness are to be believed (it’s alleged that Walker once crashed a car to avoid playing a show, though if you will wear shades in mid-winter these things are going to happen), but these days he hides beneath the brim of a baseball cap. Jarvis Cocker notes early on in the film that when Walker produced Pulp’s We Love Life album, the brim of the cap rose steadily as Walker became more comfortable with the situation. Here we get full, unfettered access to Walker sans hat, and a corresponding openness. Our unrestricted view shows Walker to be a remarkably well-preserved 63-year-old, his skin flushed with health, so much so that long-time Scott fan and the film’s executive producer David Bowie, the original ageless pop star, Sir Cliff notwithstanding, looks positively craggy by comparison.

Perhaps in a bid to compensate for the lack of archive material the movie is weighed down by a preponderance of talking heads and while Cocker is a veritable goldmine to documentary filmmakers everywhere, always ready with an interesting anecdote or angle, many of the other contributors fall into the categories of fandom or, worse, self-absorption. Sting pops up to describe Walker as ‘existential’, Damon Albarn is so damn smart as to be unintelligible, while Radiohead talk more about their own records than those of Scott’s. All in all, it’s a bit of a hotchpotch as we move from the early years of Walker Brothers mania and through Scott’s solo records and his discovery of Jacques Brel, Walker’s artistic influence increasing at every step as his commercial standing falls further and further, his TV show cancelled, his star on the wane, to arrive at the artistic highpoint of Scott 4, his undisputed masterpiece, the point of equilibrium where Scott’s intellect and pop nous exist in perfect balance… and the point where the money ran out, his sixties fanbase deserted him, and the record company’s indulgence stopped short. We pick through the detritus… fulfilling the contractually obligation: the albums of movie themes, the Walker Brothers reformation, the forays into country and the drift towards MOR… all the way to the final Walker Brothers album Nite Flights in 1977 with its four extraordinary Scott Walker compositions, where Scott throws caution to the wind in the knowledge that the band are certain to be dropped. They are. And then the film begins.

After a brief examination of 1984’s Climate Of Hunter, and of Julian Cope’s role in Scott’s rehabilitation as the compiler of the excellent Fire Escape In The Sky album, the final third of the film is given over to the making of Tilt (1995) and Walker’s latest, The Drift, released last year. Whereas the preceding part of the film has the feel of a hastily assembled TV documentary, this insight into Walker’s creative mindset is genuinely rewarding and far more involved, and if you’re left with the feeling that the price of Walker’s co-operation was this focus on his latest work, you also feel grateful that it should be so. Tilt and The Drift are innovative works of disturbing intensity that reflect our own nightmarish reality, as Walker experiments around the edges of discord, throwing his disquieting, almost abstract words into the brew. The talking heads are momentarily thrown, unsure of the correct response, victims of a practical joke. In the movie’s best moment we’re treated to the sight of Scott in the studio instructing his percussionist on the best way to punch a slab of meat for a song about the hanging corpses of Mussolini and his mistress. For a moment we’re into Spinal Tap territory, and then we hear the finished version of the song. It works.

There’s little left of Scott Walker, sixties heart-throb and greatest voice of his generation. Even the once great baritone is somewhat diminished. Walker’s infrequent forays into the world of popular entertainment, the appearances on The Tube and, latterly, on Later (let’s see you play some boogie-woogie piano to that Jools!) seem more and more incongruous. Scott Walker died sometime in 1977 and Scott Engels was reborn… by rights he should have reverted to his own name then, so little do Tilt and The Drift have in common with the sixties pop masterpieces of the band from where he took his name. Scott Walker, avant-garde composer, is finally where he always wanted to be, in complete control of his artistic destiny. It may have taken him a lifetime to get there, but there he is, occasionally dragged back into view by Sixties Scott. This film shows us a little of how he got there, and a little more of where he is now. If the Bergman-loving Scott Engels himself had been behind the lens, what a movie it could have been.

Sean Price

Format: Cinema

Release date: 5 April 2007

Distributor: 20th Century Fox

Director: Danny Boyle

Cast: Cillian Murphy, Rose Byrne, Chris Evans, Michelle Yeoh

UK 2007

107 minutes

Science fiction often requires a certain suspension of disbelief. Sunshine, the latest film from director Danny Boyle and script-writer Alex Garland, depends heavily on audiences’ willingness to overlook basic plausibility and to lose themselves in this aesthetically stunning, but curiously vacant, thriller.

Fifty years from now the sun is dying. In a desperate bid to save the Earth eight astronauts have been sent into outer space on board the ominously-named Icarus II. Their mission is to safely deliver a nuclear bomb – the ‘payload’ – into the heart of the dying star in the hope of kick-starting it back in to life. Icarus II represents the world’s last chance for salvation, following the mysterious loss of the Icarus I, which attempted the same mission seven years before.

Sunshine begins as a meditation on the fragility of the planet we live on; current fears of the consequences of global warming are both subverted and intensified. Rather than seas rising and the world over-heating, Earth is suffering from a solar winter, with cities like Sydney covered in a blanket of ice. But the cause of the crisis is not man-made; the fate of the planet depends rather on forces beyond our control, perhaps even on some kind of spiritual or metaphysical god. Delivering the payload is a last attempt by man to interfere with the omnipotence of nature.

The burden is perhaps too great; sentimentality pervades the thoughts and actions of the crew members. Mace, the ship’s engineer (played by the impressive Chris Evans) is the only character who maintains a convincing steadfast duty to complete the mission, uncompromised by his emotions. When the ship picks up a signal from Icarus I, the incongruous decision to divert Icarus II from her flight path to dock with her sister-ship is made; a decision influenced by an emotional desire to learn the fate of the original crew. The crew lose their way, mentally and physically, adrift in the infinite expanse of space. Earth’s existence is threatened by the crew’s very humanity.

The flaw with this premise is that the characters, and their actions, are simply not convincing. Cillian Murphy, who starred in 28 Days Later, the previous apocalyptic film from the Boyle-Garland team, plays Capa, the nuclear physicist who’s invented the payload and is the only crew member capable of operating the device. It seems somewhat implausible that the young, extremely attractive Murphy could be the world’s pre-eminent nuclear physicist, entrusted with the task of saving mankind. Half of the crew is made up of actors too young, too attractive, to really be credible in their roles, with the exception of Michelle Yeoh and Hiroyuki Saneda, both extremely experienced Asian actors. Sunshine is a film for the O.C. generation: science fiction for the hipster crowd.

Throughout the film we are supposed to experience a torrent of emotions – the fear, hope and desperation that the crew feels on its fateful mission. But we know nothing about the characters or their history; instead they are virtually one-dimensional, often serving to move the plot along but without adding any real depth to the film. Most successful and gripping are the intense, dramatic close-ups of Capa, claustrophobic in his futuristic space suit, sweat dripping, his eyes darting, breathing heavily, terrified as he’s unleashed into outer space to try and repair the damaged Icarus II (and, of course, save the world). Though the actors are all convincing in portraying their terror and anguish, it is difficult to feel moved by their fate: a flaw that unfortunately diminishes the film’s emotional impact.

This is not to say that the film is without drama or excitement; rather it is the Icarus itself, and the burning, raging sun, that are crucial to the build-up of tension, the focal points of the real thrills and action in the film. The spaceship is stunning, the visual effects brilliant. The imposing, gleaming shields on Icarus are a character in themselves. It is easy to become immersed in the blazing sun, to understand the creeping madness that consumes the ship’s psychiatrist, played by Cliff Curtis, who is overwhelmed by its intensity, until he becomes a burnt-out husk of a person. An aural masterwork, the organic sounds made by the Icarus, and the score by Underworld add a palpable sense of fear to the drama, conveying a host of emotions that the sometimes trite dialogue never does. Despite its faults, Sunshine is exhilarating to watch on a visceral level, and will undoubtedly become a cult classic in the sci-fi canon.

Sarah Cronin

Format: Cinema

Screening at The Barbican

Date: 15 April 2007

Time 3pm

Director: Tod Browning

Cast: Lon Chaney, Joan Crawford

USA 1927

48 minutes

A unique figure in early American cinema, director Tod Browning is best known for his stupefying Freaks (1932) and for his standard-setting Dracula (1931), starring Bela Lugosi. Between 1919 and 1930 he made eleven films with another rather singular Hollywood figure, actor Lon Chaney. Dubbed ‘the man with a thousand faces’ for his mastery of startling make-up effects, Chaney shared with Browning a fascination for the bizarre and the unconventional and for physical deformity, possibly as a result of their respective early years: Chaney’s parents were deaf-mutes while Browning allegedly worked in a circus as a clown, a contortionist and an act called ‘The Living Hypnotic Corpse’.

In The Unknown, Chaney plays Alonzo, an armless knife-thrower in a gypsy circus in love with Nanon, the daughter of the circus owner (played by a very young Joan Crawford). Malabar, the show’s strongman, is similarly infatuated but Nanon’s intense phobia of being touched by men’s hands keeps them apart and brings her closer to Alonzo. Little does she know that Alonzo is in fact a wanted criminal. Distinguished by a deformed double thumb that would make him instantly recognizable to the police, he passes himself off as a cripple, concealing his arms under a tight corset. Desperately afraid that Nanon will reject him if she finds out the truth, he resorts to a drastic course of action and decides to have his arms cut off. While Alonzo disappears into a shady clinic, Malabar perseveres in his courting of Nanon and wins her over. On his return Alonzo learns that Nanon and Malabar are to be married. Only one thing is left to him – revenge.

There is of course an undercurrent of sexual anxiety in Nanon’s phobia and in the contrast between Malabar’s muscular limbs and Alonzo’s lack of them. But more interestingly, body parts are the currency in which love is traded between the characters. Malabar has to rely on attributes other than his arms in order to earn Nanon’s trust while Nanon learns to accept them as a sign of love and Alonzo gives up his in a trade-off which he hopes will deliver Nanon to him. Devoured by his obsession for Nanon, he is prepared to pay for her in his own flesh. Love turns him into a real cripple, physical deformity conveying the intensity of his emotions, which are literally carved into his body. Mutilation here is a poignant, literal image of the sacrifice the obsessive lover is prepared to make to be loved back.

But deformity is also an act and here we recognise Browning’s fascination for theatrical illusion. The knife-throwing number that opens the film is doubly a show: a freakish circus act on the surface, it is also Alonzo’s secret cripple impersonation, witnessed only by us and his midget sidekick Cojo. In fact, the whole of Alonzo’s relationship with Nanon is based on pretence, which does not make it any less deeply felt. When Nanon wishes that God would cut off all of men’s hands, Alonzo feigns to be genuinely hurt. When she tells him she’s getting married to Malabar after Alonzo has just mutilated his body for the love of her, he has to simulate happiness. At no point can he be sincere and at no point does she find out the truth about him. Fittingly, Alonzo dies on stage, a true performer to the end. Browning returns here to one of his favoured themes – the tragedy of the performer, who, being too good an actor for his own sake, dies utterly isolated and misunderstood.

Only with Cojo can Alonzo throw off the mask and be himself. But as the performance becomes second nature what this self truly is becomes increasingly muddled. In an astounding scene, Alonzo, distraught by the prospect that Nanon may never belong to him, smokes a cigarette with his feet, forgetting to use his arms, which are untied at that point. Over the course of the film he becomes what he was simply pretending to be at the beginning, overwhelmed by his own performance. To complicate matters, there is the fact that a body double was used for some of the scenes – Peter Dismuki, who was born without arms – so that what we see on screen is an intricate illusion where a bizarre composite of Chaney and Dismuki’s bodies pretends to be Alonzo pretending to be a cripple… In the theatrical world there is no real self – all is illusion.

As the cigarette-smoking scene shows, tragedy is never far from comedy in Browning’s cinema. While Alonzo’s despair is truly heart-rending, there is also something positively funny about that scene. Browning started his Hollywood career as a slapstick actor and some of what he learnt during those years clearly rubbed off on his work as a director. He is a true master of the grotesque, nimbly walking the fine line between repulsive and ridiculous, between horror and burlesque. In that he is seconded by Chaney’s amazing powers of expression, the actor’s craggy, lived-in face moving from hate to love, from need to menace and despair in the blink of an instant. Able to express contradictory emotions at the same time, Chaney beautifully handles the uneasy balance between tears and laughter, remaining deeply moving in the most incongruous situations. As a result, even though Alonzo is a criminal, a frighteningly possessive lover and a man driven by the darkest impulses, he is the one that you root for. This is where Browning’s heart clearly is – with the freaks, the loners and the misfits, with the anguished yearnings of troubled souls.

Virginie Sélavy

Also screening at the Barbican as part of the Lon Chaney season is The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) with live accompaniment by Stephen Horne – Sunday 22 April, 4pm.

Format: Cinema

Release date: 9 March 2007

Distributor: Optimum

Director: David Lynch

Cast: Laura Dern, Jeremy Irons, Justin Theroux, Harry Dean Stanton

USA/Poland/France 2006

180 mins

Inland Empire, David Lynch’s tenth feature, is in many ways a summing-up of his career so far: it has a budget, a look and a sound design that are not that different from his 1977 experimental debut Eraserhead; it stars one of Lynch’s favourite actresses, Laura Dern, who also appeared in Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart; and its plot almost follows on from Mulholland Drive.

Nikki Grace (Laura Dern) could indeed be Betty (Naomi Watts) from Mulholland Drive twenty years on. Now mature and established, she has just landed the role of Susan Blue in a film entitled On High in Blue Tomorrows, the remake of an unfinished film based on a Polish folk tale that may or may not be cursed. As Inland Empire plays out, the lines between the remake and the original blur – and to add a further level of complexity these two films blend in with the story of what happened to the cast of the previous film and with the trials and tribulations of Nikki Grace’s personal life.

These stories are so intermingled that it is simply pointless to try and make sense of them. David Lynch goes to extraordinary lengths to make sure that you don’t, guiding you towards a particular frame of mind. Unusually here, Lynch seems to want you to trust the film and to trust him as an artist, exposing himself and his methods far more than he has ever done before. Inland Empire opens as Nikki gets a surprise visit from Grace Zabriskie’s emigrant neighbour who disturbingly seems to know exactly what is going to happen in Nikki’s life. We share Nikki’s confusion at her predictions, which puts us in a situation unprecedented in a David Lynch movie: from the outset we share the journey of the leading actress. This is the key to the power of Inland Empire: at no point do we feel that Laura Dern is any wiser than us; and at no point do we feel that, as an actress, she is lost because of that. Her performance can only come from an actress who completely trusts the director.

While Laura Dern provides the movie with its heart Lynch adds an unusually high dose of almost Godardian one-liners to the script, which attack the rational frame of mind required to follow traditional movies. One example is offered by Harry Dean Stanton’s assistant director Freddie who declares that ‘Dogs reason their way out of trouble’. Godard’s game-playing with the audience is even echoed in a flirtatious exchange between the Blue Tomorrows characters Susan Blue and Billy Slide. It is presented to us as a ‘real-life’ encounter between the actors Nikki Grace and Devon Berk (Justin Theroux) and the artifice isn’t revealed until the fictional director (Jeremy Irons) shouts ‘cut!’

The big difference between Lynch and Godard is that Lynch makes no political or even aesthetic statements with these ploys but merely tries to provide his audience with ways into Inland Empire. This is what makes this film unusual in the Lynch canon and more satisfying than most of his other films. When, in one of the Poland-set scenes, Nikki Grace/Susan Blue replies in English to her Polish interlocutor, ‘I understand it but I don’t speak it’, it uncannily echoes what may be at the heart of the film, i.e., how cinema can operate in a metaphysical rather than a rational sense. Dern’s intense, utterly convincing performance is what makes you trust that the film is indeed full of meaning. In that sense Inland Empire is like the intelligent cousin of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Double life of Veronique.

Kim Nicolajsen

Format: Cinema

Release date: 9 March 2007

Distributor: Artificial Eye

Director: Paolo Sorrentino

Original title L’Amico di famiglia

Cast: Giacomo Rizzo, Laura Chiatti, Fabrizio Bentivoglio

Italy/France 2006

99 minutes

Greed, desire, frustration and revenge all course through Paolo Sorrentino’s latest film The Family Friend, his follow-up to the captivating The Consequences of Love. There are similarities between the two – the enigmatic protagonist who falls for the young, beautiful woman seemingly just out of reach; each man undone by his desire; the lurking, criminal underbelly of humanity that forms the backdrop to both films. But while The Consequences of Love was absorbing, original and thought-provoking, The Family Friend is an irritating waste of potential talent.

Geremia ‘Heart of Gold’ (Giacomo Rizzo) is a vile, miserly loan shark. Seventy and unmarried, he lives in a squalid apartment with his bed-ridden mother, peeping on the young girls playing volleyball on the court outside the window. The town’s professional matchmaker has exhausted all possible brides for him, save for the Romanian immigrant who can barely hide her disgust. Unconcerned by the revulsion he generates, the loan shark insinuates himself into the lives of his clients, the undesirable ‘family friend’. He is eventually unmanned by the young, impossibly beautiful Rosalba (Laura Chiatti). A prized daughter, she is betrayed by her parents for their own vanity. When they realise that they cannot possibly pay off the money borrowed for her wedding, Rosalba’s body is sold to Geremia to cut a better deal. Hardly innocent, she extracts her own, cruel revenge.

Wonderfully shot, beautifully lit and well-acted, there are some brilliant, insightful moments in The Family Friend. Unfortunately, Sorrentino simply tries too hard to create a film that is provocative, nasty, and jarring. There are too many gratuitous absurdities in the film that add little to the plot, while Geremia is too grotesque, too perverted, to be taken seriously. The film is especially let down by one achingly terrible scene that could kindly be called a tribute to David Lynch gone horribly wrong, involving volleyballs and a large woman in control top underwear. The denouement, which could have been an interesting plot twist, is rushed and unconvincing, the pacing appalling.

The director wants us to believe that we are all corrupt, all capable of selling ourselves for the right price. Beauty is twisted into an ugly weapon. But Sorrentino sabotages his own message by placing edginess and style on a pedestal and leaving old-fashioned narrative in the gutter. Sorrentino is undoubtedly capable of making another intriguing film like The Consequences of Love; perhaps next time he’ll be less obsessed with the meaningless provocation that has ultimately made The Family Friend such a disappointment.

Sarah Cronin

Format: Cinema

Release date: 16 February 2007

Distributor: BFI

Director: Luis Buí±uel

Original title: Los Olvidados

Cast: Alfonso Mejia, Roberto Cobo, Estela Inda

Mexico 1950

88 mins

After Un Chien Andalou (1928), L’Age d’Or (1930) and Land Without Bread in 1932 Luis Buí±uel didn’t direct another film until 1947. A period dubbing American films into Spanish and producing mainstream films was followed by the disruption of two wars and a move to America, where he worked briefly managing the film programme at MoMA.

He was about to get US citizenship, when producer Oscar Dancigers persuaded him to move his family from LA to live and work in Mexico. His first two films, Gran Casino (a musical) and El Gran Calavera (‘impossibly banal but made a lot of money’, according to Buí±uel in My Last Breath) were followed in 1950 by his first real film in Mexico, Los Olvidados – a title variously translated as The Forgotten, The Lost Ones, The Young and the Damned and Pitié pour eux (Pity for Them – Buí±uel’s least favourite).

It was Dancigers who suggested they make a film about slum children. Buí±uel was an admirer of Vittorio De Sica’s Shoeshine and The Bicycle Thieves and loved the idea. In preparation he dressed in ‘threadbare clothes’ and toured the slums of Mexico City watching, listening and asking questions. ‘Much of what I saw went unchanged into the film’, he claimed.

Despite an opening montage suggesting that this happens in all big cities (New York, London, Paris), the film was much criticised on its initial release for Buí±uel’s negative portrayal of his adopted country. There were even calls for his expulsion. It was only after it won the prize for best direction at Cannes that it began to find an audience.

‘Don’t worry if the movie’s too short, I’ll just put in a dream.’

Although Buí±uel doesn’t specify which of his films he was referring to, it could apply to many. But also, the just putting in of a dream would be no time filler; for Buí±uel dreams are a central part of being. Although on one level Los Olvidados is an almost neo-realist film about the plight of slum children (a lot like a section from Roberto Rossellini’s Paisan but with crueller children and a few surrealist touches), it is the central character Pedro’s inner turmoil that triggers both the film’s famous dream sequence and the plot itself.

Los Olvidados follows a dream-like (nightmarish) narrative reminiscent of such contemporary film noirs as Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street. Pedro cannot escape his nightmare world. Every time his future starts to look more positive something bad turns up (usually his ‘friend’ Jaibo). The film starts with a warning, not about sex and violence, but about the ‘not optimistic’ ending, which adds to the film’s noirish fatalistic feel. It’s a lethal combination of bad luck and bad company (Jaibo turns up just as Pedro is about to prove himself trustworthy) mixed with his dire economic situation that brings about Pedro’s inevitable downfall.

However, as is often the case in crime films, Pedro’s defeat and his adversary (Jaibo) are very much part of himself. This is dramatically illustrated with the matching shots of both Pedro and Jaibo dishing out vicious clubbings. Jaibo is the devil on his shoulder offering bad advice (his mother plays the angel). Or in Freudian terms (Freud is as central to Buí±uel as Catholicism) the id and the superego. It is through his relationship with the other characters (particularly Jaibo and his mother) that Buí±uel shows the conflicts in Pedro’s unconscious mind.

Buí±uel claims that although he was a serious Communist sympathiser, he always found Marxist doctrine lacked attention to the inner desires – people’s psychological drives. Los Olvidados doesn’t show the conflict between rich and poor but it does show how poverty affects the psyche. Animal instincts drive the characters, most notably hunger. The young innocent Ochitos drinks milk straight from a donkey’s teat. In the dream sequence, Pedro and Jaibo fight over a piece of raw meat. The slums are a place where the id (Jaibo) can bully the superego or even club it to death when it’s not looking. Morality and conscience have no place in the fight for survival. As shown by L’Age d’Or‘s fighting scorpions, Buí±uel’s world is one where big animals eat smaller ones. When Jaibo explains how the weak are picked on in reform school Pedro finds this cowardly, but to Jaibo it is natural, the law of the jungle. Jaibo is a hunter. His victims are blind, crippled or just smaller. Pedro resorts to scavenging for food in a rubbish dump, like one of the stray dogs wandering through the film, before being chased off by two rivals claiming it as their territory.

Los Olvidados is the film where Buí±uel most finely balances the conscious and the unconscious, dream and reality. It is a social-issue film about the realities of poverty and the expansion of the cities, the rural peasants adapting to a new way of life in the slums of Mexico City. It is also a film about psychological conflict. However, Buí±uel does not use Freud Hollywood-style as shorthand for character motivation (although Jaibo’s memory of his mother is a bit of a ‘rosebud’ moment). And despite Buí±uel’s determined atheism and anticlericalism, it is a film about good and evil.

Paul Huckerby