Format: DVD and Blu-ray

Date: 27 April 2009

Distributor: BFI

Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini

Writer Pier Paolo Pasolini

Based on the book by: Boccaccio

Original title: Il Decameron

Cast: Franco Citti, Ninetto Davoli, Pier Paolo Pasolini

Italy 1971

112 mins

Pier Paolo Pasolini, poet, painter, writer, homosexual, Marxist, filmmaker and enfant terrible, was certainly a multi-faceted artist. His films similarly show great variety, from his late neo-realist gangster classic Accattone (1961) to Greek tragedy in Medea (1969), from intellectual allegory in Theorem (1968) to the popular pastoral bawdy romps that Pasolini called his ‘Trilogy of Life’. The Decameron makes up the first part of this trilogy; the other two films - The Canterbury Tales (1972) and Arabian Nights (1974) - are similarly based on medieval folk tales and storytelling. However, from the opening shot, which shows the director’s regular collaborator Franco Citti (who starred as Accattone) bludgeoning an unseen victim, we are never in any doubt that this is a classic Pasolini film.

Choosing 10 stories from Boccaccio’s 100, and dispensing with the framing narrative - seven women and three men (with their servants) tell stories to while away the time spent in the country to avoid the Great Plague of 1348 - Pasolini’s film nevertheless perfectly captures the spirit of these tales. The film is divided into two parts, each composed of five stories, one framing the other four. All are faithful to Boccaccio’s originals but are also well suited to Pasolini’s world view: sinners are remembered as saints, evil doings go unpunished and religious hypocrisy is rife. Typically, Pasolini also juxtaposes contradictory tales to emphasise their political aspect. We go from aspirational parents who insist on marriage when they catch their daughter in flagrante with the son of a wealthy man, to the famous ‘Pot of Basil’ story, in which a girl is caught with a lower-class lover, with grisly results. The latter tale is kindly shortened, allowing the girl to keep her pot of basil and water it with her tears, in contrast to Boccaccio’s original tale or Keats’s great poem. Although Pasolini is interested in the political subtext of the tales, he hardly offers a Marxist reworking - the bawdy folk tales are told simply and the film never feels didactic.

Pasolini himself plays an artist dreaming of and painting frescoes of heaven and hell on a church wall. In Boccaccio’s epic, the artist is the Early Renaissance painter Giotto, although he is modestly recast here as a ‘student of the master’ (in The Canterbury Tales, Pasolini similarly plays Geoffrey Chaucer). The film has a painterly look with colours that seem to have been taken directly from Giotto’s palette, although the scenes are perhaps more reminiscent of Breughel or Bosch. Perhaps Giotto’s most important legacy was his introduction of the technique of life drawing; a similar impulse can be seen in Boccaccio’s embrace of popular folk tales and particularly in his decision to write in vernacular Italian rather than Latin. Similarly, Pasolini, it seems, is striving to create a vernacular cinema.

The depiction of the Middle Ages may not be quite as filthy as that in Monty Python and The Holy Grail (1975), with its mud-encrusted peasants, but with carefully chosen locations and non-professional actors (framed in Pasolini’s long, still close-ups) clearly cast for their medieval dentistry, we get an essentially realist depiction akin to Rossellini’s Francesco Giullare di Dio (1950). Unfortunately, the clumsy post-synchronised sound seems to be the price we pay for those great locations.

The emphasis on simplicity means that the stories seem slight and at times underwhelming (even Ennio Morricone’s score is free of bombast and confined to folk ditties), and the humour (falling into cesspits, etc.) is not so far removed from a Carry On film. However, there is an honesty about sexual relations rarely found in 20th-century literature or film, as well as a determination to entertain the audience that was key to the storytelling tradition. These films were Pasolini’s biggest box-office successes. This led to a series of imitation bawdy romps to be released in Italy, which caused Pasolini to write a repudiation of his trilogy and to return to a rather less crowd-pleasing cinema with his next film - Salí³, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975).

The Decameron, like most of Pasolini’s work, never fully satisfies, lacking the epic sweep that such an adaptation deserves, but it is a serious and worthy attempt. The film ends with Giotto’s student (Pasolini) looking at the completed dream-inspired frescoes, asking a question that could be applied to any such adaptations or even to artistic creation itself, one that fully captures Pasolini’s self-doubts: ‘Why paint a picture when the dream is so much better?’

Paul Huckerby

Also available from the BFI on DVD and Blu-ray: Arabian Nights and The Canterbury Tales.

Format: DVD and Blu-ray

Date: 27 April 2009

Distributor: BFI

Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini

Writers: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Dacia Maraini

Based on: Arabian Nights

Original title: Il fiore delle mille e una notte

Cast: Franco Merli, Ines Pelligrini, Ninetto Davoli, Franco Citti

Italy 1974

129 mins

How would a notable director make a film based on the Thousand and One Nights now? Enlist some notable actors, build some spectacular sets, spend a lot of money on CGI to give visual expression to the fantastic. Maybe, for a highbrow audience, include some knowing or ironic framing material, to encourage consciousness of our apartness from this exotic world of stories, of our status as post-colonial voyeurs…

Pier Paolo Pasolini, choosing this for the last in his series of three erotic picaresques, took a different route. He enlisted a ragtag of young Italians with little acting experience, and trailed around spectacular locations (in Ethiopia, Yemen, Iran, Nepal), apparently picking raw local talent on the spot to fill out the cast. Nor is there any question of distance from the story: he plunges us straight in, and the best way to enjoy the film is to submit to the tale-telling. Pasolini dispenses entirely with the story that frames all the other stories, and which gives piquancy to the narrative’s endless inventiveness (Scheherazade’s survival depends on her being able to keep up the entertainment). This makes the film less subtle than its literary source, but does perhaps help us forget that we are playing make-believe.

The film is not just a random string of disconnected tales. The themes of captivity, escape and freedom run through it. We see, perhaps, that life is harsh, but that freedom and pleasure can be found through resourcefulness. We can also ponder the film’s motto: the truth is revealed not in one dream but in many. The stories are out of our reach, we can hardly see them as true. But they do show us some true things about our world.

The use of amateur actors works wonderfully, at least in dramatic terms. These stories were invented, enjoyed, embellished, and passed on by the folk, and it is entirely appropriate to see them inhabited by the folk. Never mind that most of the leading actors clearly do not belong in the locations as the rest of the cast do. This is a film in which European viewers are invited to enter into the world of the stories, as the European actors do. The effort of suspending disbelief is not great, thanks to the vigour of the performances. The crude dubbing can be distracting, but probably the scenes would not have been performed with such spontaneity under the constraints of live sound recording.

One thing that a filmmaker would certainly not do now, on pain of scandal, is enlist teenagers from much less sophisticated cultural backgrounds than his own and get them to enact sexual scenes. Well, this certainly does give a sense of freshness to the erotic content running through the film, but is also likely to make the viewer feel some discomfort at enjoying watching the cast go at it. My judgement, naí¯ve maybe, is that Pasolini’s film is knowingly transgressive, but not in a cynical or debasing way. The use of amateur actors was one of the enlivening features of post-war Italian cinema, and I would like to think Arabian Nights is an honourable continuation of that tradition. Whatever the ethics of Pasolini’s relationship with his cast, in that uninhibited era, I think what we have now is a film that the participants could be proud of, rather than ashamed of. Though ribald, sexually explicit, and violent, it is not coarse or brutal – a series of dreams, flickering only occasionally into nightmare.

Peter Momtchiloff

Also available from the BFI on DVD and Blu-ray: The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales.

Format: DVD

Date: 18 May 2009

Distributor: Peccadillo Pictures

Director: Laurent Achard

Writers: Laurent Achard, Nathalie Najem

Based on the novel by: Timothy Findley

Original title: Le Dernier des fous

Cast: Julien Cochelin, Annie Cordy, Pascal Cervo, Dominique Reymond, Fattouma Ousliha Bouamari

France/Belgium 2006

95 mins

The Last of the Crazy People is the second feature film from French writer/director Laurent Achard, adapted from Timothy Findley’s 1967 novel of the same name. Not dissimilar from the films of Michael Haneke, it is a work of formal sophistication and psychological complexity.

The film opens in a dark room, on a softly illumined eye peeking outside through a chink in a door. We soon learn that this eye belongs to Martin, the somber, 10-year-old boy who we follow throughout the film. Martin lives on a farm with his family and their maid. His mother, Nadí¨ge, seems to be psychotic; she refuses to leave her bedroom and is prone to fits of screaming. His brother, Didier, is a would-be writer/poet, tormented by self-doubt and by his impossible relationship with a man who is engaged to be married. The other characters act as provocateurs and/or peacekeepers to the intense atmosphere of the household, while the action centres more and more on the suffering of Nadí¨ge and Didier, and on its effects on Martin.

Fear and doubt are at the heart of The Last of the Crazy People, permeating form and content in equal measure. Achard depicts a world that is uncertain, violent and, worst of all, meaningless, the horror of which affects all the characters, but chiefly Nadí¨ge. Lingering on her remote, glaring eyes, the film asks: Is Nadí¨ge mad? Or just much more sensitive than the average human being? Perhaps Nadí¨ge is the only sane one, the only one who is really awake, and it is all the ‘normal’ people who surround her, and who give no thought to the horror of reality, who are actually mad?

Formally the film plays a game of push and pull with its audience, encouraging both our disorientation and our sympathy for the characters. In turns, we are tempted to think that the film unfolds from Martin’s innocent perspective, from a detached, realist perspective, and from a fantastical, hyperreal perspective. It is never certain whether the point of view is subjective or objective, reality or illusion, schizoid hallucination or prophetic vision. We search for a single fixed truth, which ultimately doesn’t seem to exist. Like the characters we are lost between the equally undesirable poles of illusion and nothingness.

There is no denying the bleakness of the film, but this is not to criticise. The Last of the Crazy People is a work of honesty, not miserabilism. One would perhaps see a glimmer of hope in Didier and his poetry, were it not for the weight of the prevailing order, and of fate, which sit so heavily on his shoulders. The world doesn’t want a poet. Perhaps it did once, as Didier’s piles of old books suggest, but not anymore. The world now seems to say, ‘you’re either normal or mad; you’re either with us, or you’re on your own’. Didier, not quite mad perhaps, but very much alone, broods unhappily towards a resolution. When he finally makes his decision at the end of the film the consequences are nothing short of apocalyptic.

The Last of the Crazy People is an excellent film. It is by no means easy viewing, but as a rare piece of serious cinema, it is essential.

David Warwick

Format: DVD

Date: 4 May 2009

Distributor: 4Digital Asia

Director: Yukihiko Tsutsumi

Writers: Yasushi Fukuda, Takashi Nagasaki, Naoki Urasawa and Yûsuke Watanabe

Based on the manga by: Naoki Urasawa

Original title: 20-seiki shônen

Cast: Toshiaki Karasawa, Etsushi Toyokawa, Takako Tokiwa, Airi Taira

Japan 2008

142 mins

2009 promises to be another year where the cinema is dominated by comic book adaptations and the first of this year’s crop, having been released theatrically on February 20, is an epic live action adaptation of Naoki Urasawa’s manga of the same name.

20th Century Boys (known as 20-seiki Shônen in its native Japan) is the first of a trilogy, and so presumably is based on the first seven or so volumes out of a total of 22 (24 if you include the final two volumes entitled 21st Century Boys). Being a faithful adaptation of the manga, it follows the labyrinthine structure of the source material, including flash-forwards, flashbacks, dream sequences and the same scene repeated from various points of view. However, this isn’t a technique that necessarily suits the film - unlike, say, Rashomon - as the plot of this first instalment at least is relatively simple… A group of friends in the 1970s form a club and together concoct a story about the end of the world. A quarter of a century later, this fateful tale seems to be coming true, whether by prophecy or design, with one member of the group having become a charismatic cult leader who is entrancing the whole of Japan.

Manga author Naoki Urasawa’s most famous comic is called Monster, and is an apocalyptic tale about a serial killer created by an eugenics experiment, so it should come as no surprise to learn that he is a fan of Stephen King, who has himself explored the subject in his novel IT, which was adapted for television in the 1990s and has heavily influenced 20th Century Boys. IT and 20th Century Boys share the same qualities and problems - the scenes of the kids in the past are gripping, evocative and engaging, the scenes of the same characters in the present less so, and when history starts to repeat itself you can’t help but think that you got the point the first time around.

20th Century Boys also suffers from the current obsession in making bloated trilogies for the cinema, presumably based on economies of scale - you might as well make two or three films for only a bit more (as you already have the actors, sets and director already hired) and hopefully triple the profits. However, like the Matrix and the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogies and the unfinished Night Watch series, the running time of this should have been trimmed considerably, not only for the story as a whole, but also for the individual instalments.

Those fans of Stephen King who miss his earlier work will find a lot to enjoy in 20th Century Boys, but as was the case with the TV adaptation of IT, once they’ve seen the first instalment it will take fans a lot of patience to sit through another two and a half hours of the story, let alone five, to get to the final resolution.

Alex Fitch

Format: DVD

Release date: 6 April 2009

Distributor: Stoney Road Films

Director: John Williams

Writer: John Williams

Alternative title: Ichiban utsukushí® natsu

Cast: Maho Ukai, Yoshie Minami, Etsuko Kimata

Japan 2000

100 minutes

Naomi, played with surly grace by Maho Ukai is a sulky city kid with dyed, pale orange Lion King hair and a sullen pout that’s projected in the direction of her exasperated parents. The opening moments of Welshman John Williams‘s film are a giggling homage to teen girl life in Nagoya: Naomi paints her nails instead of paying attention to algebra, she bunks off school, stays out late and teeters around town on clunky-heeled shoes. She spends her nights out drinking beer at house parties and clubs and her days accompanying her best friend to dubious photo-shoots as a way of making extra money. It’s the classic case of nice girl going off the rails, as her mother and father’s relationship falters and fails. Mum is having an affair whilst Naomi’s bewildered dad sits on the sofa, drinking too much, and dismissing his daughter’s taste in music with the expected ‘the bands these days aren’t up to much’.

When her mum finally deserts the family home, her dad decides to send Naomi to her aunt to the country for the summer until things get on a more even keel in their small cramped flat in the concrete wilderness of Nagoya. Self-centred Naomi is more than reluctant. There’s the chores of the dilapidated hot-springs hotel that her aunt runs to contend with, the annoyingly pestering presence of Yumi (Etsuko Kimata), who has learning difficulties, and the added indignity of having to look in on Mrs Koide (Yoshie Minami), an elderly women who’s growing increasingly confused and forgetful.

But it’s here, in the slow-paced countryside, accompanied by the melancholy drift of musical director Paul Rowe’s soundtrack and a chorus of insects, that Naomi begins to change. She gradually becomes intrigued by Mrs Koide’s past – the elegant elderly lady’s fragmentary conversation hints at an illicit love affair in her youth and a film role – and starts to relish the time she spends with her. She makes friends with Yumi, but in a pleasing bit of nasty realism, is still capable of reverting to pure mean girl – when Naomi’s holiday romance with the motorcycle delivery guy doesn’t work out, it’s Yumi who bears the brunt of her disgruntledness.

Williams is determined to avoid the sentimentality so beloved of happy-ever-after Hollywood. He rejoices in leaving matters ambiguous, unsolved, unresolved. Watching Firefly Dreams is like looking at series of framed pictures – glimpses from doorways, a view from a window, a shot from a corner of a beautiful lit room, suggest the story or imply the past without explicitly explaining what exactly has gone on. The film seems made up of beguiling moments – Yumi and Naomi building a 3D jigsaw of the Eiffel Tower, Mrs Koide asleep on her chair, Naomi dreaming at her feet, the two cousins splashing in a riverside pool.

The beautifully filmed countryside adds to the sense of dreamy enchantment, a perennial reminder of the importance of nature in a world being transformed by speedy consumerism and careless consumption. The shady pine forests of Horaicho, the river, the lonesome roads that Naomi cycles along with a particular joy are a glorious part of this subtle and understated coming of age tale. Firefly Dreams is just lovely, an unmissable meditation on memory and loss and growing up.

Eithne Farry

Read our interview with John Williams and a review of his 2006 Starfish Hotel.

Format: TV + DVD box set

Screened on: 5, 12 and 19 March 2009 on Channel 4

Release date: 13 April 2009

Distributor: Optimum Home Entertainment

Directors: Julian Jarrold, James Marsh, Anand Tucker

Writer: Tony Grisoni

Based on the novels by: David Peace

Cast: Andrew Garfield, Paddy Considine, David Morrissey, Saskia Reeves, Sean Bean, Mark Addy

UK 2009

3 x 102 minutes

As this year’s Oscars clearly show, in terms of quality, television is no longer cinema’s poor relation. From the 2009 Emmy winner Mad Men to the great HBO shows of the past few years (The Sopranos, The Wire, Deadwood) television has reached heights not often matched by contemporary mainstream cinema. Such Oscar fare as Slumdog Millionaire, for instance, seems by contrast just a mild diversion arbitrarily confined to what Alfred Hitchcock called the endurance time-limit of the human bladder (2 hours)or as in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, severly testing that limit. Stretching over 10 hours or more, especially when watched en bloc on DVD and often on equipment nearly as good as that of the local multiplex, shows such as The Sopranos or The Wire offer an epic experience far superior to the average feature film.

With Red Riding, Channel 4 seems to have made a determined attempt to join these ranks. Where once we had great adaptations of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens Red Riding illustrates a shift in what is considered ‘quality programming’: violence, convoluted plots, stylish direction and mild controversy (HBO-ness in short) are now the order of the day. It features the greatest assembly of British acting talent since I Claudius, all sporting impeccable Yorkshire accents with the likes of Saskia Reeves matching Sean Bean and Mark Addy flattened vowel for vowel. Each episode of the trilogy (adapted from David Peace’s quartet of crime novels) is directed by a ‘real film director’ – Julian Jarrold, James Marsh and Anand Tucker. In contrast to the HBO shows, there is no overall style to the series, but each director was given a free hand with very little (if any) consultation between them. Although all three episodes are scripted by Tony Grisoni all have different cinematographers, editors, lead actors and music composers.

The first episode, set in 1974 and shot on grainy 16mm film, is directed by Julian Jarrold (Brideshead Revisited). Depending on your point of view, its style is either eerie and dreamlike or slightly annoying and heavy-handed. With its surreal violence (mostly aimed at swans) crossed with kitchen-sink mundane it falls somewhere between Twin Peaks and Prime Suspect, but is drenched in enough 70s period detail (36p a pint we are even informed) to seem like a nastier trans-Pennine Life on Mars. The period detail is so all pervasive even Erich von Stroheim would be impressed – yes, even the underwear is authentically 1970s. It is a world full of old-school coppers, with Warren Clarke’s Bill Molloy taking his gruff-voiced no-nonsense to the extremes he often seems almost capable of in Dalziel and Pascoe, and the whole thing is clouded in enough smoke to fill a pub pre-2007. With the film reprising David Peace’s unreliable narrator there is much that we are not told – there is very little back story and strange holes puncture the plot (although most of these are filled in the final episode). The main protagonist, ambitious self-centred journalist Edward Dunford (Andrew Garfield), is at first as much concerned with losing the story to his rival as he is in covering the inquiry into the murder of a little girl. But as his colleague explains to him, with a wonderful Yorkshire take on Edmund Burke’s maxim, ‘Devil triumphs when good men do nowt’. There is no CSI-style evidence gathering, nor even old-school investigative work, and Dunford finds his man after being subjected to a combination of threats, beatings and mysterious tip-offs. In many ways, what is finally revealed in the last episode is pretty standard crime-serial stuff, and after three 2-hour episodes of ‘whodunit’ we are left with a Cluedo-style conclusion – it was the butler with the candlestick. But it is the way in which the series gets to that conclusion that makes Red Riding different.

The second episode is by far the best. Directed by James Marsh who made the excellent Man on Wire (the best film at the Oscars this year), it is held together by a typically great performance from Paddy Considine treading the line between authority and vulnerability with great skill. It is set in 1980 as the Yorkshire police (more or less deliberately) blunder through the real-life Ripper enquiry. This blurring of fact and fiction is something that Peace has virtually made his own (to the annoyance of Barbara Clough amongst others). There is even a strange appearance by Peter Sutcliffe (spookily played by Joseph Mawle), after he is almost accidentally caught red-handed (excuse the pun), confessing the details of his crime in a flat monotone Leeds accent. The style is less showy, the characters more developed and human, and Sean Harris as the slimy Bob Craven almost steals the show (the prize for the best Yorkshire accent also going to the Londoner). The great shot compositions and the melancholy score by Dickon Hinchliffe of the Tindersticks certainly make the most of wide-screen surround-sound televisions.

The final episode directed by Anand Tucker (Hillary and Jackie) is my least favourite, in particular because it looks for the poetic and metaphoric where it doesn’t seem appropriate. Back-lit smoke-filled interrogation rooms and a snowstorm of feathers in an allotment shed seem laboured and ill-fitting with the general grittiness of the story. Some fine performances, particularly Mark Addy and David Morrissey, are not given enough space to really develop and the narration in rhyme seems misjudged. It is reminiscent of how well Robert Browning’s The Pied Piper worked in The Sweet Hereafter (Atom Egoyan), but in contrast here the same device just seems annoyingly contrived.

Overall, Red Riding is somewhat uneven and not quite the ground-breaking television opus it is so obviously trying to be. Perhaps the mistake is in trying to be too cinematic. The mix of crime show clichés, TV commercial style and visual metaphors is awkward. But perhaps the hype has led us to expect too much. Comparing any TV show to The Sopranos is surely unfair, and if I’d ventured out to the local cinema Slumdog Millionaire or Benjamin Button were my only options. So perhaps we should be grateful for Red Riding and happier still to have Mad Men. And as The Wire is coming to BBC2 shortly, maybe staying in is the new going out.

Paul Huckerby