Format: DVD

Release date: 26 May 2008

Distributor: Yume Pictures

Director:Nagisa Oshima

WritersToshirô Ishido, Nagisa Oshima

Cast: Kayoko Honoo, Isao Sasaki, Masahiko Tsugawa

Japan 1960

87 minutes

Following the recent release of Naked Youth, The Sun’s Burial is the second of five Nagisa Oshima films to be released on DVD as part of Yume Pictures’ Oshima Collection. The cult Japanese director earned his reputation making gritty, brutal films, and while The Sun’s Burial, originally released in 1960, is uncompromisingly bleak, it’s also a fantastically evocative snapshot of a post-war Japan traumatised by humiliation and defeat.

In a sweltering Osaka, hard-as-nails Hanako (Kayoko Honoo) runs an illegal blood bank by day, and moonlights as a prostitute by night, giving her a twisted chance to escape the squalor of her run-down home. In what is little more than a shanty town, she lives side by side with vagrants and drunks, an unruly band held together by her somewhat sleazy father Yotsematsu. Takeshi (Isao Sasaki) is a wannabe gangster, but without the heart for the brutality unleashed by his boss, the charismatic Shin (played by Masahiko Tsugawa, Shin exudes a certain glamour in his black shirts and white-rimmed hats, a Japanese Jean-Paul Belmondo in A bout de souffle). Takeshi is the only character with any kind of conscience, but he’s unable to escape from Shin’s grasp; once he also falls victim to Hanako’s manipulations, there’s little hope for him. This motley cast of petty criminals, thugs, rapists, pimps and prostitutes are all caught up in an ugly, vicious turf war, fighting over the scraps of the decimated city.

But the fast-paced and at times impossible-to-follow plot (the film really demands a second viewing) often seems irrelevant; Oshima seems more concerned with style and message than the actual narrative. While Naked Youth is a film about teenage rebellion, here there is no authority for the characters to rebel against. The Sun’s Burial, with its scenes of a setting sun disappearing into the darkness of a ruined Osaka, is full of unrelenting despair at what Japan has lost, at the indignity the country and its people have suffered. A slightly ludicrous character, ‘The Agitator’, who muscles in on Hanako’s territory in the name of patriotism, rages against the Russians and Americans, desperate for another war so Japan can restore her imperial dignity. In another scene, the camera lingers on a banner, printed with the words, ‘let’s give love and a future to our youth’. As their criminality spirals out of control, Oshima’s warring teenagers have little chance of seeing a future at all.

Thankfully, the film’s non-stop misery is relieved by its fresh, almost playful soundtrack and riveting cinematography. The Spanish guitar often lends the film a spaghetti Western feel, with the rival gangs facing off against each other like urban cowboys. Much of the action takes place off-screen, the camera instead focusing on claustrophobic close-ups of tormented and tormenting faces, covered in a thin sheen of sweat as they stare each other down. The incongruous mix of lounge pop and violence, notably when Takeshi and Shin have their final, disastrous confrontation, adds to the film’s nouvelle vague appeal.

The Sun’s Burial is an exciting example of modern cinema that also provides a documentary-like glimpse into a now forgotten past. Little more than two decades later, Japan would once again become a global power and pop culture phenomenon, with Osaka at its heart.

Sarah Cronin

See also Night and Fog in Japan by the same director. We will be screening Naked Youth at the next Hectic Peelers on Monday 16 June, Roxy Bar and Screen, 7:30pm.

Format: DVD

Release date: 23 June 2008

Distributor: Yume Pictures

Director: Nagisa Oshima

Writers: Nagisa Oshima, Toshirô Ishido

Cast: Miyuki Kuwano, Fumio Watanabe, Hiroshi Akutagawa, Shinko Ujiie

Japan 1960

107 mins

Concerned with what will probably be a little known piece of Japanese history to today’s viewer, Night and Fog in Japan is an interesting fictional analysis of the actions of the left-wing Japanese student protesters in response to the 1st AMPO treaty with the United States by former student activist Nagisa Oshima. While it might be considered less important or engaging than Oshima’s later work, Night and Fog in Japan is a fascinating reflection on the dynamics of political movements in 1950s Japan.

Opening in 1960 at a wedding party, Night and Fog in Japan begins as a fairly standard, albeit stylised, dramatical piece. As the wedding speeches take place it becomes clear that all of the guests know each other from their past as politicised students. The narrative begins to assume a fragmented form as the guests’ reminiscences are played out as flashbacks. Slowly, Oshima outlines the group’s ideology in general terms, and as the different members of the wedding party put forward their points of view during what becomes an increasingly heated discussion, so the drama unwinds as a series of tensions within the group itself.

Night and Fog in Japan is an incredibly theatrical piece of work. Oshima is clearly not interested in creating an atmosphere of realism, and the technical attention to detail on-screen appears to be aimed solely at enlivening what is otherwise a very dry and ‘talky’ two hours. Although initially visually captivating (an early scene is one long ten-minute take; pauses in dialogue and movement allow for some interesting ‘snapshot’ compositions), the theatricality soon threatens to undermine the dramatic impact and the cast too often seem to be concentrating on hitting their marks rather than delivering impassioned performances. The fluidity of some of the camera movement (occasionally let down by some shaky camera panning – it seems that the style may have been ahead of the techniques) fails to excite after a while and then only highlights the general sombreness of the proceedings.

For the first hour of its duration Night and Fog in Japan is a fascinating prospect. Even with its political allegiances totally at the fore – to the detriment of any real personal drama – the film offers a careful analysis of how political ideals affect a group by using flashbacks alongside the wedding party scenes. Sadly, the second hour of the film moves at such a slow pace – and with a cast of characters that are firstly so large in number and secondly so pessimistic in attitude – that it becomes no more than a backdrop for a lengthy lecture, denouncing in a rather simplistic manner the students’ ‘we’ve just let ourselves down’ attitude.

While it’s not an easy watch, Night and Fog in Japan is an interesting piece of work when viewed alongside other Oshima fare of the period such as The Sun’s Burial which, while still gloomy, manages to bury its political intentions deeper – and much more successfully – into the drama. Sure, part of the problem with Night and Fog in Japan is that it’s difficult to appreciate just how daring the film was on its original release (it was pulled by the studio after just three days in response to a political assassination) so viewed today the film is an intriguing – albeit limited – watch which sadly lacks the punch it had in its day.

Martin Cleary

See also The Sun’s Burial and Naked Youth by the same director. We will be screening Naked Youth at the next Hectic Peelers on Monday 16 June, Roxy Bar and Screen, 7:30pm.

Format: DVD

Release date: 24 March 2008

Distributor: Optimum Releasing

Director: Bertrand Tavernier

Based on: Jim Thompson’s Pop. 1280

Cast: Philippe Noiret, Isabelle Huppert, Stéphane Audran

France 1981

123 mins

One of veteran French director Bertrand Tavernier’s most memorable thrillers, Coup de torchon was adapted from hard-boiled American writer Jim Thompson’s Pop. 1280. Despite, or perhaps because of, a change of setting from the American South to colonial French West Africa in 1938, the bleak pessimistic tone of the novel comes through more so here than in any other Thompson adaptations – the most famous being The Getaway (1972 and 1994) and The Grifters (1990). Thompson’s post-war existentialism fits the pre-war colonial world perfectly. Of course, by the 1980s the image of colonials was no longer that of god-fearing missionaries bringing light into the Dark Continent and we are presented with a bunch of self-serving, lazy, dirty and abusive racists. The Senegalese town of Bourkassa is a perfect stand-in for small-town America as a symbol of a world in decay. It could almost be the Wild West: life is cheap and the law corrupt; victims of dysentery float down river, local gangsters shooting at the corpses for fun.

Police chief Lucien Cordier – played by Tavernier regular Philippe Noiret, brilliantly underperforming here – is a man of inaction. Although he lacks the others inhabitants’ malevolence, he has few positive traits of his own. The first part of the film establishes the extent of his inertia. His slovenly appearance is barely altered by a trip to the barber’s. He is bullied by two local pimps and humiliated by his superior; he is the butt of their jokes, literally. He lives with his nagging wife (Stéphane Audran) and what is either her lover or her brother, although Cordier can’t be bothered to find out and simply resorts to putting salt in his rival’s coffee. Even when he does act, he does it surreptitiously.

However, he begins to realise that not intervening makes him guilty by association and he has a sudden change of heart. In a great ‘to be or not to be’ scene, he explains to the town’s priest how it is that he is expected to do nothing: that is why he was chosen for the job. The scene is underscored by a wonderful pseudo-religious visual metaphor: after termites have destroyed yet another cross, Cordier holds the Christ still while the priest hammers in the nails. Thus he begins the ingenious ‘clean-up’ of the title, although quite what he gains from this transformation is less than certain.

Thematically, we could be watching a film noir, but with the pace of the tropics, the high-contrast black and white photography replaced by an almost constant sun-bleached washed-out beige; and instead of tension or suspense there is black comedy. The film’s deliberately unsubtle metaphors are also played for humour. The stinking latrines right underneath Cordier’s window that he at first tried to ignore become a target of his clean-up campaign alongside the town’s bullies and criminals.

In the interview included on the DVD, Tavernier claims the idea to set the film in Africa came from reading Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night. With the combination of Céline and Jim Thompson as the literary influences it’s not surprising that Coup de torchon is such a dark existential misanthropic film; but it’s also somehow funny, sad and just a little bit disturbing.

Paul Huckerby

Still courtesy of the Polish Cultural Institute

Format: DVD

Release date: 8 August 2005

Distributor: Second Run

Director: Jerzy Kawalerowicz

Screenplay: Tadeusz Konwicki and Jerzy Kawalerowicz

Story: Jaroslawa Jwaszkiewicza

Original title: Matka Joanna od aniolí­Â³w

Cast: Lucyna Winnicka, Mieczyslaw Vojt, Anna Ciepielewska

Poland 1961
102 mins

In April, the Polish film festival Kinoteka paid tribute to the recently deceased Polish master Jerzy Kawalerowicz, screening three of his films, including the acclaimed Mother Joan of Angels, a feverish exploration of sexual repression and religious fanaticism.

‘Is it my fault that I’m possessed by eight powerful demons?’ Father Jozef is only the latest in a regiment of exorcists dragged to a convent in a blasted wasteland to sort out Mother Joan. Initially impressed in a purely professional capacity by her range of devil moves, he is gradually drawn into her drama, until he loses himself in it. When desire can only find expression in the baroque theatre of possession and devotional self-harm, director Jerzy Kawalerowicz seems to be saying, the consequences are dire. But Mother Joan is not all Tarkovskian gloom: love in the convent precincts may be ultimately doomed, but the film has a fond eye for cheeky grins peeping out of wimples.

In fact, Kawalerowicz maintains near-perfect poise between taking religious torment seriously and celebrating earthly delights. The narrative traces a path back and forth between the inn with its unrestrained if boorish cavorting, and the convent where the battle between purity and lust contorts its denizens into hieroglyphs; now human crucifixes, now packets of convulsed limbs.

The only un-possessed nun, Sister Malgorzata, freely trots across the ash-heap to the inn, to gossip complaisantly with lusty gypsyish strumpets, sing a little song, and win the attentions of the shiny-toothed-and-booted squire. Back in the convent, she skirts the drama, tiptoeing round prostrated bodies, quietly but demurely deflating ceremony. Although closer to the world, Malgorzata is ingenuous rather than devious, and her earthly rapture is sweet but short. Perhaps she ought to have listened to the words of her song, recommending the veil over a faithless husband, rather than the jaunty tune.

On his first trip to the convent, Father Jozef encounters two little children frolicking in the wasteland; the love children of his predecessor Father Garniec, his local guide tells him. A burnt-out stake, all that remains of Father Garniec, is a clear warning of the pitfalls awaiting the prospective exorcist, but the sight of the children – ‘aniolí­Â³w’ (‘angels’), the local calls them – skipping without a care around the scene of their illicit author’s demise, sends another sort of message he is painfully unable to receive.

Lucyna Winnicka as Joan most brilliantly condenses these conflicts into one radiant face, able to slide seamlessly between sincere religious devotion and more earthly desire. Her rapt adoration for Father Jozef’s benediction pivots on the word ‘love’ into habit-rending lust. Between these extremes, it is as if there really is no difference, only a change in the light. In manifesting passion like an electric charge through a body, Winnicka’s performance is exemplary, the equal, mutatis mutandis, of Kathleen Byron’s in Black Narcissus. With practically no commentary or explication, Mother Joan is a brilliant visual exposition of the idea of possession as the only available mise en scí­Â¨ne for emotions that inexorably inhabit and overpower a ceremonial sincerely meant to transcend them.

In one memorable scene, in an airy pigeon loft veiled by rows of drying nun-laundry, naked to the wimple, Mother Joan finishes a lengthy stint of flagellation. She turns with the admiration of a fellow pro towards Father Jozef’s simultaneous mortification. Glowing and relaxed after their exertions, they get dressed and walk out, glancing shyly at each other. At least they’ve had their little moment together.

Stephen Thomson

Format: DVD

Distributor: MVM Entertainment

Release date: 7 April 2008

Director: Satoshi Kon

Original title Môsô Dairinin

Japan 2004

325 minutes

The ground-breaking animé series Paranoia Agent first aired on Japanese TV in the spring of 2004 and has recently been re-released in a beautifully packaged thin box-set. Written and directed by Satoshi Kon, the man behind Perfect Blue and Tokyo Godfathers, Paranoia Agent focuses on a seemingly random set of attacks by a mysterious skater armed with a golden baseball bat. Inspired by a real-life case, Kon uses this story to explore themes of fear, alienation and paranoia in modern society. As Paranoia Agent succeeds particularly well in its multi-layered storyline provided by a variety of (unreliable) narrators, instead of a traditional review what follows is a dialogue about the series between Virginie Sélavy and Alex Fitch.

Virginie Sélavy: I read that Satoshi Kon did Paranoia Agent as a way of experimenting with ideas he couldn’t fit anywhere else and it does go in all sorts of directions and some of the strands don’t seem to lead anywhere.

Alex Fitch: That’s the thing; there are so many non sequiturs and red herrings throughout… They pretty much explain it all in the first episode and then there are twelve episodes of obfuscation to make you think it’s about something else entirely.

VS: Which is why the end is a bit of a let-down, because in those kinds of set-ups, it’s what people are led to imagine that’s interesting and the final explanation always feels a bit flat and disappointing.

AF: And the format changes in each episode; it might be concentrating on one character, it might be part one of a three-part story, it might in fact be four different stories, like with the four women in the apartment block in ‘Etc’. They’re like a Greek chorus. I wanted more of them throughout.

VS: At that point it gets very interesting because the episodes are so formalistic. In ‘Etc.’ the stories they make up about Shonen Bat are all ridiculous, but the other three women keep telling the new young wife that her stories are just ludicrous and that she should know better as she’s married to the scriptwriter.

AF: I don’t know if it’s intentional – it’s like when we both interviewed Park Chan-wook, both of us asked if he played computer games and he said he never did – it’s weird how filmmakers seem to be tapping into the zeitgeist without even knowing it (although that’s one of the themes of the series). Because ‘Etc.’ is very much like an issue of this 1940s comic book The Spirit, which is about to be turned into a movie by Frank Miller. It revolves around this film noir world where the text of the comic book literally imprints itself onto the world. In this episode of Paranoia Agent the tower blocks form the word ‘Etc.’ when you see them from above.

VS: I think that’s what Satoshi Kon is really good at, exploring how the boundaries between fiction and reality are blurred. ‘The Holy Warrior’ is another fantastic episode on that theme, when the detectives are taken into the game world that the copycat attacker inhabits, and characters from the real world are transposed into the game world, with different roles and values.

AF: It reminds me of another comic called The Invisibles, which came out about 10 or 15 years ago and the Wachowskis apparently ripped off for The Matrix. It’s about hacking reality, about how you can literally empower yourself by getting other people to believe in you, but it’s set in the real world, not in a video game. In Paranoia Agent, it feels like the memes of modern-day culture have started to affect people on some kind of physical level rather than just an intellectual one.

…And when characters descend into their own fantasy worlds, the art style changes completely like in the second episode (‘The golden shoes’), about a kid who wants to win at school; it’s a very child-like, brightly coloured world. And in the final episode, when Tsukiko accompanies Detective Ikari into his fantasy world, it’s like a watercolour painting. All the characters are literally two-dimensional – when they turn around they’ve just got an edge rather than a side… That ‘super-flat’ art style has become popular in animation – I suppose in the West there’s South Park – and in Mamoru Oshii’s last film…

VS: Yes, The Amazing Lives of the Fast Food Grifters – that was the first Japanese animé I saw that used that style, and to start off, it’s off-putting.

AF: You get the feeling that one of the things that Oshii is getting at, is that when you use old footage / newsreel footage of people to construct an argument, you can’t go anywhere beyond the footage you have. You can’t look behind these characters to see their three-dimensionality – you can only see a flat surface – and I think that’s one of the nice attributes of this style: what you see is what you get. You can’t turn the characters around because there’s nothing there to see. Which I think is an ideal way of rendering a character like Ikari and his fantasies, because the people in his dream aren’t real, they’re just flat caricatures of life.

VS: Also, what’s interesting is that it’s possibly a reaction to all the CGI stuff, which tries to make things look as real, as three-dimensional, as possible… And what do Oshii and Kon do? They go back to 2D, almost like primitive animation from years ago…

AF: …but it’s also something that represents the avant-garde somehow…

VS: Absolutely. And it changes the way you watch the film, it introduces a distance and there’s no longer any suspension of disbelief. You’re in this almost abstract world of ideas; it’s a lot less about recreating an impression of reality and a lot more about ideas.

AF: It didn’t really grab me. It wasn’t the style… I just don’t think Oshii gave it his all. I think that like Paranoia Agent, it was a case of a director throwing all his unused ideas together, but unlike Paranoia Agent, it didn’t really work for me.

Alex Fitch and Virginie Sélavy

Win a copy of the Paranoia Agent DVD box-set (courtesy of MVM) at our next Sunday Shock Therapy on Sunday 8 June, 2-6pm at the Vibe Live.

Format: DVD

Release date: 3 December 2007

Distributor: Second Run

Director: Frantisek Vlí¡cil

Director: Frantisek Pavlicek, Frantisek Vlí¡cil

Based on: the novel by Vladislav Vancura

Cast: Magda Ví¡sí¡ryoví¡, Frantisek Veleckí­Â½, Josef Kemr, Michal Kozuch

Czechoslovakia 1967
159 mins

I had to sneak into work after hours to watch this one on a big screen. Distributors like Second Run are doing wonders in the way of DVD release of films you might otherwise never have had the chance to see. But some films make you more aware of the limitations of your laptop than others. Marketa Lazaroví¡ is on the grand scale from the opening frames. The camera dwells on a blinding snowscape fusing into a cold sky for a minute before some black specks become discernible; only when these have become wolves does it lurch into motion, tracking the sinuous loping forms across the unending white. In the laptop version, the screen is merely white, and the wolves remain specks. This does make a difference, as the sense of a vast and indifferent natural world is the cinematic keynote of the film. Throughout, human groups batter each other to smithereens, leaving isolated figures wandering, floundering in swamps, or crawling on all fours in the undergrowth of some of cinema’s most unnerving forestry. You need that feeling of everything just going on and on in every direction, on every side of the frame.

The story concerns the squabbles of neighbouring clans in a time before Christianity has successfully turned warlords into estate managers. The Kozlí­Â­k clan are hunters, of rich travellers as much as of game. Lazar, on the other hand, is a hypocritical yeoman, happy to scavenge after the Kozlí­Â­k boys have done their worst, but wheedlingly pious when he is caught at it. Think of my Marketa, he pleads, effectively pimping his daughter’s innocence to top Kozlí­Â­k son Mikolí¡s. A sudden radiance illuminates the doting father’s face as we share a vision of Marketa following a peloton of dove-toting nuns up a wind-blown hill to chapel. Even the grimly determined Mikolí¡s has to look uncertainly over his shoulder in an effort to locate the mysterious light source. Whether or not he sees, as we do, Marketa extricating a dove, and an inadvertent nipple, from her bodice, remains doubtful. Back in reality, a horse, inspired in a quite different way, licks the supplicant Lazar’s bouffant headgear.

All in a day’s work for the Kozlí­Â­k boys then, in a world they master as far as they can see. Unfortunately, however, this time they have gone too far: by raiding the caravan of a German Bishop, and abducting his son, they bring upon themselves the unwelcome attention of the King’s regional representatives. As fat old Hetman Pivo (Captain Beer) pursues the Kozlí­Â­ks, Lazar naturally does nothing to stand in his way. Kozlí­Â­k revenge costs him dear, however, as Mikolí¡s seizes his most treasured possession, Marketa. Guerilla warfare, and mutual annihilation, with some brutal, doomed romance along the way, ensue; pretty much the way of things for the hell-bent, werewolf-descended Kozlí­Â­k’s, but something of a journey for intending nun Marketa; from lamb of god to Czech art-house Sarah Connor.

Rhyming with the nomadic fury of the participants, the narrative method is nomadic and furious. A simple tale in its broadest strokes is skewed by narrative loops and interleaving; memories and moments of clairvoyance come out of nowhere in vertiginous dislocations of point of view. Holding it all together is exceptionally strong and coherent art direction on all fronts. Costume, in particular headwear, is the index of beast fable in this beastly world. Kozlí­Â­k’s lupine descent seems to be spreading over him like a fungal infection: starting from his claws, the fur has gained as far as the elbows, and his wolf-eared hood is surely only the first step towards prognathous developments. Conversely, as she gazes out from the back of the sled on her way home from the convent, Marketa’s face is framed by the heart-shaped opening of a woolly white snood. She has just been offered to Christ and somehow you already know this is a world in which lambkins get roasted. The range of lighting throughout is fantastic, much of it pointed at Marketa’s receptive face. Zdení„›k LiÅ¡ka’s soundtrack is curious and intense, ranging from the expected medieval plainchant to wild, incongruous outbursts of marimba. Sound in general is one of the film’s most distinctive features: every word, every movement whips back at you in a dry, staccato echo. Like bullets off armour plating, every act rebounds on you, every prayer is rebuffed. From the clattering courtyard of the Kozlí­Â­k homestead to the depths of the immemorial forest, the landscape is not listening, and it doesn’t care.

Stephen Thomson

Format: DVD

Release date: 19 February 2007

Distributor: Second Run

Director: Jií…(TM)í­Â­ Weiss

Screenplay: Jí¡n Otcení¡sek, Jií…(TM)í­Â­ Weiss

Original title: Romeo, Julia a tma

Cast: Ivan Mistrí­Â­k, Daniela Smutní¡, Jirina Sejbaloví¡

Czechoslovakia 1960

92 minutes

Czechoslovakia, 1942, during the Nazi Occupation. Hanka, a Jewish girl, escapes the transports to Theresienstadt by hiding in the attic of a large apartment block. Hanka is helped by Pavel, an 18-year-old boy who uses his mother’s attic storeroom as a darkroom. Pavel brings her food, drink and books and his daily visits become her only contact with the outside world. Predictably, the two teenagers fall in love until Hanka is discovered by the mistress of a Nazi officer living in the house. While echoes of Anne Frank are present within the story, Romeo, Juliet and Darkness is not a wartime thriller but a love story set in the midst of the fear and violence of occupation.

Film director Jií…(TM)í­Â­ Weiss knew his topic intimately; as a Jewish refugee Weiss spent the war years in London and later fled Prague for the US after having established himself as an award-winning filmmaker. There are echoes of the nouvelle vague and Italian neo-realism in his style, and as in MiloÅ¡ Forman and Roman Polanski’s early work, there is a strong nod in the direction of a more politicised and yet consistently lyrical use of melodrama. The use of the house as a realist location is cunningly devised with much of the action taking place on the windy stairs, which separate as well as bring together, in both ethnic and social terms, the various occupants of the house. Even more impressive is the sparse use of sound effects that help to temper as well as accentuate what is naturally an overtly melodramatic story line. Throughout the plot, the melodic and at times piercing song of a caged canary evokes the situation that Hanka finds herself in; caged and kept by Pavel whom we first meet as he is about to recuperate an abandoned hamster in a flat previously occupied by a Jewish family.

Weiss was quoted as saying that he was attracted to the subject matter firstly as a love story, and only secondly because of its social and political implications. In reality, Weiss could just as well have said that he was motivated by cinema’s ability to affectionately portray the minutiae of human circumstance rather than the sturm und drang of forbidden and tragic love. Because of this, the love element in the film is almost downplayed and the two youngsters spend most of the time gazing at the stars from the attic window rather than engage in corporal pleasures. Miles apart from, for example, Bergman’s portrayal of young love in Summer with Monika, Romeo, Juliet and Darkness displays no fresh eroticism or vigour, and Weiss’s lovers are instead shy embodiments of dreams hindered by circumstance. As in that infinitely more extravagant version of Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story, the lovers here are caught in ethical and moral dilemmas that have more to do with larger affiliations than with intimacy. Even faced with his wholesome blonde girlfriend in a swimsuit at the local pool Pavel cannot forget that his fellow countrymen are simultaneously being executed by the Nazi occupiers.

Herein lies the film’s curious strength as well as its outdated-ness, perhaps, for more modern viewers. What seems to matter is not so much the relationship between these two young people as how a young boy is forced to make extraordinary decisions in the face of imminent danger. The camera lingers over actress Dana Smutní¡’s classically beautiful features as if to remind us that the character of Hanka is indeed the vessel for Pavel’s romantic yearnings but with little information to flesh her out as a person, she remains just that. Consequently, Ivan Mistrí­Â­k as Pavel is more effective in the scenes at home or at school, where he has to externalize his internal torment, than when he is looking at Hanka.

To a large extent, the story is told through the little details such as the balance wheel that Pavel’s watchmaker grandfather spends all day working on, or the incessant yapping of the Nazi mistress’s dog who nearly discloses Hanka’s whereabouts. The viewer is well aware that time is running out for Hanka, and in Shakespearean terms, it provides the lovers with no other opportunity than to turn night into day, when Pavel can visit Hanka unseen. Likewise, it is no coincidence that Pavel dreams of being an astronomer: the lovers are genuinely ‘star-crossed’, their fate determined by forces much larger and insurmountable than mere mortal love.

Despite such little nods in the direction of Shakespeare, the film, it seems, chooses to downplay whatever complex literary references one might expect in favour of a more guileless visual and spoken language. If it works, it is because the actual horrors of the Holocaust are left unspoken. Ultimately, the first image of the film is perhaps its most poignant as Pavel helplessly watches a Jewish family dragging their few possessions through the empty streets of Prague. Romeo and Juliet may have been the instigating factor for Weiss’s melancholy film but it is the darkness of the impending genocide that we are fittingly left with.

CB

Format:DVD

Release date: 26 May 2008

Distributor: BFI

Director: Chris Petit

Writer: Chris Petit

Cast: David Beames, Lisa Kreuzer, Sandy Ratcliff

UK/Germany 1979

100 mins

Finally available on DVD for the first time in the UK, Chris Petit’s Radio On is one of the most striking feature debuts in British cinema. A haunting, existential synthesis of thriller and road movie, it reflects a fascination with not only all things automotive but also the mythology of freedom and the lingering ennui that underpins the finest films in the road movie genre.

Previously the film editor at Time Out, Petit claims to have seen nothing on the English screen that corresponded to a modern life that for him combined ‘drift and boredom, Alphaville, JG Ballard and Kraftwerk’. An admirer of Two-Lane Blacktop and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, Petit began to wonder why a British film could not explore the enduring theme of migration whilst presenting contemporary England as a cinematic landscape. While he was similarly enthralled by the austere aesthetic of Bresson, Straub and Rossellini, it was the films of Wim Wenders that indicated that a way of actually making films might be possible. Possibility became reality when the German responded to Petit’s overtures and became his Executive Producer.

Minimalist in plot, Radio On follows a young man (a suitably distant David Beames) as he travels by car to Bristol to investigate the death in mysterious circumstances of his brother. As he drives he encounters figures as rootless as himself: a soldier deserting from duty in Northern Ireland, a German woman looking for her lost child (Lisa Kreuzer, on loan from Wenders), and a rural rock ‘n’ roll loving garage mechanic with dreams of stardom (an early Sting cameo). Stunningly photographed in luminous monochrome by another Wenders regular, Martin Schäfer, the film offers a mythic and quietly compelling vision of a late and very gloomy 1970s England stricken by economic decline and stalled between failed hopes of cultural and social change and the imminent upheavals of Thatcherism.

In his preface to my road movies book Petit, who has carved out a simultaneous career as a novelist, eloquently writes of his love of driving and music, citing the portable radio cassette as one of the ‘greatest inventions of the twentieth century and the in-car stereo as the means by which the dreary reality of Britain could be transcended’. Given this appreciation of the relationship between music and motion it should come as no surprise that Radio On delivers one of the great film soundtracks, utilising the new wave sounds of David Bowie, Robert Fripp, Kraftwerk and Devo. But despite these pop accoutrements and despite suggesting an audacious new direction for British cinema, this undeniably alien and alienating work was met with suspicion and incomprehension on release.

Later celebrated by the writer Iain Sinclair in his book Lights Out for the Territory, Radio On‘s reputation has rightly remained in the ascendancy and it remains very much a personal favourite. Theatrically re-released to an audible fanfare by the British Film Institute in 2004, the film’s availability on DVD (again through the BFI) will give further pause for re-discovery. It’s a handsome package too, incorporating 1988’s 24-minute Radio On (Remix) project (a stunning digital video essay with radical disruption of the original soundtrack by Wire’s Bruce Gilbert), extended interviews with both Petit and maverick producer Keith Griffiths and essays by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, John Patterson, Ian Penman, Chris Petit, Sukhdev Sandhu and road movie guru Rudy Wurlitzer.

Jason Wood

Jason Wood is the author of 100 Road Movies (BFI Publishing).