Category Archives: Festivals

A Page of Madness

A Page of Madness
A Page of Madness

Screening at L’Étrange Festival, Paris (France) on 13 September 2017

Format: Cinema

Director: Teinosuke Kinugasa

Writers: Teinosuke Kinugasa, Yasunari Kawabata, Banko Sawada, Minoru Inuzuka

Cast: Yoshie Nakagawa, Masao Inoue

Original title: Kurutta Ippēji

Japan 1926

59 mins

Teinosuke Kinugasa’s technical and artistic mastery is enough to make A Page of Madness a masterpiece of Japanese and, for that matter, world avant-garde cinema.

Every year Serge Bromberg brings a forgotten jewel from the silent era to the L’Étrange Festival. This year the audience was treated to one of the early films by Teinosuke Kinugasa, best known for his Cannes-awarded and universally acclaimed Gate of Hell (1953). Although it did not meet with immediate success at home, A Page of Madness was considered by Kinugasa to be his favourite film. The story goes that he had it buried in his garden shed during the war and unearthed it only in 1971, which allowed for the worldwide circulation of a newly restored copy. So much for the legend; the truth is that at least three other copies of the film had survived.

The film itself is a mystery, in the total absence of intertitles. The audience is helped (if that is the right way to put it) by a few hints gleaned from contemporary reviews: the story is one of a janitor in a lunatic asylum, a former sailor who took on the job to look after his wife who had been locked there after attempting suicide and drowning her baby daughter. Yet, without those loose plot-threads, the opening sequence of the film would not necessarily suggest the same story. The first minutes after the credits offer a puzzling montage that leaves little doubt as to whether Kinugasa knew Eisenstein’s work. Shots of rainy streets, rushing cars, lightning-lit barred windows and water pouring down stairs create a frenzied acceleration of pace that dissolves into a dance show on an art-deco scene, dominated by a revolving, hypnotizing ball, before the camera zooms back to reveal bars that transport us into the asylum where another dancer, shabby-clothed and barefoot, madly performs in her cell to the sound of imaginary drums and trombones, while thunder and lightning tear the sky, in swift intertitle-like inserts of white painted thunder bolts against a black background.

After this wild sequence the spectators, as the inmates of the asylum, lose track of reality and are carried on through the story, desperately trying to pick up the unhelpful threads of the formerly announced plot. But Kinugasa’s technical and artistic mastery is enough to make A Page of Madness a masterpiece of Japanese and, for that matter, world avant-garde cinema, a proud orphan of the Shinkankakuha movement (The New Sensation School). The film also betrays one of the screenwriters’ obsession with dancers – none other than the great Yasunari Kawabata, who had just received acclaim for his short story ‘The Dancing Girl of Izu’. Yet, if A Page of Madness is often considered the Japanese answer to Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920), it’s actually Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau who seemed to exert a much stronger influence on Kinugasa, and in particular The Last Man (1924) which may well have inspired the absence of intertitles, so that the images could speak for themselves. Though very far from any asylum or institution, The Last Man also offers similar scenes of dreams and fantasies, using lens distortion and playing with perspective to alter the perceived reality of the drunken porter played by Emil Jannings, one of Kinugasa’s favourite actors.

Serge Bromberg and David Sheppard spent the last two years restoring the film for a DVD release, but last June they heard a rumour that the text of the benshi (which was a narration read over the film to the audience by professional actors) was rediscovered in Japan, and have decided to postpone the project, thus leaving us in unbearable suspense as to what really happens in the film.

Pierre Kapitaniak

Black Lizard

Black Lizard 1
Black Lizard

Screening at L’Étrange Festival, Paris (France) on 13 September 2017
Format: Cinema
Director: Kinji Fukasaku
Writers: Masahige Narusawa, Yukio Mishima
Based on the story by: Edogawa Rampo
Cast: Akihiro Maruyama, Isao Kimura, Kikko Matsuoka, Junya Usami
Original tile: Kuro tokage
Japan 1968
86 mins

The delirious adventures of a queer criminal as seen by Yukio Mishima and Kinji Fukasaku.

Footsteps echo in the dark. A hand knocks on a door. A flap is lifted, a pair of eyes peeks out, the door opens. Footsteps lead down a corridor decorated with fluorescent drawings. Another door flings open and the psychedelic lights and music of a nightclub explode onto the screen, frenzied dancers wearing little aside from body paint gyrate to a wild groove while men gleefully grab handfuls of sequined breasts, the walls around them decorated with Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations for Oscar Wilde’s Salome. In such a heady atmosphere of decadence and loose abandon, it does not seem unnatural that the mistress of the place, a femme fatale in slinky black dress and diamonds, should be played by a cross-dressing male actor (the celebrated Japanese transvestite Akihiro Miwa, here credited as Akihiro Maruyama). Mrs Midorigawa, aka the famous criminal Black Lizard, approaches Detective Akechi, sitting alone at the bar, who came ‘by chance’ to the secret club, and their encounter is the start of a sexually charged, fatal face-off where romantic tension is played out as the mind games of two people on opposing sides of the law.

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Bushwick

Bushwick
Bushwick

Seen at Fantasia International Film Festival 2017, Montreal (Canada)
Format: Cinema
Release date: 25 August 2017
Distributor: Kaleidoscope Entertainment
Director: Jonathan Milott, Cary Murnion
Writers: Nick Damici, Graham Reznick
Cast: Dave Bautista, Brittany Snow, Angelic Zambrana
USA 2017
94 mins

An exceedingly dark picture that feels like it would have been at home and comfy amidst any number of classic dystopian 70s science-fiction/action thrillers.

You get off the subway in Brooklyn with your boyfriend, looking forward to introducing him to Granny. The platform is strangely empty until, naturally (it is Bushwick after all), a gent in flames barrels by, screaming in agony. As you and your beau ascend the stairs, you do so with trepidation – not only because a fiery human shish kebab has just passed by, but because you can now hear screams and gunshots from above. Your boyfriend bravely goes out to take a peek. Wrong move. He returns, near death, his flesh seared like charred corned beef. Ah well, onwards and upwards.

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Cold Hell

Die Hoelle
Cold Hell

Seen at Fantasia International Film Festival 2017, Montreal (Canada) Screened at Horrorchannel FrightFest 2017, London (UK) on 26 August 2017

Format: Cinema
Director: Stefan Ruzowitzky
Writer: Martin Ambrosch
Cast: Violetta Schurawlow, Tobias Moretti, Sammy Sheik, Friedrich von Thun, Verena Altenberger, Robert Palfrader
Original tile: Die Hölle
Austria, Germany 2017
92 mins

Giallo comes to Austria in this super creepy, densely layered and politically/sociologically charged film.

After a long, hard night driving hack on the meaner streets of Vienna, Özge (Violetta Schurawlow) is greeted by a foul odour wafting through her apartment. It’s not like she has an overly sensitive olfactory system, but rather, the stench involves burning flesh, chemicals and plenty of spilled, boiled blood. Yes, she is witness to an especially brutal murder. And the handsome killer (Sammy Sheik) knows she’s seen his face. He knows who she is and he wants her dead. But when he eventually slaughters someone near and dear to our heroine, the tables will turn. Özge, a deadly, rage-infused kickboxer (I kid you not!) wants him dead.

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Haruneko

Harunek
Haruneko

Seen at IFFR, Rotterdam (Netherlands)

Format: Cinema

Director: Hokimoto Sora

Writer: Hokimoto Sora

Cast: Yamamoto Keisuke, Kawase Yota, Akatsuka Minako, Lily, Tanaka Min, Iwata Ryuto, Takahashi Yo

Japan 2016

85 mins

Hokimoto Sora’s debut Haruneko is a quirky, somewhat surreal oddity.

In the Bright Future strand, I happened upon the Japanese production Haruneko, described in the catalogue thus: ‘makes a valiant play for the accolade “weirdest film of the year”…’. That description being too much to resist, I headed out in the cold to take a look. In many ways, the film did not disappoint. It is set in a café run by a character known only as The Manager, with his elderly helper (a woman who knits) and a young man called Haru. People who wish to die – whether young or old, healthy or ill – come to the café and are then driven to a place deep in the woods, where the point of no return is on the other side of a tunnel. Once there, they can never change their mind about dying, and what they will find is that they will slowly disappear and be transformed into sound waves. Through the lens of a magic lantern show, aspects of their past lives are flashed onto a makeshift screen, with the show always culminating in a live musical number that features a children’s choir and a raucous rock band wearing white cat masks. Honest!

These plot conceits are justified by the overarching ‘point’ of the film that, in the end, ‘all that is left for us is to sing and dance.’ This may be so, but it is a bewildering and not wholly satisfactory cinematic ‘song and dance’.

The terrible beauty of films that incorporate tropes of the fantastic, the uncanny, the speculative and the carnivalesque is that, while we can applaud the director’s bravura and commitment to such narrative strategies, these strategies need to appear seamless, unself-conscious and wholly necessary, rather than artfully pretentious. Luis Buñuel is one of a handful who could accomplish this effortlessly. Director Hokimoto Sora seems laboured and less sure-handed in dealing with these strategies in his film. A tightrope walk of visual and textual precision in balancing these particular tropes – in contradistinction to losing balance to preciousness – is of fundamental concern to the would-be storyteller, and at times Sora seems to lose this balance. Even ‘difficult’ non-mainstream texts need a discernible and perceivable overall inner logic and clarity of vision – however diffuse this may be with regard to the storyline. That uncomfortable feeling of cringe-worthy pretentiousness did rear its head in me from time to time, especially in the musical sequences where the aesthetic seemed a little prosthetic.

But having vented that criticism, I applaud the vision and courage of Sora for approaching his story in this way – we certainly could do with more of that in young filmmakers – and would, nonetheless, recommend seeing for yourself this quirky, somewhat surreal oddity.

James B. Evans

Sexy Durga

Sexy Durga
Sexy Durga

Seen at IFFR, Rotterdam (Netherlands)

Format: Cinema

Director: Sanal Kumar Sasidharan

Writer: Sanal Kumar Sasidharan

Cast: Rajshri Deshpande, Kannan Nayar, Vedh, Sujeesh K. S., Arunsol, Bilas Nair

India 2016

85 mins

Sanal Kumar Sasidharan’s Sexy Durga is not sexy and more of a drag(a) than a durga.

Another World Premiere at IFFR was the Indian film Sexy Durga: not sexy and more of a drag(a) than a durga. Director Sanal Kumar Sasidharan’s film is described as an investigation into ‘how obsessiveness and worship can quickly degenerate in a patriarchal society into a mentality of oppression and abuse of power’. Well, yes… sort of… but this rambling text is far too open-ended and ill-disciplined to address those issues in any buttangential ways. This is Sasidharan’s fourth feature length film, and unlike his previous one, Ozhivudivasathe Kali (An Off-Day Game, 2015), which was claimed to have been made without a script, Sexy Durga is claimed to have been made without a pre-set narrative. Sorry to say that this is very evident in various drawn-out, repetitive and rambling sequences and storylines. The risk of improvisation and ‘chance’ in a film can be rewarding if all concerned are up to the challenge, but it would seem not to be the case here. Not all of the actors are persuasive enough to pull this off, and a tighter grip of the director’s hands on set and in the editing suite would have paid better dividends.

The lack of a set narrative notwithstanding, the story is about a young woman, Durga, who is on the run with her lover, Kabeer. They meet up at the side of a road and take off into the night, trying desperately to get to a train station in time to board and begin their amorous journey to a place far away from their point of origin. Along the way, they get picked up by a group of seedy fellows who become increasingly intimidating, while also seeming to be strangely protective of the couple. Sub-plots in this liminal road movie involve the couple trying to escape the group or the group expelling them from their vehicle, but somehow they always get back together to continue the journey in its cramped space.

Set against this trip is recurring footage of Hindu festivities in honour of Kali, the ’embodiment of the rage of the mother Goddess, Durga’, a four-armed deity who carries a severed head as well as her deadly weapons. During the festival, men dance ecstatically, walk across hot coals, and insert sharpened metal skewers into their faces or insert meat hooks into their backs and thighs to be hoisted up a la Richard Harris in the infamous scenes in Elliot Silverstein’s A Man Called Horse (1970). The juxtaposition of the males in the car and the males at the festival are meant to somehow conflate into a parable(?), a morality lesson (?), a polemic (?) about masculinity or, as quoted, ‘a degeneration in patriarchal society into a mentality of oppression and abuse of power’. Ok, I get it. But it is not persuasive nor clear, and, to paraphrase, the film itself is more about a degeneration in directorial society into a mentality of obfuscation and indulgence of power. To lose the plot is one thing, but to lack one, is quite another.

James B. Evans

Rey

Rey
Rey

Seen at IFFR, Rotterdam (Netherlands)

Format: Cinema

Director: Niles Atallah

Writer: Niles Atallah

Cast: Claudio Riveros, Rodrigo Lisboa

Chile, France, Netherlands, Germany, Qatar 2016

90 mins

Rey is to be admired for the vision, commitment and sheer determination of the filmmaker.

Perhaps the sheer eclecticism of the producers behind Rey – from Chile, France, Netherlands, Germany and Qatar – somehow echos the sheer eclecticism of the film itself. This wildly ambitious, experimental piece, which had its World Premiere at IFFR as part of the Hivos Tiger Competition, transcends many of the criticisms made of the previous films while at the same time ironically embracing many of those same critiques. It’s visionary, brave, memorable, but it also occasionally slips off of that aesthetic and intellectual tightrope of pretension/non-pretension, with little chance of this particular dialectic finding (or even seeking) resolution.

The PR claims that the director, Niles Atallah, shot segments of the film as early as 2011 and ‘buried the 35mm, 16mm, and 8mm film in his back garden’ for later inclusion in Rey as narrative devices to illustrate ‘deteriorating memories’, wild visions of the protagonist’s developing madness, and to raise ‘problems of history and memory’ by including these degraded visual and aural images into the final film. Atallah also developed his story with plotting devices such as puppets, masks and stop-motion animation, in addition to the scratched and disfigured celluloid exhumations. These devices and more are brought to bear on a story about a real-life but largely forgotten19th-century French lawyer and adventurer named Orélie-Antoine de Tounens, who travelled to Patagonia bearing a written constitution – composed by himself – and declared himself King. He travelled a difficult journey through untrammeled wilderness before reaching his destination and meeting with the local Mapuche tribes, who he undertook to rule over but also protect. He later minted coins, designed a flag and appointed ministers to his ‘kingdom’, which was not endorsed by French or Chilean authorities. Considered to be mad, he pressed on with his plans for the rest of his life, and after legal proceedings and deportation, finally died back in France.

The film recounts the story using experimental cinematic methods that culminate in a theatrical experience where Norman McLaren meets Terry Gilliam meets Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God, mixed with Fitzcarraldo. And even this description of some of the DNA that can be discerned in Atallah’s film doesn’t quite do it justice. Rey is a singular work and is to be admired for the vision, commitment and sheer determination of the filmmaker. The film is successful in many ways, but does occasionally slip into self-conscious affectation and slightly pretentious artifice. In the days of Midnight Movies – aided and abetted by certain psychotropic ‘refreshments’ – where the likes of El Topo, 2001: a Space Odyssey and Eraserhead triumphed, I think Rey would have found a theatrical home.

James B. Evans

Anti-Porno

anti-porno
Anti-Porno

Seen at L’Étrange Festival, Paris (France)

Format: Cinema

Director: Sion Sono

Writer: Sion Sono

Cast: Ami Tomite, Mariko Tsutsui

Japan 2016

76 mins

Sion Sono diverts Nikkatsu’s Roman Porno Reboot into a subversively playful and multi-layered take on the female condition.

The 2016 edition of the Etrange Festival offered audiences the chance to see two of the five films commissioned by Nikkatsu for their 100th anniversary, as part of the Roman Porno Reboot Project. Akihiko Shiota’s Wet Woman in the Wind was labelled by Nikkatsu as ‘Battle’, and Sion Sono’s Anti-Porno as ‘Art’. The latter director is a regular at the festival, as there has hardly been a year without at least one Sion Sono film programmed.

Anti-Porno starts in an Almodóvar-like colourful flat, in bright blue, yellow and red, with young Kyoko naked (but for her panties) dancing to her ghost-sister’s rendition of Offenbach’s ‘Nuit d’amour’, after a particularly boozy night. Unlike his earlier contemplative I Am Keiko (Keiko desu kedo, 1997), where the action (or the lack of it) was confined to an unrealistic red-painted flat fitted with yellow-painted appliances, so as to focus on the passing of time, the frantically paced Anti-Porno is rather a reflection on confinement and on the impossibility of real freedom, as the leitmotiv of a living lizard inside a whisky bottle reminds us constantly.

Every detail in this room feels artificial and exaggerated, while the film becomes more and more hysterical, as the versatile artist Kyoko becomes more and more sadistic with her assistant. Kyoko eventually has her bleeding and then raped during an interview that she gives to lesbian fashionista journalists. And just when we tell ourselves that this is really too much and too kitschy, so does the director, who orders the scene to be cut. Once the suspension of disbelief has been shattered, Sion Sono plays with endlessly embedding successive layers of reality, as he did with parallel worlds in Tag.

Sion Sono loves metaphors and, as in most of his films, he can’t get enough. Both the flat and the bottle stand for the virgin/whore dichotomy, to which Kyoko finds herself confined by the world of men. Sion Sono also adds another layer, using butterflies escaped from a biology book and trapped under a schoolroom ceiling to denounce the glass ceiling still blocking Japanese women. Yet Kyoko’s several soliloquies do not do justice to the film’s clever, manifold levels of perception and reality, concluding on one final and rather trivial aphorism: ‘Men’s world is shit, men’s dreams are shit… Porno is shit’. Why did Sion Sono opt for such an obvious and direct address? Was it because the film was a commission for Nikkatsu? Because he had already perfected the poetic treatment of the female condition in Japan in his previous films? Or because he feared he had not been fully understood so far? For, despite a few delightfully funny scenes, among which the bourgeois family dinner conversation on genitalia certainly ranks highest, Sion Sono gets excessively serious here. One has the impression that Anti-Porno moves from a form of criticism to that of a manifesto, bringing hope in the wake. In Tag, Mitsuko’s only solution was seppuku; in Anti-Porno, though Kyoko’s sister chooses death too, in the final scene we leave Kyoko writhing on the floor in gallons of paint, obsessively seeking ‘an exit’.

Pierre Kapitaniak

The Darkness

the-darkness
The Darkness

Seen at L’Étrange Festival, Paris (France)

Format: Cinema

Director: Daniel Castro Zimbrón

Writers: Daniel Castro Zimbrón, Denis Languérand, David Pablos

Cast: Brontis Jodorowsky, Aliocha Sotnikoff, Camila Robertson Glennie

Original title: Las tinieblas

Mexico, France 2016

91 mins

Daniel Castro Zimbrón’s twilight tale of an isolated Mexican family in the woods impressed at the L’Étrange Festival.

This year’s L’Étrange Festival opened with the world premiere of Daniel Castro Zimbrón’s new feature film The Darkness (Las tinieblas). After Tau (meaning ‘sun’ in the Huichol language), which dealt with a biologist stranded in a sunburnt desert and forced to reconsider his past and present, this second part of the ‘Trilogy of Light’ explores the other extreme, while starring the same Gustavo, convincingly and charismatically played by Brontis Jodorowsky. This time the desert gives way to a misty forest, where a father lives with his three children: a teenage Marcos, 12-year-old Argel and 8-year-old Luciana. They live alone in the woods, cloistered in a house repeatedly haunted by something dark, noisy and scary, in an unspecified future. The post-apocalyptic dimension of these woods is only vaguely hinted at when young Argel asks his father about the use of an old rusted pick-up, a relic from an unknown, bygone past. In this indefinite future there seem to be neither seasons nor any difference between day and night – only claustrophobic mist-ridden twilight. The title’s darkness is recurrently created by the father’s meticulously closing the shutters and locking his children in the cellar for bedtime. This world is further blurred by Argel’s mystical dreams, which invade the narration now and again, revealing their oneiric nature only when Argel wakes up. In one such dream, a Pandora-like box diffusing a blinding white light alludes to Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955), where a similar box was the fruit of the Manhattan Project.

The fact that the whole story is narrated from Argel’s point of view, oscillating between dream and reality, adds to the general mystery, as does the masterful cinematography of Diego García who, as in Tau, shoots exclusively in natural light. Tenebrist tableaux, reminiscent of Caravaggio or Joseph Wright of Derby, are worth a look for themselves, but Zimbrón avoids complacent indulgence in mannerist camerawork by endowing his shots and his plot with an inner depth that transfigures the film from a post-apocalyptic thriller into a universal comédie humaine, exploring the confused limits between parental protection and authority, set against young Argel’s coming-of-age. For the beast that visits the house ‘nightly’ is (to quote the director’s own words) ‘a metaphor of the world in which we live, in which the beast represents the dangers outside the home as well as the dark side of human nature’. During his waking hours, the father makes elaborate wooden puppets of and for his children, the last one being fashioned after Luciana’s drawing of him as a spider-shaped monster. Like this puppeteer, Zimbrón manipulates our expectations, scatters contradictory clues as to what is really going on, and deceives us into believing in a M. Night Shyamalan-like twist, only to depart from it in the last part of the film, leaving us eventually, bewitchingly and literally in the dark.

Pierre Kapitaniak

Raw

raw
Raw

Seen at L’Étrange Festival, Paris (France)

Format: Cinema

Release date: 7 April 2017

Distributor: Universal

Director: Julia Ducournau

Writer: Julia Ducournau

Cast: Garance Marillier, Ella Rumpf, Rabah Nait Oufella

Original title: Grave

France 2016

95 mins

Julia Ducournau’s technically masterful female-focused cannibal film is less insightful than it may seem.

A girl walks alone at dawn, alongside a deserted country road. When a car drives by, she dives underneath it, causing the car to crash into a tree. The driver is dead and the girl leans over the car door to examine him. Here we are, then, revisiting David Cronenberg’s Crash, one might be tempted to think. Yet we soon find out that, if Julia Ducournau’s first feature film – selected for the Cannes Critics’ Week 2016 – definitely pays tribute to the ‘baron of blood’, it is most indebted to his recent novel Consumed. (Incidentally, let it be said that the English title makes the film’s cannibalistic turn evident from the start.) Cronenberg makes a perfect and duly acknowledged tutelary figure for the 32-year-old French director, who must have been fed pithy anecdotes from dissecting tables and emergency wards in her early days by her dermatologist father and gynaecologist mother. This might partly account for Ducournau’s obsession with the transformation of bodies, already omnipresent in her short film Junior (2011) and in her TV film Mange (2012). Junior actress Garance Marillier – now come of age and confirming her talent – is entrusted with the main role of Justine, who joins her elder sister Alexia (Ella Rumpf) for her first year in a veterinary school. During the unavoidable fresher initiation ritual (and in France medical schools are known to be the most gruesome), vegetarian Justine is forced to swallow a raw rabbit kidney, which, after an allergic reaction, triggers a novel taste for meat. A bikini-line depilation accident transforms this taste into a craving for human flesh, which actually runs in the family, as Alexia turns out to be ‘crash’ girl, eating her victims’ spare parts.

Although at first sight, Ducournau seems to be using the horror genre as a vehicle for a reflection on the passage to adulthood, the film is rather short on social or psychological insights, while the plot and the characters seem half-baked. In fact, Ducournau indulges in a sensationalist exploitation of the theme and the wide range of unpalatable reactions it provokes. This was clearly confirmed when she presented her film at the Etrange Festival, and evidently relished retelling the pungent anecdote from the Toronto Film Festival where paramedics had to be called during the screening to assist a spectator who had found the film hard to stomach. Thus, inscribed within the horror genre, Raw rather self-consciously plays with its codes, safe within its boundaries and often verging on parody. Ducournau delivers an efficient and technically mastered (but one would not expect less from a Fémis graduate) variation on the cannibal flick, which manages to keep a few twists in store alongside the more expected final feast. Ducournau was one of the 30 people on The Alice Initiative 2016 list, which aims to boost the number of female directors. Let us hope she gives us more fat to chew on in the years to come.

Pierre Kapitaniak