The Last Exorcism

It’s that old Penn and Teller sketch. First you show them how it’s done – how it’s usually done, how those other schmucks would do the trick – then you do the trick again, only this time you do it differently, better, and with such élan, such verve, that no one’s going to work out how you did it, even though you just told them how. Oh, and just like Penn and Teller, make sure you add a bucket-load of fake blood into the bargain, just to seal the deal.

The Last Exorcism tells the story of Reverend Cotton Marcus, a man from Baton Rouge, practically born into preacherdom, whose faith was shaken by the near-death of his only son (‘The first thing I thought of to say was, “Thank you Doctor” not “Thank you Lord”’). As we meet him, he’s been reluctantly carrying on the family business of spreading the Good News and exorcising evil spirits, all the while telling himself that he was at least performing some psychological good, even if he no longer believed in the letter of the ancient screeds he spouted.

Having resolved to quit, he accepts the call for one last exorcism, this time taking a documentary film crew along with him in order to expose all the little tricks of his trade to the world. So we see him setting up wires in the bedroom of the girl to be exorcised, little hidden loudspeakers to emit demonic wails and moans at just the right moment, even showing off the smoke-emitting ducts on his crucifix. But when Cotton Marcus gets to the Sweetzer farm in rural Louisiana, he finds himself face to face with a little more than he bargained for.

Coming from the production stable of Hostel director Eli Roth, The Last Exorcism, predictably, has its fair share of moments to be labelled ‘not for the squeamish’. Director Daniel Stamm similarly took the mockumentary format into macabre territory with his 2008 feature debut, A Necessary Death, which claimed to follow the final preparations of a suicidal volunteer. Under his hand, The Last Exorcism is clearly as comfortable manipulating its audience’s emotions as it is manipulating its own generic format. As with The Blair Witch Project, however, one can’t help but feel that, were you to strip away the shaky cam conceit of the frame, you’d be left with a remarkably formulaic script. That is not to say it is not grimly effective.

In the end, perhaps the most consistently disturbing feature of this film is not the apparently psychotic teenage girl, or the demon that is supposed to be possessing her, but her control freak fundamentalist father. And it is in the light of this that The Last Exorcism is very much an Exorcist for our times. For the Reverend Marcus’s attitude towards his profession is, to a large extent, that of every one of us, in these decaffeinated, supposedly post-modern times. We all know very well that the big Other does not exist, that democracy is a sham, that our actions at work and in the supermarket are contributing to the wholesale destruction of the planet; and yet we carry on, operating under the flimsy protective gauze of a layer of reflexive cynicism. It is not the gods that we ourselves believe in that we fear, but the – always more fanatical, always more fundamentalist – belief of the other that threatens us. And so we cross ourselves and vote for measures that curb our own freedoms and perform our little absurd rituals in order to protect ourselves from the other’s belief, fully aware that it is only these futile litanies that keep the threat alive in the first place.

Robert Barry

The Human Centipede

As a rule, I try to hear/read/see as little as possible about the films I’m going to write about, but in the case of The Human Centipede – if one moves in sleazy circles – it was difficult to avoid the advance word, and the advance word was ‘yeeuch!’

The film’s selling point is a nasty idea – that a mad surgeon, Dr Heiter (Dieter Laser), will capture three human subjects and sew them in a row, mouth to anus to mouth, so that they effectively become one creature with one digestive tract. I sincerely hope you’re grown up enough to realise the icky connotations of this operation, because I’m sure as hell not going to spell it out for you. I also don’t think I’m spoiling anything for prospective viewers when I reveal that the operation doesn’t end well for anyone concerned.

Tom Six’s film is, in many ways, exactly what you expect. The set-up is perfunctory B-movie cheese, straight out of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and countless others, with two dumb American teenagers, Lindsay and Jenny (Ashley C Williams and Ashlynn Yennie), stumbling into a madman’s house after their car breaks down in the woods at night. It’s clearly cheap, the cast is small, locations are few, script and acting hover around porn movie standard, and, following the rules of exploitation, any characters that aren’t crazy are stupid. Audience sympathy for Lindsay and Jenny’s characters greatly increases post-operation, partly because of the horror of their predicament, and partly because they are now unable to voice any more idiotic dialogue. Anyone wondering why Dr Heiter has this elaborate, sick obsession will be disappointed. We know he doesn’t like people, he used to separate Siamese twins, and he’s crazy. That’s it, and without any real reason given for his insane desire, Heiter comes to resemble the arse-obsessed doctor in South Park. THC exists to show a number of horrible things happening to a number of people for 92 minutes. Pretty much everybody dies. That’s what it’s about, and you can’t say you weren’t warned.

This utilitarian gross-out approach actually makes the result more watchable. We don’t see the doctor kidnapping Katsuro (Akihiro Kitamura) to be the head of his centipede, because it’s only important to the tale that he turns up. In fact, we don’t see much of the world outside Heiter’s house at all – a motorway side road, some woods, an anonymous hotel room – because we don’t need to see more. When the cops inevitably turn up, they’re at the doctor’s front door at once; we never see a police station, or the witness that is overheard screaming ‘in an American accent’, because Six isn’t really interested in anything outside his hermetically sealed medical nightmare. It’s as if Heiter’s house, with its clean, ordered furnishings and bleached hospital cellar, exists outside of any recognisable place in the world. This, together with the unreal, stilted nature of some of the dialogue, gives the film an off-kilter weirdness, and good thing too. If we were convinced that any of this was happening to real people it would be unbearable.

How much of this weirdness is simply down to budget, and how much was through Six’s design is uncertain, but the film is designed, in a European minimalist fashion. This is not a Texas Chainsaw freakout, there’s none of your Rob Zombie hand-held nonsense here, the camera work has been composed: all tripod, pan and dolly, with none of Saw or Hostel’s tricksy editing or industrial Gothic flourishes. This may sound crazy given its subject matter, but the film is actually pretty restrained. The expected sexual angle isn’t exploited, bar a little un-eroticised nudity. The soundtrack is unobtrusive and uncluttered. Likewise, anyone expecting fountains of gore and scatological filth will be surprised at how much the film doesn’t show.

While it’s cracked in concept it’s not entirely devoid of thought. There’s a recurring motif about communication; with the two girls unable to comprehend Heiter’s German, and no one speaking Katsuro’s Japanese, the doctor has, perversely, given his centipede a head he himself cannot understand (and oddly, Katsuro’s longest, most dramatic speech goes untranslated). What’s Six trying to say here? That perhaps, y’know, we might all learn to get along as a species if a mad doctor would only sew us together? Hell if I know. He was one of the original directors of the Big Brother TV phenomenon. Which seems to make perfect sense.

So, are there any reasons to watch The Human Centipede, other than grotesque novelty? Well, there’s Dieter Laser’s performance: he suggests absolute gibbering insanity through clenched body language and measured language, overacting and restrained at the same time, like Christopher Walken on Thorazine. He pretty much screams ‘mad scientist’ even before donning the regulation white coat and shades, and his utter impatience and irritation with every other character on screen make his scenes genuinely amusing. Then there’s the title creation itself, which is both a sick and unsettling idea, and an undeniably surreal spectacle, like something that’s crawled out of Bosch’s garden of earthly delights, or Pasolini’s Salò, or 120 Days of Sodom.

But, frankly, there’s not much to The Human Centipede, really. It’s as if once he’d conceived of the central idea (apparently as an appropriate punishment for convicted paedophiles), Six couldn’t come up with much to do with it. It’s better than it ought to be, I had some evil chuckles, and it will get a following. The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence) is already on the way, god help us. Can I be the only one hoping for a whole new direction in which the human centipede comes to terms with itself as a new organism, learns to love its own body, and we end with a tap dance routine on Broadway that the audience will never forget? C’mon! Now that’s entertainment!

Mark Stafford

Down Terrace

Bill and his son Karl are members of a seemingly normal family living in a terraced house within a nondescript suburb of Brighton. Following an acquittal from an unspecified court case, the two return home to the familiar staple of chores to be completed, tension between the family’s women to defuse and their own tempestuous relationship to address. Beneath this surface, however, lies a far more sinister and interesting truth; the members of this family are career criminals, and are now on a blood hunt for whoever grassed them up.

Welcome to Down Terrace, the feature debut from Ben Wheatley. Far from being merely an episode of The Sopranos directed by Mike Leigh as many reviews have suggested, the film is a fascinating look at the mechanics of a family, focusing on the little things that at once enthrall and irritate, exposing harboured truths and the ties that bind people together. Blazing arguments are abruptly ended by bursts of perfectly timed humour and assumptions about characters are turned on their head at the least predictable moments. Wheatley’s script, co-written with star Robin Hill, is a brilliantly original take on the familiar British crime genre, infusing each character with depth and compassion. We care deeply for each of these characters, which increases s the impact of their irrationally violent reactions towards others. A particular scene of pure visual humour resulting from a sudden action from Karl typifies this perfectly.

It comes as no surprise that Robert Hill (Bill) and Robin Hill (Karl) are real-life father and son, sharing a painfully realistic chemistry that’s as heart-wrenching as darkly amusing. An ex-hippie and regular drug user, Bill is prone to twisted philosophical musings that are highly enjoyable, and at times it’s difficult not to sympathise with the familial and professional weight on his shoulders. Karl is also blessed with some unfortunate situations to challenge his ever-shredded nerves, not least an ex-girlfriend who turns up at the door bearing his child. While plot devices such as this could possibly be viewed as contrived, they perfectly highlight the domestic pressures that bear on the family to the same extent as their illegal exploits.

Featuring a host of familiar faces from cult British comedy, such as Julia Deakin and Michael Smiley, combined with non-professional actors, the film is undoubtedly a lo-fi affair, though at no point is it hindered by its budgetary constraints. More so, the claustrophobic atmosphere is largely achieved through the film’s almost singular setting of the family home (the Hills’ real-life home, no less), and a sense of realism is attained through the use of minimal crew and equipment.

In a genre that boasts as many forgettable flops as Michael Caine or Bob Hoskins classics, it’s refreshing to see a film that finds something original to say without relying on clichéd one-liners or stock characters. Down Terrace has already proven itself to be a hit across the festival circuit, winning Best UK Feature at last year’s Raindance among others.

James Merchant

Gainsbourg

Like that other French national institution Edith Piaf, Serge Gainsbourg is known as little more than a one-hit wonder in Britain. Although recent re-issues have gone some way to boosting his reputation here, he still seems to be rated only by serious music fans and Jarvis Cocker. I wonder whether Joann Sfar’s biopic Gainsbourg, packed with so many incredible songs, will find new fans for the singer-songwriter who died in 1991, or (as is more likely) appeal solely to those already in the know. It has to be said that such films seem to be made by fans for fans – surely a David Hasselhoff biopic would only have a market in Germany. This, of course, can lead to a somewhat uncritical approach to the subject matter, and Sfar certainly seems guilty of this.

The musical biopic is perhaps the most rigid of genres, complete with its own strange, idiosyncratic rules. Perhaps this is because until recently it included mostly made-for-TV movies, such as Summer Dreams – The Story of the Beach Boys (1990) or The Karen Carpenter Story (1989). With the exception of Todd Haynes’s Dylan and Bowie innovations (which divided audiences), the rules of the biopic seem unbreakable and Gainsbourg does not challenge them.

A musical biopic is not about what is going to happen (we usually know that), it’s about how it will happen or how it is going to be portrayed. So we sit through The Doors thinking, when is he going to flash his penis? In the Joe Meek film Telstar, we wonder, when is he going to kill his landlady? It is a genre that singularly lacks suspense. In the case of Gainsbourg – as 62 years are condensed into just over two hours – we might also wonder what is going to be left out. Will we see him sleep with Bardot? (yes) Will we see him win Eurovision (no) or make lewd propositions to Whitney Houston? (sadly, no). It’s just a waiting game.

A successful biopic depends first and foremost on the performances. These films rarely (never?) win awards for direction or writing but almost always win for acting. Recent acting Oscars have gone to Ray and La Vie en Rose while Walk the Line got a win and a nomination (losing the best male lead award to its near-cousin, the literary biopic Capote). The key is the central performance, and Gainsbourg scores full marks here. Eric Elmosnino is not only an uncanny lookalike (although I suspect prosthetic ears), but has perfected Serge’s mannerisms and movement – that perpetual slightly drunk swagger. He walks the line between charming and lewd with great skill. As with Ray and La Vie en Rose, the film itself may be average, but the central performance is outstanding.

All good biopics also need a strangely accurate performance from a talented child-actor – a portrait of the artist as a young man. Kacey Mottet Klein’s young Gainsbourg (or Lucien Ginsburg as he was known then) is a revelation. The charming little Jewish boy surviving in wartime France seems worthy of his own film. In addition, we also need a cast of instantly recognisable lookalikes in the supporting roles. Laetitia Casta’s Bardot is pretty impressive; Lucy Gordon’s Jane Birkin has straight hair and a mini-dress but doesn’t really look like her. It might seem superficial, but in this genre this is important. Many a John Lennon film has been marred by low-quality Beatles – a real distraction.

One of the strangest quirks of the genre is the soundtrack: the cast must also sing. It would be somehow inauthentic to mime to original recordings. Elmosnino’s Gainsbourg impersonation is again of the highest standard but it was Lucy Gordon’s perfectly breathy Jane Birkin that had me checking the credits at the end (yes, the songs were actually performed by the actress, who committed suicide shortly after the film was finished). Of course, it helps that the songs are great, and I enjoyed seeing the lyrics translated in the subtitles (so it’s not about lollipops!!!) and realising what a good lyricist he was.

And finally we need a convincing ‘rosebud’ – the key to understanding who he/she is. Here the key seems to be Gainsbourg’s insecurity about his strong Semitic features. Although he seems quintessentially French to the English, he was the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants. This anxiety manifests itself as a Nazi propaganda poster chasing him down the street and an enormous caricature puppet (all nose and ears) that appears at all the wrong times.

Gainsbourg ticks all the boxes, and despite a few innovations it is a pretty traditional biopic. The pleasures of watching a musical biopic are equivalent to watching Stars in their Eyes. But if that TV show were to have a Gainsbourg special with Serge, Brigitte Bardot, Jane Birkin, France Gall and Juliette Greco impersonators (and no Matthew Kelly) I’d definitely watch it, and I’d phone in a vote for Lucy Gordon’s version of ‘Le canari est sur le balcon’.

Paul Huckerby

Inception

As Christopher Nolan’s Inception is all about dreams and the persistence of memory, it’s entirely fitting that my feelings about the film changed as time elapsed after it ended. Immediately after leaving the cinema, my overall impression was that I loved the experience and wanted to watch (at the least the beginning of) the film again, preferably in an IMAX cinema. However, after a couple of days’ reflection, while I still would happily recommend the film as one of the best blockbusters I’ve seen this year, the flaws of the movie became increasingly apparent.

One of the main themes of the film is the seductive nature of subconscious fantasies, and indeed the world(s) the film presents are often beguiling, and the audience enjoys being immersed in them as much as some of the characters do on screen. However, while Inception is laced with great (if familiar) ideas, their strength and novelty diminish as the film progresses.

The plot of the film, which presumably is set in the near-future – although only the concept of the technology, which allows people to share their dreams, is futuristic, not its rendering, which looks like a 1980s child’s toy – is about corporate espionage, with characters entering the minds of CEOs to steal secrets and subvert their future decision-making. Corporate espionage was fairly common in late 20th-century speculative fiction, but hasn’t really taken off in the cinema outside of films such as Cypher (2002) and Largo Winch (2008), which both deserved greater attention but slipped under the radar of many genre fans. Indeed, in a world where corporate interests have greater power than national ones, it’s surprising that, in contrast to cyberpunk fiction in print, films such as Blade Runner (1982) and The Matrix (1999) have focused more on protagonists struggling to define their humanity under the onslaught of technology rather than on man versus (evil) corporations. Perhaps as big-budget films are financed by corporations, filmmakers might be worried about biting the hands that feed them.

Inception is basically a cross between The Matrix (1999) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), with a touch of Ocean’s Eleven (1960/2001) thrown in. Like The Matrix, it presents us with imaginary worlds that allow the protagonists to perform heroic deeds, kill bad guys with no consequences (as they’re not real) and manipulate the world around them on a practically quantum level – such elements as gravity and architecture being vulnerable to manipulation. A Nightmare on Elm Street lends the idea of a nemesis from beyond the grave, who can trap our heroes in the dream world, leading to their (brain) death in the real one. Ocean’s Eleven and the briefly resurrected heist movies of the last decade lend the idea of a group with different attributes who team up to perform a scam/break-in for financial reward. In fact, this is pretty much a magpie’s nest of a film, including imagery from MC Escher prints and James Bond movies, with echoes of other films that have similar plots from Total Recall (1990) to Dark City (1998).

However, director Christopher Nolan just about pulls it off. The various characters in the movie are well cast and not so two-dimensional that you don’t enjoy their company, even if only really the lead character Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) has anything to lose (and that’s somewhat debatable too). This is cinema as spectacle, and having honed their art on the 21st-century Batman films, Nolan and cinematographer Wally Pfister are exemplary creators of films that feature great locations, intriguing set pieces and plenty of things blowing up. The film is constantly exciting, entertaining and impressively mounted. The cast, featuring a trio of veterans from the director’s first Batman film (Watanabe, Caine, Murphy) alongside relative newcomers to the action genre (Page, Gordon-Levitt and Hardy) are all extremely engaging, to the extent that the attraction of the ensemble alone makes the idea of a sequel welcome, albeit one that would focus more on character development.

The slickness of the first third of the film, cut to a relentless Hans Zimmer score as if it was a trailer, is initially off-putting, suggesting another Michael Bay-style experience. It’s a film that never lets you think about the ideas it’s presenting while it cuts from one beautifully constructed scene to another. As we enter the dream worlds within worlds within worlds, the initial complexity of the various narratives running concurrently makes you occasional want Christopher Lloyd to come along with a blackboard and explain what’s going on. However, while the narrative seems overly complex at times, in the style of the more baffling entries in the Mission: Impossible franchise (which this film also evokes, both in terms of a team of spies and the impersonation of one character by another), the plot is actually quite simple. In fact, this is storytelling on the level of computer games, with different scenarios – city-based car chase, Bond-esque Alpine battle, terrorists in a lush hotel – starring the same characters taking place at the same time rather than in sequence as in most other movies. This is entertainment for people with attention-deficit disorder, and it makes Hollywood appear one step behind computer games, which already provide changes of genre or location twice a minute in products such as Pix’n Rush or WarioWare.

In the late 1980s, I saw a terrific animated short called Rarg about a dream world where the inhabitants become aware of the nature of their existence and their impending doom when the dreamer wakes up. They travel into our world and do everything they can to stop this happening – they turn off his alarm clock, fluff his pillows, put earplugs in his ears – but haven’t taken account of the consequences of what might happen if he just started dreaming about something else. In the 23 minutes of that film, the writer-director came up with a tighter and more memorable scenario about dream worlds than Nolan does in two and half hours of Inception, which makes you wish the latter had allowed more collaborators in at the scripting level.

Inception isn’t nearly as dumbed down as many of its peers and is the first ‘virtual worlds’ blockbuster that’s been attempted that is, in many ways, as good as the original Matrix. This being a film about dream worlds means Nolan can create any scenario he wants for the characters to visit, but that’s a double-edged sword. An early scene has a dream ‘architect’ played by Ellen Page bend the landscape she and DiCaprio are walking in through 180 degrees so that the land also becomes the sky (a scene that has been recreated, albeit differently, for the film’s poster). Later on, as all the oneironauts are trapped under gunfire for the first time, one character says to another (who is using a machine gun), ‘You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger’, and blasts away at the bad guys with a grenade launcher. However, unlike the protagonists of The Matrix, these heroes don’t choose to fly (except when the entire building is in free fall) or shoot impossible weapons, and so the film, having teased us with the idea of impossible worlds, rarely presents them again, except for one further use of Escher’s endless staircase.

Perhaps this is both the film’s blessing and its curse: Nolan’s cinematic success has allowed him to make a multi-million-dollar movie where he can basically put anything he or his characters can dream of on screen, but he and they come up against the limits of their own imagination. If other movies hadn’t already tackled this subject – Dark City, perhaps, most provocatively so – then this film would be a ground-breaking masterpiece. However, as a compilation of the best bits of the last 30 years of action cinema strung together, it’s merely a good, entertaining film.

Alex Fitch

Splice

While Vincenzo Natali’s four feature films have a few things in common – a single word title, small casts featuring David Hewlett and being situated in the environs of the fantasy/science fiction genre – they couldn’t be more different in terms of (high concept) plot. Cube features six characters with partial amnesia enclosed in a futuristic death trap. Cypher is a Philip K Dick-style spy thriller about shifting identities and corporate espionage. Nothing is a two-hander set in a house surrounded by an encroaching white void. His new film Splice is an update of the Frankenstein story through the lens of modern fears of genetic modification. Compared to Nothing, or even Cube, you’d think Splice would be an easy sell to the financiers. However, while the film has proved to be a reasonable box office and critical success in the US, Natali revealed in his video introduction at Sci-Fi London that getting funding for the movie was arduous until executive producer Guillermo del Toro came on board.

Having seen the film I can imagine why. The story is familiar enough: ambitious scientists Clive (Adrien Brody) and Elsa (Sarah Polley) decide to disregard their company’s instructions not to go rushing ahead with a gene-splicing project that has already yielded satisfactory results and end up creating a dangerous human-animal hybrid. Variants of the story have turned up in a number of films over the last quarter-century such as The Fly (1986), Species (1995) and Alien Resurrection (1997). Each of these have suggested that a creature with mixed human/non-human DNA will have a skewed sexuality, but as Splice adds elements of bestiality, incest and paedophilia to this, it is easy to see why any financier who initially read the script might have got cold feet. Of course, it is precisely these elements that make The Fly superior to the exploitative ‘T&A’ of a movie like Species and Splice an intriguing and relatively daring film. Perhaps it’s something to do with Canadian sensibilities – too much introspection on long winter nights – but Canadian cinema often presents some of the most fascinating explorations of human sexuality on screen, not only in the films of David Cronenberg, but also in those of Guy Maddin and Robert Lepage, and with Splice, Vincenzo Natali has added another notable genre film to that list.

In the TV mini-series Frankenstein: The True Story (1973), writer Christopher Isherwood was one of the first authors to suggest that if a human scientist tried to create augmented life, the creature might turn out to be handsome rather than horrific – visually, if not morally. In Splice, the creature starts off as a cute alien pet, but soon grows into a beautiful young woman (albeit with a prehensile tail and reptilian eyes). This creature, whose androgyny turns out to be important to the plot, becomes an object of desire for both its creators, one of whom is also a genetic parent, and the film explores some of the perverse possibilities of post-human relationships. This section of the film ultimately unbalances the whole project as the shifting attitudes and desires of the creature’s makers are dealt with a little too quickly while the final act is too similar to a dozen other movies.

In spite of its few shortcomings, the film has much to commend it and its ideas are adeptly fleshed out by an excellent cast. Sarah Polley is an idiosyncratic actress with a number of terrific SF/horror performances under her belt – Dawn of the Dead (2004), eXistenZ (1999), Last Night (1998) – and she is equally good here. Adrien Brody preceded Splice with the Dario Argento film Giallo (2009), which continued the director’s downward slide into DVD bargain bins, and while good actors often sleepwalk through genre films, Brody is well used here. His casting against type as an action hero in Predators (2010), not to mention his role in the underrated time travel film The Jacket (2005), shows that science fiction is a genre that suits his brooding demeanour and haunted looks.

While Splice was not the massive hit in the US that ‘geek’ websites predicted, it has the potential to move Natali out of his reputation as a niche director of speculative fiction. While Cube, for example, arrived a little too early to benefit from the success of the similarly themed Saw (2004) and its endless stream of sequels, Splice is intriguing and subversive enough to get the director the larger recognition he deserves. Natali is currently rumoured to be attached to adaptations of a couple of lauded but challenging science fiction classics – William Gibson’s Neuromancer and JG Ballard’s High Rise – and if anyone can tackle thought-provoking SF and do so on a relatively low budget, he’s certainly the man for the job.

Alex Fitch

The Killer inside Me

That filmmakers should be drawn again and again to the work of American crime novelist Jim Thompson is not surprising. Thompson’s dark gems are tightly written, brutally compelling and as psychologically complex as they are morally ambivalent. It would be great then if those directors made the effort to read Thompson properly, if they did not oversimplify and often entirely miss the point of the novels. Indeed it is rather frustrating that, with a few exceptions, Thompson’s remarkable body of work should have led to so many disappointing offerings, and Michael Winterbottom’s new adaptation of The Killer inside Me is a particularly deplorable entry into the canon.

The British director’s film, co-scripted by John Curran, is the second screen version of what is often considered one of Thompson’s finest works (the first was Burt Kennedy’s 1976 film, with Stacey Keach in the lead). It stars Casey Affleck as Lou Ford, the outwardly sweet-natured but dim-witted Deputy Sheriff of a small Texas town, who under his Southern good manners hides a frightening intelligence and psychopathic impulses. When naïve rich boy Elmer (Jay R Ferguson) falls for Joyce (Jessica Alba), a prostitute who has set up shop on the edge of town, his father, local big shot Chester Conway (Ned Beatty), asks Lou to move her on. But Lou instead gets involved with Joyce and decides to use the situation to seek revenge for past misdeeds. His plan does not quite work out and Lou increasingly struggles to keep control of events, a situation that is further complicated by his relationship to girlfriend Amy (Kate Hudson).

This story of deceit and death is the occasion for scenes of extreme violence, which has already generated heated controversy. There are two particularly grisly murder scenes, in which the women are subjected to extended brutality and degradation. The issue here is not the graphic violence per se, but its presentation and context. There is a tremendous sense of indulgence in the beautifully shot murder scenes, and the copious amount of gratuitous sex adds to the sensational aspect of the film and the objectification of the women. The characterisation of the main female characters is indeed spectacularly reductive: always seen half-naked and in bed, they are both stunningly gorgeous and like rough sex… This, coupled with the fact that they only appear in scenes of sex or violence, gives the film a rather nasty whiff of unredeemed misogyny.

Winterbottom has said in interviews that he wanted to be ‘faithful’ to the source novel, and this has served to justify the violent excesses of the film. He is most probably not misogynistic, but his incredibly unsophisticated literal approach is particularly unsuited to capturing a novel as ambiguous as The Killer inside Me: Winterbottom scrupulously follows to the letter a book that actually requires reading between the lines (could literalness be one of Winterbottom’s defining directorial traits? Real migrants in In This World, real sex in 9 Songs…). Crucially, the film fails to coherently convey the fact that Lou is an unreliable narrator and that what he tells us might not be true, something that would help explain the characterisation of the women and distance the film from his view of them. This is particularly important in the murder of the second woman. In the book, Lou teases the reader, making us wait for the full narrative, possibly because what he has done has triggered strong emotions in him, possibly because he likes to play games, probably for both reasons and more. That section is a key moment in the book: it explores hidden nuances in the main characters, reveals the complexity of Lou’s psychology and of his relationship to Amy, and confirms that the reality described by Lou is a fictional construct. This, if translated into the screen version in some form, would have given a much better understanding of the violence and made it far less dubious.

This is something that Alain Corneau and his co-scriptwriter, Oulipo novelist George Perec, successfully managed to do in Série noire, their adaptation of Thompson’s A Hell of a Woman (1979), which, like The Killer inside Me, features an unreliable, murderous narrator. The brilliant opening sequence shows Patrick Dewaere’s Franck Poupart role-playing in the middle of a wasteland, shadow-boxing in the rain before dancing to Duke Ellington while holding his small radio, entirely in a world of his own creation. This prepares us for Poupart’s endless re-positioning of himself and his constant reconstruction of an unsatisfactory reality, and most disturbingly of all, for his remarkable ability to actually believe in his warped version of events.

Paradoxically, by relocating the story to a drab Parisian suburb, and making Poupart a hopeless door-to-door salesman, Corneau and Perec convey more of Thompson’s spirit than Winterbottom’s ‘faithful’ version. They understood one crucial thing: Thompson’s psychotic men are losers and misfits who are uncomfortable in the confines of their insular, petty-minded surroundings. Winterbottom does not get it: he channels Thompson’s savage view of humanity through memories of glamorous Hollywood noir cinema; the women look like stars, not like provincial beauties; the cars are desirable curvy objects straight out of 50s advertising; the cinematography is as flawless and slick as the women. But his noir pastiche completely misses the seedy side of the evil described by Thompson, the mediocrity of the hypocrisy, decay, immorality and viciousness, the small-town-ness of it all, present even in the most disturbing acts of malevolence.

This profound understanding of Thompson’s world makes Corneau’s Série noire one of the best adaptations of the novelist’s work on screen by far. The other exceptionally good Thompson adaptation happens to be another French film: Bertrand Tavernier’s Coup de torchon (1981) takes one of Thompson’s most accomplished novels, Pop. 1280, and transposes it to colonial Africa, a setting that not only perfectly suits, but also intensifies, the climate of corruption of the original novel and its uncompromising vision of the rotting human soul. Clearly, Tavernier and his co-scriptwriter Jean Aurenche, like Corneau and Perec before them, had made the effort to read the book closely. Shame Winterbottom’s literary sensibilities are not quite as developed.

Virginie Sélavy

Tetro

Tetro, Francis Ford Coppola’s first original screenplay in 30 years, has been hailed by some as a return to form. Although it is not in the same class as the four films he made in the 1970s (The Conversation [1970], The Godfather Parts 1 and 2 [1972-1974] and Apocalypse Now [1979] all regularly feature in all-time greatest film lists), it is reminiscent of some of his more interesting work from the following decade, particularly Rumble Fish, The Outsiders (both 1983) and One from the Heart (1982). Like the former, it is beautifully shot in high-contrast black and white.

Although Coppola’s writing credits are impressive – deservedly winning an Oscar for the brilliant Patton (Franklin J Schaffner, 1970) and co-writing The Godfather – it is the script that proves to be Tetro’s flaw. It is an over-egged Freudian/Oedipal melodrama about an artistic Italian-American family, the Tetrocinis, and the effects of its dominating patriarch (Klaus Maria Brandauer grandly stating, ‘There’s only room for one genius in this family’), which has had everyone drawing comparisons with the Coppola clan (although who is supposed to represent Carmine, Francis, Sophia or Nic Cage is not exactly clear).

Set in Buenos Aires, the film centres on two brothers: a world-weary, beaten beatnik writer (Vincent Gallo in the title role) and his innocent younger brother Bennie (Alden Ehrenreich symbolically dressed in a pure white seaman’s uniform at the outset), who tries to discover why the talented brother he had grown up idolising is hiding from his family in Argentina and seems to have given up on his dream of becoming a writer.

As we meet Tetro’s quirky group of friends, a scene of an angry girlfriend cutting up Armani suits and smashing guitars sent worrying messages that we might be entering that same cliché-ridden ‘life among those passionate Latins and artists’ world presented to us by that other fading star of the 1970s, Woody Allen, in Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008). Luckily, such scenes do not dominate Tetro. What we have instead is an old-fashioned soapy plot that is somehow just too melodramatic to be engaging. And although Pedro Almodóvar has proved time and again that such a mix of stylish filmmaking and melodrama can work in the 21st century, Coppola is less successful with the blend here. Mostly because the film demands that we take the overblown drama seriously.

However, in most other aspects the film proves its worth. The performances are strong throughout. Vincent Gallo rises to operatic intensity to deliver a perfect hammy Dean/Brando impression that outshines both Matt Dillon and Mickey Rourke in Coppola’s SE Hinton adaptations. Maribel Verdú somehow holds the film together despite being a modern woman stuck in a 50s melodrama, and Alden Ehrenreich is a revelation – a C Thomas Howell for the 2010s (if one is needed).

As the drama moves from the mildly preposterous – Bennie discovering his brother’s magnum opus in a suitcase and finding that it was written in a secret code that can be read using a mirror – to full-blown ballet sequences, Coppola, who has never been known for subtlety, piles on the heavy metaphors. He might not be using the entire Vietnam War to show the corruption of the human soul here but costumes (dark glasses, leather jackets, plaster casts) and scenery (towering glaciers, glaring headlights) are all used ‘poetically’ to show the emotional and psychological depth of the characters.

Although the times when a film being ‘personal’ was seen as a sign of quality and of a ‘true artist at work’ are long gone, Coppola’s authorship here transcends the obvious autobiographical aspects. Visually, so much is borrowed that it could be argued that Coppola is more ‘pasticheur’ than ‘auteur’ but what shines through as personal is the director’s deep love of cinema. It is a film that seems more cinematic than his other works (if that is possible). Coppola himself credits the influence of Elia Kazan, whose blend of stylish location-based realism with the theatrical (as in Baby Doll [1956] and On the Waterfront [1954]) is certainly apparent in Tetro. This belief in the power of filmmaking and love of cinema (an excerpt of Powell and Pressburger’s Tales of Hoffman [1954] is even included in the film) stands to remind us of why Coppola, along with Spielberg, Bogdanovic and Scorsese, earned the collective moniker ‘the movie-brat generation’.

Tetro may be pretentious and bombastic but there is also much to enjoy. It is a beautiful film – the contribution of cinematographer Mihai Malamaire is every bit as vital as Vittore Storare’s work on One from the Heart and Apocalypse Now. And Tetro stands as proof that Coppola, with an almost stationary camera and nothing more technical than light on film, can still achieve a more stunning visual experience than the 3D CGI of Avatar.

Paul Huckerby

The Time That Remains

Taking to the stage at the London Palestine Film Festival, Palestinian-Israeli director Elia Suleiman spoke of the problems he encountered making his latest feature, The Time That Remains. As he peppered the discussion with wisecracks, there was something of the charismatic showman about Suleiman. He wittily told tales of problems with funding, run-ins with the Palestinian Army (who, somewhat unsurprisingly, failed to lend him a tank to film) and his own difficulties in approaching the film’s subject matter. Clearly, any cinematic work that presents a narrative of Palestinian history will necessarily generate a certain amount of controversy but with this semi-autobiographical work, Suleiman also needed to wrestle with his own personal history.

Inspired by the private diaries and letters of his parents, the film follows the lives of Suleiman’s family, starting in 1948 when his father was acting as a resistance fighter. It was an immensely strong beginning with a rapid-fire pace, as characters raced through occupied streets, dodging bullets and finding themselves in absurdly comic situations. Furthermore, the first quarter of the film was infused with instances of sublime beauty. A shot where white pamphlets fluttered down over the hills to announce victory in the Arab-Israeli War possessed a particularly powerful stillness. A similarly graceful silence permeated perhaps the most vivid scene of the whole film. Arrested and tied up, Suleiman’s father was led to an olive grove as his captors prepared to shoot him. As he was left alone for a few moments, his blindfolded eyes faced out on to a beautiful valley. There was an intensified rustling among the branches and grass; the sun shone a mellow honey; he breathed in deeply and serenely. Here was a man facing death, unable to see the view, and yet the magnificence of the scenery overpowered his senses, even through the material of his blindfold. Suffocatingly still and hushed, yet light and beautiful, it was a subtly powerful moment. Suleiman is evidently a director capable of masterful cinema.

Unfortunately, for me at least, the rest of the film did not achieve this level of subtlety. After chronicling his father’s experiences in the 1940s, the narrative progressed to Suleiman’s childhood in 1970, his teenage years in 1980 and, finally, the present day. Suleiman himself appeared in the final quarter, resurrecting his semi-autobiographical persona of ES, seen in the two features – Chronicle of a Disappearance and Divine Intervention – that began this loose trilogy of films. As Suleiman comes closer to the material, the magic seems to diminish. The blackly comic elements played out so nicely in the first quarter, with its balletic violence and incongruous moments of beauty among conflict, become increasingly heavy-handed and broad. In particular, there is one scene where a tank tracks a man while he takes his rubbish to the dustbin outside his house; too wrapped up in a conversation on his mobile phone, he does not notice the tank’s movements, which become increasingly frantic as it tries to keep up with his back-and-forth pacing. This may have been a funny skit for a second or two but the scene lingers too long; it almost seems to be waiting for the audience’s laughter.

Suleiman evidently enjoys referencing historical cinema (one particular scene echoes the plane-dodging episode in North by Northwest) and much has been made of his stylistic similarity to the greats of silent comedy. Certainly, there is a comparable playful physicality in the early stages of The Time That Remains but towards the end of the film the endless visual gags begin to feel a little superficial and repetitive. The balance between physical comedy, dramatic tension and human interactions is difficult to achieve; the variation between these elements begins to disappear as the film progresses and the character of ES, as a silent witness to history and observer of those around him, seems a little too detached to demand our sympathy. While we are always rooting for the characters created by Buster Keaton, it is not easy to empathise with a protagonist who provides such little outward emotion. There are moments where we catch glimpses of ES’s inner feelings – when visiting his sick mother in hospital or looking at a pretty girl on the bus – but they are few and far between. As the amount of dialogue and interaction between the characters diminishes, the surrounding individuals are in danger of becoming basic caricatures or figures of fun.

In the Q&A after the screening of the film, Suleiman explained that he had to think harder about how to deal with the early material as he knew less about this period of his family’s history; he decided to approach it in what he described as a more formal style. For me, the leap between the straightforward narrative of the early stages and the later whimsical, episodic approach was ultimately too great. Having felt emotionally involved at the start of the film, it was disappointing to feel this attachment evaporating. There needed to be more balance and pacing in order to retain the film’s subtlety and maintain the audience’s involvement. Yet, although the latter part of The Time That Remains was dissatisfying, there were certainly elements to enjoy. By injecting incongruous comedy into a history of conflict, Suleiman emphasises the absurdity of much of human experience. This approach is a refreshing one and, at times, created some moments of thoughtful visual beauty.

Eleanor McKeown

Lebanon

The one-line pitch for this claustrophobic little war movie runs ‘Das Boot in a tank’, and for once that’s pretty damn accurate. Based on writer-director Samuel Maoz’s experiences, it’s set during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, (as seen in Waltz with Bashir) and we the audience are trapped with an ill-prepared and uneasy crew of four inside an armoured mobile box. We only know what they know, which is precious little, only see what they can see through their sights, which isn’t much, and apart from the opening and closing shots of the film, we are very much inside the tank for the tight 92-minute running time. The crew start the film barely functional, but as tension mounts and tempers fray the chain of command dissolves completely. The captain loses his marbles, the gunner won’t shoot, and the driver doesn’t want the tank to drive anywhere but home. The mission goes badly off course, victims mount, unwelcome guests are received and everything falls apart…

As with the ‘war is hell’ sub-genre in general, the focus is on the experience of combat rather than a cohesive view of the rights and wrongs of the conflict itself. As in Waltz with Bashir, the blame for the true evil, the atrocities, is shifted onto the shifty, brutal Christian Falangists, with the Israeli forces mostly represented as misled and misguided, a bunch of poor bastards in the wrong place at the wrong time. I’m sure many Lebanese will find much to disagree with in this, but to its credit Lebanon does show the Israelis firing upon the guilty and the innocent, and the film does not flinch from the traumas inflicted upon the population. At least, Maoz isn’t peddling some horseshit that the greatest casualty of war is innocence. How many American Vietnam war movies even considered the point of view of the Vietnamese?

It’s as a sensual experience that Lebanon is at its strongest. As the film progresses, the men’s sweat begins to drip and pool on the tank’s floor, thick with muck, dog-ends and soup croutons (don’t ask). The air fills with smoke, and oil and mystery crud accumulates on the faces of the cast. You can almost feel the heat, and definitely feel glad you can’t smell the action. Be glad it isn’t in 3D at your local IMAX, the full sensurround experience would require cinemas to lay on shower facilities. This all adds greatly to the mounting unease, as the reluctant crew becomes drawn into literally and morally murkier and murkier territory, and their culpability in the torture, slaughter and destruction surrounding them becomes clear. Lebanon is not earth-shatteringly original, it’s heavy-handed in places, and a little clichéd, but it feels authentic: grimy, stinky, delirious and chaotic. It works.

Mark Stafford