Miss Bala

The second feature from Gerardo Naranjo, Miss Bala is a searing, brutal film set in the midst of Mexico’s vicious drug war. Laura (played by the terrific Stephanie Sigman), her bedroom walls covered in images torn from the pages of fashion magazines, is a stunning but poor young woman who dreams of winning the Miss Baja California beauty contest. Unless that happens, she’s stuck in a mundane existence caring for her father and young brother. But the night before her audition, she witnesses an attack by members of a cartel on a club filled with cops, gangsters and their girlfriends. She manages to dodge the hail of bullets, escaping unharmed, but loses her friend Suzu in the chaos. After one terrible error on Laura’s part, she’s plunged into a morass of betrayal, corruption and violence.

Naranjo has made a very different film from his 2008 debut, Voy a explotar, a tragically romantic love story about two young runaways, filled with pop culture references. Miss Bala is darker, deeper and more haunting; for Laura, there is no escape. When she seeks help from a traffic cop in finding Suzu, she’s instead delivered into the hands of the criminals who shot up the club, and their very unglamorous leader, Lino (Noe Hernandez). Instead of killing her, he does something almost worse, forcing her to become a pawn and accomplice in his war with the government. In return, he will do what he can to help her win the beauty contest, except that too is little more than a set-up.

It’s a gripping story told in the style of a very un-Hollywood thriller, with the action and suspense stemming from a disturbingly realistic portrayal of violence. ‘I wanted to make a social film, but I wanted to put it in the frame of an action or suspense film, a thriller. I wanted it to have another layer of movie-making, so people weren’t put off by the idea of a “political” film,’ said Naranjo at an interview during the London Film Festival. ‘There was no practical reason for making this movie, but I had a social and moral obligation. It’s a very sad subject, it’s a dark thing, something we’re not proud of. There are some people who think that we shouldn’t make movies like this, that they’re promoting the problem. If we give the problem a face and identify what’s happening, there are other people who think it’s a very unpatriotic act. Obviously we don’t agree with that.’

In the film, the line between the police and the criminals is disturbingly blurred; corruption is ingrained, and the gangs act with shocking impunity. High-ranking officials are murdered, with one DEA agent’s body strung up from a bridge, dangling over passing traffic. Laura, out of fear for her own life and the safety of her family, has little choice but to do as Lino demands. ‘The criminals are the law,’ said Naranjo. ‘People in Mexico are living in fear. That was the origin of the film.’

Laura is very much at the centre of Miss Bala (which means ‘bullet’), the camera almost never leaving her. This was a very conscious decision by the filmmaker: ‘Other movies about crime in Mexico are all told from the criminal’s point of view, almost to justify their actions. I wanted to talk about the experience of the victim, someone who was alien to the criminal world. I saw the news about this beauty queen who was arrested with all these criminals, so we decided to explain how these two realities that are so distant can meet. I was also very upset about how the media portrayed the criminals, with the gold chains, the women, the orgies and the drugs, like it’s a constant party. When we researched we discovered it was nothing like that. The life of a criminal is much more pathetic, with a lot of fear and paranoia.’

Miss Bala is bleak but engrossing, mixing the political message with some excellent filmmaking and cinematography. In creating such a compelling picture, Naranjo and Stigman have drawn much needed attention to an ongoing tragedy – as the film reveals in its closing moments, more than 30,000 people have been killed in the drug war since 2006.

Sarah Cronin

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The Yellow Sea

Gu-nam (Ha Jung-woo) is the loser’s loser, down on his luck at the mah-jong tables, leading a pitiful life as an ethnic Korean in Yanbian, China. His wife left for Korea in search of work months ago and he hasn’t heard from her since, he is unable to support his child, and the debts have long spiralled beyond his ability to pay. Then local gangster Myun-ga (Kim Yun-seok) offers him a chance to wipe the slate clean: all he has to do is cross the Yellow Sea to Seoul and kill a businessman. He is understandably reluctant, but this seems his only way out, and offers him a chance to track down his wife.

Everything, of course, goes horribly wrong.

Na Hong-jin’s exhilarating film is pretty much a game of two halves. For the first hour or so it’s a wholly credible portrait of a desperate life. Gu-nam lives in a crappy world, he is well aware of his status as a ‘josenjok’, unwanted and despised. Everything seems to be on its last legs, everyone is heartless and on the make. His days in the shabby milieu of Yanbian, the gruelling smuggling operation that gets him to Korea, his cold and hunger and increasing frustration and stress are graphically evoked in blues and greys, through clipped sparse dialogue and sharp editing, as he plans to kill a man he does not know.

From the clusterfuck assassination onwards, however, the film evolves into a high-octane gore-flecked black comic shocker as Gu-nam goes on the run from hordes of cops, the Korean gangster behind the hit, and Myun-ga, who re-enters the picture to cut a bloody swathe through the last hour with a butcher’s knife and hatchet. The carefully built sense of verisimilitude is first strained, then shattered, as our fugitive changes from a pitiful nobody into a resourceful killer with nine lives. This never stops the film from being entertaining, however. Na Hong-jin clearly knows what he’s doing with a camera and there are a series of pulse-pounding audacious action sequences. Moreover, his sense of telling detail and street-level scuzz never deserts him. I enjoyed the town mouse/country mouse disdain that the Seoul gangsters feel for the Yanbian mob, and Myun-ga’s appalling grasp of housekeeping. It’s just that the poignancy and sad irony that the film aims for at its resolution seem oddly misplaced after all that Fargo via Simpson/Bruckheimer bloody chaos.

This is a common feature in a lot of Eastern cinema (‘the Asian Gear-Change’?). Many kung fu dramas crunched from Laurel and Hardy slapstick to grim Deathwish revenge thriller after the third reel. Fans of this stuff aren’t going to bat an eyelid at the wildly different tones that The Yellow Sea goes through, but it just seems odd to me, like James Toback’s Fingers being spliced with The Last Boy Scout. Ah well. Kim Yun-seok and Ha Jung-woo hold the screen well, I was never bored, it’s fast and funny and edge-of-the-seat tense; it’s just that I’d still like to see the end of the film it started off being.

Mark Stafford

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Fusako Shigenobu in the Middle East (Children of the Revolution)

Cinematic re-imaginings of 1968 have flooded our screens in recent years to mark the 40th anniversary of the global phenomenon of revolutionary action. Such films are often coloured in a dangerous hue of nostalgia or, even worse, attempt to market their subjects as seductive youths titillated by violence, cheapening the political vigour that drove them. Shane O’Sullivan’s documentary Children of the Revolution is certainly immersed in the same fascinations, yet comes from a different vantage point, offering a unique point of reference: the daughters of the revolution.

Children of the Revolution looks at the immediate aftermath of 1968 in Germany and Japan, from where revolutionary politics burst globally in the 1970s to have a long-lasting impact on our contemporary age. O’Sullivan positions Germany and Japan alongside each other for their shared histories as aggressors in the Second World War, as broken nations in its aftermath and, most importantly for this documentary, as countries that experienced large-scale civil revolt in the 1960s and into the 1970s. Both the Baader-Meinhof Group and the Japanese Red Army, leading activist groups of their respective nations, came up against limitations while operating within their own national borders and broke through internationally, ending up in Palestine to join its liberation movement. Both activist organisations involved women as central leading figures, namely Ulrike Meinhof and Fusako Shigenobu, and O’Sullivan details their personal histories through interviews with their daughters, Bettina Röhl and May Shigenobu, who were born and raised amid the chaos.

Addressing the daughters of the revolution is certainly an inspired choice. Our protagonists inherit the legacies of the revolutionary acts as if they’d been genetically bequeathed, an unavoidable part of their upbringing. Their appearance within the frame immediately elicits considerations of the aftermath of revolutionary action and whether we have a choice in the process of the past influencing our present. Moreover, O’Sullivan rebalances the often male-driven, testosterone-fuelled narratives of revolutionary action by focusing his attention on the female leaders who, in these cases, were not just participants, but leaders of the rebellion.

What is extraordinary about Children of the Revolution is the daughters’ differences of opinion about their mothers’ involvement in revolutionary politics. As journalists, both Bettina and May have a remarkable ability to critically observe a history so intertwined with their upbringing, yet have come to distinct conclusions. Although they don’t represent their respective nations’ standpoints, it hints at the fact that the way in which history enters the collective consciousness varies in each country. With both historical narratives fraught with factual complexity and incomplete chronicles, it was a brave decision for O’Sullivan to tackle both in one film; and, at least for this writer, a worthwhile choice if only for the revelations that emerge through comparative study.

The DVD release includes a re-edited version of Shane O’Sullivan’s previous documentary Under the Skin (2002), with an interview with revolutionary filmmaker Masao Adachi added to the impressive list of speakers, which includes Toshio Matsumoto, Kôji Wakamatsu, graphic designer Tadanori Yokoo and critic Donald Richie, to introduce Japan’s 1960s counterculture and the politics that bound it. Although less focused, it is a generous companion piece to Children of the Revolution and reveals O’Sullivan’s growth as a documentary filmmaker.

Julian Ross

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Children of the Revolution trailer from E2 Films on Vimeo.

Julia's Eyes

During a thunderstorm a distraught woman screams abuse into the darkened corners of the room, until a flash of lightning reveals that she is blind, and that there is nobody there. It’s clear she is tormented by something as she makes her way down to the cellar, but by what is unclear, and as the strains of ‘The Look of Love’ pour from the stereo, we see the noose waiting.

Astronomer Julia (Belén Rueda) immediately senses that something is wrong with her twin sister Sara and drives with husband (Lluís Homar) to her house to discover an apparent suicide. Both sisters suffer from a degenerative disease that leads inevitably to blindness, and everyone apart from Julia believes Sara’s more advanced condition caused her to take her life. So Julia begins her own investigation, against the wishes of her husband, seeking out a man her sister was with but whom no one seems to have seen, every step she takes bringing on the stress-induced episodes that reduce her vision more and more…

The first few minutes of Guillem Morales’s film set out the stall for what is to follow, which is 90-odd minutes of splendid Gothic nonsense. We are in a strange Spanish hinterland of almost permanent rain and glowering skies, peopled by odd-looking types with something to hide, the lighting, sound and set design all working overtime to create an atmosphere of unease and lurking menace, where Morales can create creepy scene after creepy scene. One, where an unnoticed Julia listens in on a conversation about her sister in a centre for the blind, closely surrounded by chattering naked women, desperately trying to avoid their detection, had me stunned by its brilliantly mounted wrongness, the sightless women reconfigured into figures of spiteful menace, blithely discussing suicide as an unavoidable consequence of their condition, Julia’s awkwardness, repulsion and embarrassment mounting until the whole scene turns on its head with another twist. All great stuff, in the venerable thriller sub-genre of blind-women-in-peril, in the wake of The Spiral Staircase and Wait until Dark. With lots of artful use of point of view shots and selective framing, we see both through the eyes of the killer whom nobody sees, and through Julia’s steadily darkening vision.

The trouble is that anybody enthusiastic about all this malarkey will have seen enough of it to predict the film’s final twists and turns. Julia’s Eyes is fantastically entertaining for about three quarters of its running time and slightly disappointing thereafter. It’s still pretty scary, but never steps outside the confines of what you’d expect from this kind of thing. The splendid sense of menace built up around the shadowy killer is dissipated as their actual nature is revealed, and the last 20 minutes is unnecessarily cluttered with red herrings and dead ends. And don’t get me started on that final bloody scene… Still, it has all the qualities you’d expect from a Guillermo del Toro production, it looks and sounds great, Rueda plays Julia with the right mix of vulnerability and defiance, and there must be a fair few out there who’ll be just as swept up by the final reel as I was by the rattling nasty fun preceding it.

Mark Stafford

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Source Code

In less than a year, three films have been released that have been profoundly influenced by the style and structure of (rather than adapted from) computer games. If anything, it is a cinematic trend that is overdue, in the wake of the likes of Tron and The Matrix in the 80s and 90s. Following last summer’s Inception and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, which transferred the plotting and aesthetics of video games to the big screen, Source Code is reminiscent of the kind of game where you have to complete a mission; if you die, the level resets and you have to start all over again, trying to master the level based on your prior knowledge of the behaviour of the non-player characters. In the plot of this film, Jake Gyllenhaal’s character starts ‘the level’ believing that he is in a simulation where he has eight minutes to discover the identity of a bomber on a train. Between each attempt he wakes up in the cockpit of a crashed helicopter and tries to work out why he can’t escape this environment. As the film progresses, we discover the truth about the two worlds between which he moves and the nature of his interaction with military personnel, who are communicating with him via video screen.

In other hands, this could have been a dull ‘Channel 5’ action film, but with Gyllenhaal wringing the maximum amount of emotional potential out of his time-and-body-displaced hero, and with compelling direction by Duncan Jones, the team lift the material out of its familiar genre trappings into something more intriguing and moving than you might expect. Gyllenhaal has made a career of looking slightly perplexed in unusual situations – from playing the disturbed eschatological lead in Donnie Darko to a gay rancher in Brokeback Mountain – and his endearing performances help the audience to accept the outré scenarios he often finds himself cast in.

For Jones, this movie is the cinematic equivalent of ‘the difficult second album’. His debut Moon was an underrated cult hit with a nuanced performance from Sam Rockwell (a very watchable actor who can be his own worst enemy by playing unusual characters a little too broadly) in the role of a lonely astronaut with existential angst on the titular planetoid. Fans of this first film, and indeed the company that bankrolled Source Code, probably expect his new film to be similar to a certain extent, but with higher stakes and a bigger budget, and be slightly more accessible. Luckily, Source Code manages to achieve all these things with aplomb. The science fiction is both more accessible than in some of the film’s predecessors – many people have seen Quantum Leap and Groundhog Day, which are both referenced in the casting and dialogue respectively – and more obtuse, as I for one can’t quite get my head around the nature of the lead character’s time travel. Moon’s theme of a character dealing with the nature of his own ‘less than human’ status and experience of his own death over and over again is repeated and successfully reimagined here, and the only faults I found with the film were the tacked-on romance, which is of the Sandra Bullock ‘relationships that start under intense circumstances’ style, and slightly annoying product placement.

Like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, Gyllenhaal reacts to the time loop he’s trapped in with a similar range of responses: bewilderment, bemusement, hysteria, denial and eventually acquiescence, making the best out of a bad situation even if his final visit to the past might prove fatal. Both films ignore the immorality of the situation – Murray learning to ice-sculpt and play piano just to woo the woman he fancies and Gyllenhaal essentially stealing another man’s life – but they are both so enjoyable that you ignore the unspoken and concentrate on the excellent filmmaking.

Moon was helped in achieving cult status by an excellent ad campaign and word of mouth. Unfortunately, Source Code has had little of either – the disappointing posters being as generic as any dismal Philip K. Dick mis-adaptation – but this is the first great thriller and first great science fiction film of 2011, and it deserves to find as large an audience as possible.

Alex Fitch

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Never Let Me Go

Alex Garland writes a screenplay based on Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, Mark Romanek directs. A slow-burning nightmare, as a strange boarding school in a timeless limbo England raises children for a sinister purpose. It’s a film about the evils that can be concealed behind politeness and bureaucracy, and the horrors society is prepared to tolerate if it suits our purposes.

If I was the ridiculous smart arse that I clearly am I’d try to draw parallels between the film’s theme, where official euphemisms (‘donors’, ’completion’ etc) are used to make all manner of nastiness acceptable, and the film itself, where a quality cast, a string quartet soundtrack and a little cinematic restraint can be seen to be covering up the fact that this is essentially The Clonus Horror/The Island with a university degree.

But I won’t, because it’s actually pretty bloody good, the tastefulness and restraint making the nasty stuff all the more horrible and moving. Andrew Garfield, Keira Knightley and Charlotte Rampling all do good work, Carey Mulligan is great. I think the film loses something and becomes more clearly an adaptation of a novel after it leaves the weird bubble of Hailsham House. But it still weaves a disconcerting spell.

Mark Stafford

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Black Swan

I love this movie to death! To pinch myself to see if I was dreaming, I attended a second showing during the 2010 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival with my wife and 9-year-old-daughter in tow. Bearing a passing resemblance to The Addams Family we settled in for an evening of prime family entertainment. I wasn’t dreaming. Black Swan is exactly the sort of film we’ll all look upon as a milestone in cinema history. It’s Powell/Pressburger’s The Red Shoes meets Mankiewicz’s All about Eve meets Verhoeven’s Showgirls with heavy doses of Polanski’s Repulsion – and then some!

Director Darren Aronofsky etches the tale of Nina (Natalie Portman), a ballerina driven to achieving the highest level of artistry, brutally encouraged by crazed impresario Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel), thwarted by her possessive, narcissistic mother (Barbara Hershey), terrified at the prospect of failure exemplified by an ageing prima ballerina (Winona Ryder) and most of all, facing the threat of extinction by Lilly (Mila Kunis), an earthy rival with less technique, but greater raw passion – something Nina desperately needs to wrench from the depths of her soul to move beyond mere technical virtuosity. O, glorious melodrama! Replete with catty invective hurled with meat-cleaver sharpness, corporeal cat fights, blistering mother-daughter snipe-fests, swelteringly moist masturbation, scorching lesbo action, furious anonymous sex in nightclub washrooms and delectable over-the-top blood-letting, Black Swan is one motherfucker of an ice cream sundae with not one, not two, not three, but a jar-full of maraschino cherries in a pool of glistening globs of red syrup on top.

The performances are expertly pitched to melodrama. Miss Portman commands with such bravado that it will be the performance to beat in the coming awards season. Mila Kunis is raw, gorgeous and sexy as all get out. Winona Ryder proves to be a worthy successor to the suffering bitch goddess Susan Hayward. Barbara Hershey drags us into the demonic bilge barrel of great movie harridans. While last, but certainly not least, Vincent Cassel is a perfect impresario: part genius, cocksman and Mephistopheles.

Some have already referred to Black Swan as ‘The Red Shoes on acid’. They couldn’t be more wrong. Powell/Pressburger’s The Red Shoes is already on acid. From my vantage point, Aronofsky’s Black Swan is pure crack cocaine – a free-base dose to rival that which lit Richard Pryor up like a flaming Weihnachtsbaum.

Greg Klymkiw

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