Format: Cinema

Release date: 20 March 2009

Venues: Curzons Mayfair and Soho, Renoir (London) and key cities

Distributor: Artificial Eye

Director: Paolo Sorrentinon

Writer: Paolo Sorrentino

Cast: Toni Servillo, Anna Bonaiuto, Giulio Bosetti, Flavio Bucci

Italy 2008

117 mins

Il Divo, which translates as ‘The Divine’, is just one of the nicknames given to Giulio Andreotti, who was Prime Minister of Italy seven times between 1972 and 1992. The others, including ‘The Man of Darkness’, ‘The Black Pope’ and ‘Beelzebub’, give a good indication of Andreotti’s notoriety. Tried on several occasions for murder, corruption and Mafia involvement, he escaped conviction each time due to a lack of evidence. Director Paolo Sorrentino borrows the aesthetics of a crime movie – for example, the Reservoir Dogs-style slow motion shot where, on the day of their appointment, the members of the seventh Andreotti government walk down the corridors of power – but he does not try to uncover the truth behind the accusations; instead, Sorrentino chooses to focus on the cloak of ambiguity that Andreotti wove for himself. This distance between style and content is ironic, and it is central to Sorrentino’s films.

In order to portray a character with Andreotti’s supreme level of self-control, you need an actor of equivalent status. Toni Servillo is that actor. Sorrentino is careful not to judge Andreotti through the development of the plot, but Servillo’s characterisation tells a different story. Before shooting, Sorrentino prepared piles of footage of the real Andreotti for the star of his acclaimed 2004 feature The Consequences of Love, but Servillo chose not to watch it, preferring instead to play the character as written in the script. Servillo portrays Andreotti with remarkable precision through movements so small that they have to be measured in millimetres, conveying Andreotti’s impressive impassivity. This, coupled with his protruding ears, hunchback and long white fingers – all exaggerated characteristics of the real Andreotti – recalls Murnau’s Nosferatu, implying that Sorrentino sees Andreotti as a vampire who fed on the blood of Italy.

In keeping with the ironic style Sorrentino has developed, the formal beauty of the film and the music are often used to undermine the emotion of a scene or to create incongruous contrasts. Framing Andreotti in extremely deep shots, accompanying the images with a cosmopolitan soundtrack that takes in classical, electronica, indie and pop music, Sorrentino uses the cinematography and the score to mock the politician subtly, constantly undercutting his idea of himself and of all the power he has amassed.

Sorrentino has previously said that ‘life is tragic enough and irony is the best antidote’. It is therefore perhaps unsurprising that in a film full of actual Andreotti quotations, the most resonant line should be, ‘Irony is the best defence against death’, an Andreotti-style aphorism invented by Sorrentino and delivered by Servillo with a pan so dead it is as if it has been encased in concrete then dropped in the ocean to ‘sleep with the fishes’.

Alexander Pashby

Format: Cinema

Release date: 13 March 2009

Venues: Cineworld Haymarket, Empire Leicester Square, Odeon Covent Garden (London) and nationwide

Distributor: Vertigo Films

Director: Nicolas Winding Refn

Writer: Brock Norman Brock

Cast: Tom Hardy, Kelly Adams, Katy Barker, Edward Bennett-Coles

UK 2009

92 mins

Bronson is an odd film: compelling in places, ineffectual in parts, it has a number of powerful scenes, but is full of loose ends and strange omissions, with an unconvincing artistic apotheosis at its climax. Most of its problems, though, are pretty much inevitable given the real life story that Pusher-man Nicolas Winding Refn and co-writer Brock Norman Brock are trying to document. Charles Bronson (born Michael Peterson) has spent 34 years out of a 57-year life behind bars, 30 years of which in solitary confinement. His criminal career consists of little more than a couple of unspectacular robberies, but the time served is down to some idiosyncratic character traits, such as: a) a tendency to beat the holy crap out of anyone around him at any time for ill-defined reasons; b) a complete failure on his part to comprehend why this could be a problem.

Whilst the details of his career as ‘Britain’s most violent prisoner’ are lurid enough to fuel any Brit gangsta flick, the shape of his existence defies any conventional narrative treatment. There is no grand character arc, no rise and fall: ‘bloke gets banged up… stays there’ does not really lend itself to a three-act structure, and a life in solitary offers a limited number of roles for the supporting cast. Nicolas Winding Refn attempts to surmount these problems through aggressive stylisation. We are part of a shadowy audience watching Bronson, an unreliable narrator in variety hall make-up, tell his story. And whilst the settings and dialogue of his tale are authentically grimy, everything else is decidedly non-naturalistic. The performances are mannered, the photography is archly composed, the soundtrack consists of lush classical and synth pop music. Bronson resembles a cross between Andrew Dominik’s 2000 Chopper and Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (DP Larry Smith worked on Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, and on this evidence was paying attention), and is too narrowly restricted to that glib description to prove wholly satisfactory. Its attempts to portray Bronson as an artist without a canvas deprived of his liberty by a cold and uncomprehending world are decidedly undermined by its own depiction of the man as a living train wreck.

The film’s worth mainly lies with its version of Bronson as a terrifying, unpredictable and ludicrous individual utterly lacking in self-awareness, a rebel without a clue, a kidnapper without demands. Tom Hardy is terrific in the part, and the sequences showing his brief period of freedom in 1988 are fantastic, tense and weirdly hysterical. He stomps around Luton in a three-piece brown suit, like a human special effect, fists and body permanently clenched, baffled by even the most mundane domestic interaction. Many of the film’s most vital scenes come from this section. But he was free for only 68 days, and we are soon imprisoned with him again. What a life.

Mark Stafford

Wild Japan: Sex in Japanese Cinema of the 60s and 70s

1-30 December 2008

BFI Southbank, London

BFI website

Among the rare delights offered by the Wild Japan season that ran at the BFI Southbank last December, three films stood out for their boldness, ambition and originality. Kan Mukai’s 1969 Blue Film Woman (Burû fuirumu no onna) was a delirious mix of grotesque horror, stylised sex, psychedelic visuals and 60s exuberance. The story centres on the family of a ruined stockbroker forced to acquiesce to the demands of the loan shark he is indebted to, a repulsive man called Uchiyama, who requests sexual favours from the wife as payment. After having his way with her, Uchiyama takes her to his house where he lets her be raped by his monstrous idiot son; her suffering ends tragically when she is run over by a car on her way home. Mariko, the daughter, takes up employment as a go-go dancer in a nightclub to provide for her father and herself. After he commits suicide, she becomes a call girl and records her sexual encounters with a group of wealthy businessmen, using the films to bring them down in revenge for the ruin of her family.

The plot takes a sinuous, unexpected path, and Uchiyama’s comeuppance is meted out not by Mariko but by his own son in a shockingly brilliant twist. Mariko aims higher, focusing not so much on the sleazy loan shark who is simply a middleman, but on the legitimate businessmen at the very top who think nothing of destroying whole families through their reckless actions (sound familiar?), an idea emphasised by shots of the enormous stock exchange building towering over people on the streets below. Add to the implied social criticism the rich, horrific inventiveness of the scenes involving the blubbering maniacal son, throw in the swirly sounds and stroboscopic lights of a hip, late 60s Tokyo nightclub, and you have one of the most unpredictable and pleasurable films of the Wild Japan season.

For this writer, however, the unquestionable highlight of the programme was the pair of films from the independent Wakamatsu Pro company, including Kôji Wakamatsu’s Secret Acts behind Walls (Kabe no naka no himegoto, 1965), and Gushing Prayer: A 15-Year-Old Prostitute (Funshutsu kigan: 15-sai no baishunfu, 1971), written and directed by Wakamatsu’s long-time collaborator Masao Adachi. Both films were made as pinku eiga (pink film), a genre of soft-core porn that emerged in Japanese cinema in the early 60s. Wakamatsu and Adachi found in the erotic film industry an alternative distribution network that allowed them to get their uncompromising work shown. Sharing the same radical spirit and aesthetics, fascinating, articulate and beautifully filmed, Secret Acts behind Walls and Gushing Prayer are closer to European art films than to Western sexploitation of the same period. For both Wakamatsu and Adachi, sex is a crucial indicator of social relationships and as such, is political. Through their characters’ sexual encounters, the directors probe the state of post-war Japan, the repressive hypocrisies of its patriarchal society and the bitter aftermath of the student leftist protests.

Filmed in black and white, Secret Acts behind Walls opens with bleak shots of concrete blocks of flats before closing in on a couple in bed, injecting drugs, the woman caressing her lover’s keloid scar, calling him ‘an emblem of Hiroshima, of Japan, an anti-war emblem’. This confrontational opening is followed by a tightly framed study of the oppressive lives led by a number of the block’s residents. The couple are revealed to be disillusioned lovers whose youthful ideals have come to nothing. In the opposite building, a young student is driven mad by sexual frustration while his attractive sister has her first relationship with a man. Obsessions and dissatisfactions heat up slowly, bringing the characters together in a violent dénouement.

The sex acts are constantly associated with political and social events. The central couple read newspapers in bed, the man fondling his lover’s breast while reading an article about the Vietnam war. Their initial passion was linked to their shared beliefs in pacifism and their involvement in the student movement: in a flashback, they are seen making love in front of a poster of Stalin. He is now a stockbroker who makes money from the war, and she is an alienated housewife struggling to escape the confines of the small flat she shares with her husband, disenchanted by her lover’s increasingly cool, cynical detachment. He has no qualms about his current employment and seems happy to call their affair – and possibly their former activism – a ‘momentary passion’, in somewhat callous disregard to the momentous sacrifice she made to what she believed was their eternal love (she chose to get sterilised because his irradiation meant they could not have children). A sense of profound despair hangs over the residents, born of an awareness of the changes that could have been but never materialised, and of the characters’ resulting imprisonment in a claustrophobic present that offers no hope for the future and no solace in the past.

The opening of Adachi’s Gushing Prayer is as startling as that of Secret Acts behind Walls, framing the body of the vacant-eyed teenage Yasuko lying on the floor in a series of close-ups as she is fondled by two boys who ask her, together with another girl sitting nearby, what she can feel as they touch her. The four teenagers spend the film debating sex and their attitude towards it with the kind of dogmatic intensity and moral rigidity displayed by revolutionary students in other Japanese films of the same period. To establish whether Yasuko has betrayed their rules by sleeping with an adult (their teacher), and whether this means she is a prostitute, they decide she should begin taking payment to perform sex acts with strangers. What follows is a succession of bizarre, random, dispassionate couplings that are observed and discussed by the rest of the group. When Yasuko says she is four months pregnant, the group decide she should keep the child. Having managed to finally escape the overbearing attention of her friends, she ponders the words ‘prostitute’ and ‘mother’ in an effort to find her identity, but in a patriarchal society that restricts women to those two roles, her only way out seems to be suicide. This is emphasised by the soundtrack: throughout the film, disembodied voices read the suicide notes of teenage girls, grimly hinting at where Yasuko’s sexual exploration might lead.

Just as in Secret Acts behind Walls, sex is a social transaction and a political act. The film explores how what one does with one’s body, especially when female, defines their relationship to their community or society, and how that community may try and claim ownership of the body, controlling its perceptions and desires. The four teenage friends constitute a small, marginal social group trying to construct their own set of rules, different from the ones that prevail in what they dismissively call ‘the adult world’. In that sense they are social revolutionaries, akin to the rebellious students of the post-war years, and the genius of the film is to explore politics obliquely through the characters’ teenage anxieties and sexual experimentation. More cerebral and verbose than Secret Acts behind Walls, with a looser, rambling, experimental style that allows for the unfettered investigation of ideas, Gushing Prayer offers just as searing a depiction of a suffocating society with nothing to offer to its defeated youth.

Virginie Sélavy