Format: Cinema

Release date: 22 August 2008

Venues: Cineworld Haymarket, Curzon Soho, Odoen Covent Garden (London) and nationwide

Distributor: Optimum Releasing

Director: Shane Meadows

Writer: Paul Fraser

Cast: Thomas Turgoose, Piotr Jagiello, Ireneusz Czop, Elisa Lasowski

UK 2008

75 mins

Somers Town, the latest feature from cult British director Shane Meadows, is the charming story of two 16-year-old boys who find friendship when they fall for the same French waitress.

Tommo (This Is England‘s Thomas Turgoose) is running away from an unhappy life in Nottingham when he finds himself in the Somers Town area of London. However, on his first night, he’s beaten up and his bag is stolen. Marek (Piotr Jagiello) is the son of Polish construction worker Marius (Ireneusz Czop), who is working on the renovations to turn St Pancras station into the new international terminus for Eurostar trains. Marius can’t afford to send Marek to school, so Marek spends his days exploring Somers Town and taking photographs. When Marek meets the bruised and broken Tommo, he decides to hide Tommo in his room and hope his father doesn’t find out. After a bit of light stealing to find Tommo some replacement clothes – Tommo’s idea – Marek introduces Tommo to his muse, the beautiful waitress Maria (Eliza Lasowksi). However, when Maria is called home, the boys hatch a plan to visit her in Paris.

Somers Town has a good script by Paul Fraser and a strong young cast. Meadows combines the two through his preferred working method of improvisation to create naturalistic acting and dialogue, allowing for moments of both comedy and pathos. Similarly, the film is nicely shot in black and white by director of photography Natasha Braier in an attempt to find a visual way of uniting the old and new architecture of Somers Town.

However, these successes are overshadowed by the questions that the plot raises about what it is exactly that Meadows is trying to say with Somers Town. Why are almost all the characters in the movie immigrants, and legal ones at that? Why choose to set the movie around St Pancras International, given that this is where future immigrants will be alighting? Perhaps Meadows wants to offer an alternative vision of England to the white nationalist one he presented in This Is England? Maybe he wants to show an England where legal immigrant workers are essential to the success of a project of national pride like St Pancras International? The disappointing answer to all of these questions is that if Somers Town seems like one big advert for Eurostar, it’s because it is! The film started life at an advertising agency as an idea for a short promotional video, which Eurostar then decided to produce as a full-length movie.

Meadows has always been very open about directing commercials for companies such as McDonald’s as a way of funding his films, which is fine as long as the two things remain separate, but this is a different Filet-O-Fish altogether and feels like deception on the part of Meadows and the movie makers. Meadows is going to have his work cut out defending against the inevitable accusations that he has sold out. Like this one.

Alexander Pashby

For more films by Shane Meadows, see This Is England and This Is Shane Meadows.

Format: Cinema

Release date: 29 August 2008

Venue: ICA (London) and key cities

Distributor ICA Films

Director: Mika Ninagawa

Writers: Moyoco Anno, Yuki Tanada

Based on:the manga by Moyoco Anno

Cast: Anna Tsuchiya, Kippei Shiina, Yoshino Kimura

Japan 2006

111 minutes

Some films are virtually impossible not to like. Mika Ninagawa’s debut feature, Sakuran, based on the manga of the same name by Moyocco Anno, is an exuberant film with an infectious pop sensibility. A well-known fashion photographer, Ninagawa’s experience shines through in the film’s gorgeous visuals and set pieces. Starring Anna Tsuchiya, herself a model and pop-star, Sakuran tells the story of Kiyoha, a young girl sold into prostitution in 18th-century Edo, Japan.

Kiyoha’s feisty character refuses to settle into the narrow confines of Yoshiwara, the nightlife quarter, yearning to escape back into life outside. Her attempts merely result in her repeatedly being caught, beaten and called a ‘filthy, little boiled root’. Her stubborn streak leads to a change of tack – her new goal is not to get away, but to master the art of being an oiran – the highest-ranking prostitute. Though dismayed by the ‘women, women, women… a world of women’, the young Kiyoha’s determination to prove people wrong leads her up the ladder to become one of the brothel’s most valuable assets, stepping on numerous silk-clad toes as she climbs. But her bitchy, riot-girl demeanour conceals a remarkable generosity and tenderness, perfectly captured by Tsuchiya in her terrific performance. Kiyoha refuses to believe that the women are like goldfish – beautiful only within the glass bowl of the brothel, ugly carps in the wild, never giving up on her desire to escape from Yoshiwara on her own terms.

Ninagawa’s film is the perfect antidote to the appalling, Western view of Japanese women propagated by Rob Marshall’s unfortunate Memoirs of a Geisha (which sadly cast two otherwise talented Chinese actresses in the main roles). Anna Tsuchiya’s spirited performance refuses to pander to a male desire for submissive Asian women. And though popular themes in Japanese cinema abound here – the rebellious teen, the star-crossed lovers, the sense of being trapped within the confines of tradition – Ninagawa creates a world that is all hers, a lavish, alternate reality, full of reds and golds, that delights in an almost sensual pleasure, whether it’s the stunning kimonos or the smooth texture of the women’s skin. Most importantly, she creates a world where Kiyoha discovers that she can make her own rules.

Despite its historical setting, the film insists on being contemporary. The soundtrack by Shiina Ringo flows from jazz to pop to heavy rock, continuing the break from tradition. In one scene, Kiyoha, now the brothel’s oiran, performs the traditional promenade to the sounds of drony, heavy guitar; in another, Kiyoha’s passionate lovemaking ends with a burst into a cabaret tune. The eclectic music adds yet another dimension to the film’s playful punk-rock aesthetic.

Cherry blossoms are a national obsession in Japan. Every spring, weather forecasts track the spread of the blossoms across the country, while people throw endless parties beneath the trees, eating and drinking for hours. Named for these blossoms, Sakuran is a beautifully vibrant film, full of colour and light, and simply gorgeous to watch.

Sarah Cronin

Format:Cinema

Release date: 29 August 2008

Venue: BFI Southbank, London

Distributor BFI

Director: Terrence Malick

Writer: Terrence Malick

Cast: Martin Sheen, Sissy Spacek, Warren Oates

USA 1973

94 mins

As is the case with Orson Welles, Terrence Malick’s first film is also his best. Indeed, the reclusive director’s 1973 masterpiece can justifiably make a claim to be one of the greatest debuts ever made: by turns frightening, funny and deeply beautiful, there’s very little else like it, as this new print from the BFI proves.

Badlands is a fictionalised account of the 1959 Charlie Starkweather/Caril-Ann Fugate murder spree, and when Malick came to write his script Fugate was still in prison and up for parole, meaning that the 29-year-old director was forced to change their names for his version. Badlands instead presents the story of young rubbish collector Kit Carruthers (Martin Sheen) and his teenage sweetheart Holly Sargis (Sissy Spacek), who murder Sargis’s father before faking their suicides and lighting out for the badlands of Montana.

Made at the height of summer for little money ($300,000) with a non-union crew, Malick’s script was inspired by great American myths from Tom Sawyer to James Dean. But Malick was also influenced by Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou and its reworking of the classic tropes of film noir – the first-person voice-over, the doomed couple on the run (the film is dedicated to Bonnie And Clyde director Arthur Penn). Like Godard, though, Malick sidesteps any of the kind of moral judgements associated with the great films noirs. Unlike its many lesser imitations, this is a movie which is almost startlingly lacking in comment on the violence we are presented with. The strapline on the original movie poster proclaimed ‘in 1959, she watched while he killed a lot of people’. We’re forced to do the same, neither identifying with nor being forced to condemn the actions of the lead characters, instead being shown Kit and Holly alongside images from nature, perhaps suggesting that the world is a cruel place and that their crimes are just another product of that cruelty. Certainly that was the conclusion of Bruce Springsteen, the title track of whose 1982 album ‘Nebraska’ was inspired by the film and contained the lyrics ‘they wanted to know why I did what I did/well sir I guess there’s just a meanness in this world’.

A photo exists of the real Starkweather and Fugate – who killed eleven people over the space of six months across Nebraska and Wyoming – immediately after their capture. They’re both handcuffed, but are grinning into the camera. Badlands presents Sheen and Spacek’s characters as equally remorseless but far more solemn and self-obsessed. Spacek’s character is fixated with the fantasy world of celebrity magazines and there is a sense in which she has been bred to be a passive consumer of images, no matter how disquieting: at one point Carruthers shoots an acquaintance from his garbage truck route in the stomach (Holly: ‘Kit never let on why he shot Cato’) and the couple follow this futile and meaningless act of violence by watching him slowly bleeding to death.

It’s not exactly their fault: this is a world where moral authority is entirely absent from the moment that Holly’s father (Warren Oates) shoots her dog, where the bounty hunters and police who hunt Carruthers and Sirgis do so only for money or personal fame. Living out in the woods in a tree-house before their capture, we see Kit and Holly achieve a kind of innocence, before nature’s savagery forces them to set out again on their journey to the very end of the world.

Pat Long

Format: Cinema

Release date: 1 August 2008

Venues:Curzon Soho & Key Cities

Distributor: Icon

Director: James Marsh

Cast: Annie Allix, Ardis Campbell, Paul McGill, Jim Moore, Philippe Petit

USA/UK 2008

94 mins

Now that enough time has passed for movies about the World Trade Centre to be tinged with nostalgia rather than hysteria or pathos, the first post-post-9/11 movie is an intriguing docu-drama about high-wire walker Philippe Petit, who staged one of the most outrageous stunts in modern urban history. Intercutting between Petit remembering the events now and an actor (Paul McGill) recreating them in the past, Man on Wire tells the story of Petit’s 1974 riveting and illegal high-wire walk between the Twin Towers, 1,300 feet from the ground.

Filmmaker James Marsh seems equally confident making documentaries and dramatised films, having even approached Elvis from both angles: the documentary The Burger and the King and the fiction drama The King with Gael Garcí­Â­a Bernal. However, where his 1999 film Wisconsin Death Trip perfectly mixed drama and documentary, Man on Wire is not quite so successful and it seems like two different films are vying for attention in the same space. The suspense of drama doesn’t quite work here as the scenes of Petit in the present assuage any worry that he might not survive his architectural heist.

That said, it’s easy to see why the director was torn between the two approaches. The real Petit is an affable and engaging character who is obviously perfectly happy to tell his tale one more time while the dramatised Petit is reminiscent of a young Malcolm McDowell, complete with rakish insouciant charm. Both strands of the movie have a lot to offer, even if they don’t quite fit together. The straight-to-camera interviews with Petit and his associates reveal a variety of characters whose lives have irrevocably been changed by the event, mainly on the personal level, as the original gathering of Petit’s ‘team’ both forged and broke friendships. These relationships vary from touching to acerbic in the dramatised part and the film excellently conveys the feeling of lost youth of all these characters, a youth that remains forever crystallised in this news-making event.

The director films the dramatised scenes on a grainier stock with washed-out colours, using this as visual shorthand for a decade marked by the end of hippy subculture. When plot points approach a mythic quality, Marsh treats them like scenes from a fairy tale – the night before the event, shot in high-contrast monochromatic chiaroscuro with unconvincing clouds obscuring our vision, feels like an out-take from a Guy Maddin film – or the rehearsal for a production of The Wizard of Oz. The latter in particular seems to have inspired the sequence in which the real-life Petit moves back and forth from behind a curtain as he relates and re-enacts the incident where he hid from a security guard by following him around a pillar like a character in a 1930s screwball comedy.

Perhaps for American audiences Petit’s stunt is the second most famous thing to have happened to the World Trade Centre – indeed the cover of ‘The New Yorker’ on September 11th 2006 – had a silhouette of Petit on a wire but no buildings or landscape around him; the WTC represented by its absence. For international audiences though, the recreation of the stunt joins a distinguished group of comedies / dramas which use the high-rise building for dramatic potential from Safety Last to Die Hard.

As Petit’s life became defined in retrospect by this one act, we shouldn’t be surprised that the film should only cover it up to that point – but it’s frustrating that the documentary doesn’t tell us what happened next. A coda to his release from brief incarceration sees the tight-rope walker sleep with a fan to celebrate the joy of being alive. We can only speculate as to how the man responsible for this stunning act of aesthetic terrorism lived for the following three decades.

Perhaps this gap in the narrative, which could have been remedied by some on-screen text before the credits rolled, is meant to be as exasperating to the audience as the antics of the man himself were to the authorities at the time. It is, however, another element of the film that prevents it from being a classic. But while the film may be flawed, the combination of aspiration, humanity and courage in Man on Wire make its single iconographic stunt a worthy and welcome alternative to the interminable summer blockbusters that show characters forgettably defying gravity in almost every scene.

Alex Fitch

Format: Cinema

Release date: 29 August 2008

Venues: Odeon Panton St, Rich Mix, Coronet (London) + key cities

Distributor: Momentum Pictures

Director: Nic Balthazar

Writer: Nic Balthazar (from his novel)

Cast: Greg Timmermans, Laura Verlinden, Marijke Pinoy, Pol Goossen

Belgium 2007

93 mins

Ben X may seem like a predictably tragic computer nerd’s coming-of-age story but Nic Balthazar’s debut as a filmmaker is a smart, thoughtful tale about school bullying, mental distress and the social impact of online role-playing games. The ambitious themes are treated with great sensitivity and imaginative power in a tale that is both touching and beguiling, pushing beyond the form and frame of conventional feature-length fiction.

Sharing an apt (and somewhat detached) voice-over narration with other classic studies in teen angst such as Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting and Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park, Ben X opens with a powerful interweaving of lush 3D game graphics and live action. This, coupled with Ben’s commentary, beckons the audience in with an intriguing premise and then forces them to endure Ben’s painful reality by placing them right inside his head. Ben is affected by Asperger’s Syndrome and therefore is not able to communicate his thoughts properly through speech. He finds it hard to connect with the real world in any normal, straightforward way, making him the perfect target for the cruel games that his stronger classmates like to inflict on him. Incapable of striking back, Ben devises his own survival strategy by completely immersing himself in the 3D universe of ‘Archlord’, a massive multi-player game that allows one player to rise through the ranks to rule the world. His online avatar, Ben X, is as vigorous and brave as Ben’s real persona is introverted and anxious. In this custom-made fantasy world, even his wish for a friend seems to come true when online gamer Scarlite appears. Yet, still she cannot save him from the permanent bullying he faces at school and it looks like tragedy is inevitable.

Revisiting the source material of his own novel-turned-stage-play (based on true events), Balthazar has settled on film as the most suitable medium for the story. A dazzling blend of skilfully rendered computer graphics, punchy editing and impulsive sound makes for some extremely intense and powerful moments, especially at the beginning of the film. However, as the story progresses, leaving Ben with no choice other than to dive back into black despair, the pace decelerates and the final scenes succumb to over-the-top symbolism and pathos.

Ben X suffers most from Balthazar’s attempt to mix the animation and live action with a vérité documentary style. Snatches of interviews with Ben’s parents and friends are interspersed throughout the film, intending to enhance the story but failing to explain what we learn more poignantly through the deeply moving acting and narration. Played with spacey diffidence by Greg Timmermans, Ben never feels too comfortable in front of the camera but it is this very awkwardness that makes his character so endearing.

Despite the melodramatic overload, Ben X is wonderfully compelling whenever it relies on its lush visual and aural landscape. Not only does the semi-animated form allow Balthazar to comment on the desperation caused to young people by the horror of daily bullying in a manner that feels fresh and original, it also offers an astonishing insight into the adolescent mind. As such, Ben X is a film to savour, as soft-spoken, eccentric and smart as its main character and as satisfying in its visual details as it is in its larger intentions.

Pamela Jahn