Format: Cinema

Part of season: ‘A Life More Ordinary – A Portrait of Contemporary Japanese People on Film’

Release date: 9-17 February 2008

Venues: ICA, London, then on tour at the Watershed Media Centre (Bristol), Queens Film Theatre (Belfast), Filmhouse (Edinburgh) and Showroom (Sheffield)

Distributor: Japan Foundation

Director: Tetsuya Nakashima

Based on: manga by Novala Takemoto

Original title: Shimotsuma Monogatari

Cast: Anna Tsuchiya, Kyôko Fukada

Japan 2004

103 mins

Welcome to the weird and colourful world of Momoko (Kyôko Fukada) – a dedicated follower of fashion – eighteenth-century-inspired ‘Rococo’ Lolita fashion, that is! Dressed in frilly period attire and stuck in a backwater called Shimotsuma, Momoko helps her father sell his ‘Versach’ bootleg merchandise on the streets to pay the bills. Unimpressed by the tracksuits and cheap supermarket threads that prevail in her hometown, she dreams of working for Baby, The Stars Shine Bright, Tokyo’s bona fide fashion house for Lolita outfits, led by í¼ber-designer Akinori Isobe.

One sunny day, a black-clad biker girl called Ichigo (Anna Tsuchiya) comes to Momoko’s house to buy some fake designer gear after arranging the visit over the Internet. When she realises that Momoko is not the smart cookie she imagined but a baby doll draped in Marie-Antoinette lace, Ichigo’s curiosity quickly turns to contempt. Being a foul-mouthed rebel ‘Yanki’ and member of an all-girl speed-tribe, as Japan’s Kamikaze biker gangs are referred to, Ichigo has no patience for Momoko’s fussy girliness. However, as they visit Pachinko parlours (slot machine dives) and cocktail bars together, the two girls learn to admire each other’s own brand of gutsy non-conformism and gradually form an unlikely friendship. Indeed, opposites attract, and what ensues is an often comical and surreal road trip that brings each girl a little closer to fulfilling her dream…

Director Tetsuya Nakashima has whipped up an exquisitely shot and wonderfully quirky film that is highly enjoyable even if you are not acquainted with Japan’s complex youth subculture. Based on the graphic novel Shimotsuma Story by cult manga creator Novala Takemoto, the rather misleadingly titled Kamikaze Girls convinces through strong performances and a captivating plot.

Thanks to the ICA’s ‘A Life More Ordinary – A Portrait of Contemporary Japanese People on Film’ season, this 2004 movie is finally given a much deserved release in a London cinema.

Claudia Andrei

Format: Cinema

Release date: 29 February 2008

Venues: London and key cities

Distributor: Diffusion Pictures

Director: Lars von Trier

Writer: Lars von Trier

Original title: Direktí¸ren for det hele

Cast: Jens Albinus, Peter Gantzler, Iben Hjejle

Denmark 2006

99 mins

After the tedious sabre-rattling of Manderlay and his increasingly big-budget casts, Lars von Trier surprises yet again with a low-budget comedy in the tradition of The Office (although the director claims not to have seen the show). Funny, moving and incisive, The Boss of It All shows that von Trier has a great grasp of comedy and the absurdity of modern life. Arguably the ridiculous situations in many of his other films wouldn’t have taken much to tip into comedy, but here he generates genuine laugh-out-loud moments through great character creation. It’s quite a deft sitcom set-up – the boss of a company has spent the last five years pretending he’s another employee to get his colleagues to like him. Now that he’s about to sell the company for millions and sack them all, he hires an actor to be the mysterious boss they think they’ve never met. A terrific cast handle the mechanics of this satire with great aplomb, including dogme veterans Jean-Marc Barr (director of dogme#5 The Lovers and star of The Big Blue) and Peter Gantzler (dogme#12 – Italian for Beginners).

It’s tempting to call the style of this new film ‘dogme06’ but although the filmmaking principles utilised here could be seen as even more liberating than the rules set out in the original manifesto, I doubt many other directors will take up this technique. The Boss of It All was shot using von Trier’s computer-controlled system ‘Automavision’, whereby a computer moves the camera randomly within a 20-degree angle of the direction it’s pointed. This footage is then cut into shots of around five seconds in length. It’s not clear if the cutting was also carried out by the computer, but if so it must be well-attuned to human speech patterns as it never cuts in the middle of a sentence.

There’s no white balance or concession to continuity, so the colour and exposure within a section may vary wildly from shot to shot, adding a lunatic Ed Wood quality to the aesthetic. This is not to say that the computer doesn’t occasionally choose a pleasing angle, in the same way a four-year-old handling their first camera might. This technique becomes annoying on occasion but forces the viewer to ignore the camerawork and concentrate on the direction, the script and the performances. After Manderlay and Dear Wendy, this is von Trier’s best screenplay in years, though his own appearance as omniscient narrator book-ending the film is slightly unnecessary – yes we all know how clever he is. Just to rub salt in the wounds, von Trier mocks the dogme movement itself by satirising actors and improvisation, but he’s a filmmaker at the top of his game and when he’s making comedies like this we can forgive his arrogance.

The Boss of It All isn’t a film that will gain great renown for its technical, directorial or textual innovations, but if von Trier feels that doing a small film like this will recharge his creative batteries before mounting the next grand folly, this is a fine amuse-bouche, and an easier watch than many of his previous films.

Alex Fitch

Format: Cinema

Release date: 18 January 2008

Venues: Vue West End (London) and nationwide

Distributor: Paramount

Directors: Joel and Ethan Coen

Based on: the novel by Cormac McCarthy

Cast: Javier Bardem, Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin, Woody Harrelson

US 2007

122 mins

Sacrilegious as this may seem, I’ve never been a fan of the Coen brothers. In part I’m sure this is due to only having seen certain films in their oeuvre, but having suffered through the unbearable screwball comedy of Raising Arizona and the insufferable Barton Fink I’d pretty much given up on them by the time The Big Lebowski hit the screens (‘You’ve never seen The Big Lebowski?’ No, I have never seen The Big Lebowski. ‘Officer, the handcuffs’.) I’ve since been tempted back into the cinema for The Man Who Wasn’t There (fantastically dull. Really.), rented Fargo (good, but what movie with Steve Buscemi’s hang-dog face isn’t?) and watched Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? on telly (I liked the songs) and my opinion has changed little. The Coen Brothers are competent filmmakers with a tragic disposition towards wackiness and pastiche that mars their every work, something akin to seeing Wes Anderson in double. I tell you this because there’s a tendency amongst film critics to praise the Coen Brothers’ work to high heaven regardless of its worth, and I want you to know that when I say their new film is very, very good, you can trust me.

No Country for Old Men is based upon Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 novel, the brothers’ first straight book adaptation, and by all accounts the film adheres fairly strictly to the text. This leads to a peculiar moment later in the film when a central character dies, but more of that later. Until that point, from the opening credits and Tommy Lee Jones’ portentous voice-over as Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, this is a tight, taut exercise in filmmaking, a relentlessly tense thriller that works on a purely visceral level but also deals in higher ideas of good and evil. Its backdrop is the imposing landscape of West Texas, sparse and arid, and it’s out here that Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin) stumbles across the gory aftermath of a drugs deal gone wrong. Among the dead and the dying Moss finds a briefcase stuffed full of banknotes and flees the scene.

By now we’ve been introduced to the murderous, enigmatic presence of Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) who, despite a haircut that makes him look like a member of an especially groovy sixties garage band and a curious instrument of death constructed from a pressurized gas canister, has already killed twice in scenes of such extreme violence and cold-bloodedness that we are developing a sense of extreme foreboding over Moss’ decision to take the money. When Moss returns to the scene of the massacre he narrowly escapes being caught by the Mexicans and, packing his wife on a bus to her mother, goes on the run with the briefcase, with Chigurh in close pursuit. It’s hard to describe the degree of menace Bardem brings to this role. There are moments of what could be described as humour in his interactions with those he meets along the way, but they’re shot through with such terror and unease that you’re gripping your seat even while you’re laughing.

Chigurh seems to represent relentless, unstoppable evil; as unforgiving and harsh as the Texas countryside; as inexorable as the general decline in standards that the Sheriff complains bitterly about. There comes a point where we’re unsure if he’s a man or some kind of dark, avenging spirit. Part of what is disquieting about Chigurh is that he appears to live by some strict moral code, however twisted, and that his actions are in some way governed by this, as if he’s obliged to track down Moss not as a job, but in order to make him pay for his greed. The appearance of Woody Harrelson as Moss’ guardian cowboy angel, pleading with him to return the money, only adds to this impression, as do the Sheriff’s lugubrious pronouncements on the inevitable.

Approximately three-quarters of the way through the film one of the major characters dies off-screen, removing the possibility of the dramatic showdown that is high in the audience’s expectations. From this point onwards not everything that occurs is immediately clear and we lose the logic that has, until then, underpinned the narrative. The instant gratification of the obvious is snatched away from us and we’re left blindly searching for meaning in the void. Given my low opinion of the Coen brothers it was at this point I feared that No Country for Old Men had fallen foul of their contrived methods but, firstly, the brothers are doing nothing more than being true to the original text and, secondly, while what may work in print isn’t always what works in film, there is something pleasing in leaving a movie theatre still digesting what you have just seen on the screen. In this way the Coens score big over that other recent film set in the wide expanses of America, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which saw fit to telegraph every last emotion and plot detail by way of an intrusive voice-over, and instead invites comparison with that master of the unexplained, David Lynch.

Sean Price

On 23rd January the Barbican will be revealing the first of its collaborations with the Hammett Story Agency. Writers are commissioned to write a short story about a minor character in their favourite movie. The evening will feature a screening and a reading of the story by its author. The first film, selected by Cathi Unsworth, is Beat Girl, made in 1960 by Edmond T. Gréville and starring Gillian Hills, Adam Faith and Christopher Lee. Cathi Unsworth will read her story ‘Johnny Remember Me’ (the title of soap star John Leyton’s 1961 chart topper), a first-person account narrated by one of the anonymous backing musicians.

Beat Girl is set in that mythic milieu in pop culture history – Soho in the late 50s – the moment when England discovered ‘cool’, when wild young merchant seamen such as Tommy Steele and Cliff Richard went looking for kicks during shore time and accidentally imported an American music called rock’n’roll. In coffee bars, across the street from strip joints, the nation’s first ‘teenagers’, fuelled by double shots of espresso, went wild for this new music. Somewhere between child and adult, this new being began to create its own identity and its own language. When Jenny’s (Gillian Hills) father asks her what all the new words mean she replies, ‘It means us. Something that’s ours. We didn’t get it from our parents’. The film is peppered with so many ‘cool it daddios’ it seems almost too forced – the ‘square’ movie producers’ idea of what the kids sound like – but it may well be accurate.

Like other ‘fictional’ accounts of this era, The Tommy Steele Story and Espresso Bongo (which charts Cliff’s rise from coffee house bongoiste to becoming God’s own Elvis) the film depicts a world of crazy beatnik jazz and early rock’n’roll (as always the importance of skiffle is overlooked).

The jazz music (nothing like the bebop that Kerouac, Cassady and Co went wild for) is provided by the John Barry Seven (just a year before Bond theme mega-stardom) and the rock’n’roll by Barry’s protégé Adam Faith – who gets to perform two songs. The John Barry theme tune is quite something, maybe even better than his classic Bond theme. Thus it is that Beat Girl became the first British film to have a soundtrack LP release.

‘THIS COULD BE YOUR DAUGHTER’, the poster shrieks, and Beat Girl is undeniably an exploitation film, with the familiar mix of titillation (a lengthy strip scene was cut from the original UK release but is usually reinstated nowadays) and delinquency with a timely lesson in morality thrown in at the end. Unsurprisingly, it is a bit corny and a little clichéd but in all the right places. When Faith strums the battered old acoustic guitar he wears throughout the film he is suddenly backed by an invisible rock’n’roll band and his voice is drenched in Elvis Presley-style reverb. But Gillian Hills is excellent as the wild beat girl ignored by her architect father (obsessed with the creation of his sound-proofed utopia ‘City 2000′) and angry at his new 24-year-old French wife. She spends her time screaming hysterically in her bedroom or sneaking off from St Martin’s College to hang out and drink coffee with her friends and go dancing in cellars and caves ’til the early hours with a young Oliver Reed (now that is wild!). The film is always willing to show the seedier side of life. As in Jane Mansfield’s Soho-set movie Too Hot To Handle (1960), much of the action concerns the strip clubs and their managers (Christopher Lee in both cases) and of course the strippers.

Beat Girl remains an entertaining film and a great picture (lacking in some authenticity I’m sure) of that brief moment of British ‘cool’ before the entertainment industry stepped in and turned Cliff, Tommy et al into family entertainers. But while Cliff and Tommy got cleaned up, Soho’s reputation as London’s centre of sex, caffeine and rock’n’roll was made. In the 60s the R’n’B clubs gave the likes of Georgie Fame and The Yardbirds their start and even today coffee shops (mostly Starbucks, granted) exist alongside strip clubs and sex shops. And jazz can still be heard at the Pizza Express.

As for the Cathi Unsworth story I’m curious to find out. Will the musician follow John Barry to Hollywood and work on soundtracks? Does he think in hip-talk or just use it to act cool with his friends? Will he break the world drumming record? And are they really only drinking coffee?

Paul Huckerby

For details of the event click here.

Photo í‚© Scott Green

Format: Cinema

Release date: 28 December 2007

Venues: Nationwide

Distributor: Tartan Films

Director: Gus Van Sant

Based on novel by Blake Nelson

Cast: Gabe Nevins, Jake Miller, Lauren McKinney

USA 2007

85 mins

Gus Van Sant’s multiplex days already feel like a distant memory: one imagines the director working on Paranoid Park, looking back on Finding Forrester with a shudder and gaining the strength to cut in another five minutes of wordless 16mm skateboard footage. And although this new film is more straightforward than either Last Days or Gerry, it still bears the hallmarks of a filmmaker on a mission to escape convention.

Shot, like Elephant and Last Days before it, in Van Sant’s home base of Portland, Oregon, the film focuses on skate-obsessed teenager Alex and his involvement in the accidental death of a train yard security man close to the eponymous hangout. Deliberately oblique and open-ended, the fractured narrative is constructed through snippets of Alex’s memory and his written recollections of that night’s events. The script, adapted from a novel by local author Blake Nelson, feels loose and improvised, and engagingly natural. But the structure is uneven – Van Sant’s decision to hold back full revelation of the story’s key events is a sound one, and ensures a level of surprisingly intense, simmering tension throughout the first two acts of the film. The crime itself is revealed in a sequence of extraordinary horror, and the immediate aftermath is stunningly realised and utterly overwhelming. But once the shock has worn off the tension inevitably dissipates, and the final scenes struggle to maintain momentum: even at 85 minutes, the film feels a little overlong.

The actors, sourced via a casting call on MySpace, are largely non-professional, naturalistic and occasionally rather awkward. As Alex, Gabe Nevins is essentially asked to carry the film – he appears in practically every scene, the entire story told through his eyes. He never seems quite comfortable in front of the camera, but it is this very uncertainty that makes the character sympathetic. Set apart from the adolescent world that surrounds him, Alex seems somehow helpless, conflicted about his parents, his friends, his sexuality and most importantly how to absorb and deal with the terrible events in which he becomes involved. Alex’s only release is skating: watching it, talking about it, doing it. The film regularly lapses into golden reveries of skate footage, roaming 16mm cameras tracking floating teenage figures around parks, streets, empty swimming pools.

Aside from this rough footage by Rain Kathy Li, the majority of the film is photographed by Christopher Doyle and bears many of his familiar hallmarks. Although the direction is all Van Sant, with long tracking shots of characters in motion, close-ups on pensive faces and unexpected cutaways, the look of the film is unmistakeably Doyle: richly coloured, warmly textured and highly evocative.

Perhaps the film’s most bizarre and notable characteristic is its aural landscape: natural and artificial sounds are used to sparing but brilliant effect, accentuating the paranoia inherent in the central character’s situation. And ranging from blippy electronic soundscapes to excerpts from Fellini scores via thrash metal, hip hop, trad country and two inevitable (and perfectly chosen) contributions from the late Elliott Smith, the soundtrack feels at times comically incongruous, at others bewitchingly appropriate. But it works wonderfully, contrasting or complementing the images in a way that is occasionally perplexing but consistently memorable: an apt description for the film as a whole.

Tom Huddleston

Format: Cinema

Release date: 11 January 2008

Distributor Artificial Eye

Director: Cristian Mungiu

Original title: 4 luni, 3 saptamini si 2 zile

Cast: Anamaria Marinca, Laura Vasiliu, Vlad Ivanov, Alexandru Potocean

Romania 2007

113 minutes

A remarkable new generation of filmmakers has erupted out of post-communist Romania in the last few years. Cristian Mungiu’s excellent 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is the latest film to achieve critical success, deservedly winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year.

Romania had one of the Eastern Bloc’s most vicious and repressive regimes under the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. Abortion was criminalised in 1966, forcing the practice underground. Mungiu’s film, the first in a series that he’s planning about the legacy of communism in Romania, takes place over the course of one day in 1986. A young student, Gabita, foolishly having left an unwanted pregnancy too late, enlists her friend Otilia’s help to get her through the backstreet abortion that she’s arranged with an unknown ‘doctor’, Mr Bebe. The faux-naí­Â¯ve Gabita (whose frailty is perfectly captured by Laura Vasiliu) is incapable of being honest with herself, and has deceived both the doctor and Otilia, who finds herself entangled in a web of lies. But it’s really Otilia, in a stand-out performance by Anamaria Marinca, who drives the film forward.

The girls, living together in a dorm full of fellow students, barter with each other for black market items. Otilia tries to hunt down a pack of cigarettes, hoping they’ll help her bribe hotel officials when she tries to book a room where Gabita can have the abortion. The hotels themselves are virtually impenetrable fortresses, reminding us of the police state that dominates the fringes of the film. The girls are unprepared for their eventual encounter with Bebe; he is both brutal and brutalised by the acts he is forced to perform. Furious at Gabita for lying about her pregnancy, he exacts a cruel, calculating revenge on the two powerless friends.

4 Months aesthetically captures the bleakness of communist Romania in the 80s, with its sterile dorms, soulless hotels and cement-lined streets. The film is composed of brilliantly choreographed long takes that demand utter commitment from the actors, wresting tortured, powerful performances out of each of them. The naturalistic camerawork creates an acute awareness of a dangerous world lingering just outside the frame, making the film an almost edge-of-the-seat psychological thriller. Every element of the film, from the acting to Oleg Mutu’s enthralling cinematography, comes together to create a powerful, coherent whole.

The film is something of a blank canvas, allowing the audience to project its own judgements and values on an all-too-familiar tragedy. Crucially, it’s not merely a film about abortion, but rather the degradation that Romanians suffered at the hands of a totalitarian dictator. Otilia desperately tries to hold on to her dignity in the face of the emotional and physical brutality that Bebe, and the regime, inflict on her and Gabita. The abortion itself is merely a metaphor for the cruelties unleashed on the country.

This wave of young filmmakers are the first to have grown up virtually free from communism. They seem to share a powerful sense of duty to reflect on their history, on the sacrifices made by their parents and grandparents. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is a suspenseful, riveting tribute to the character and integrity of people like Otilia: she is the strong, quietly defiant young woman out on the streets of Bucharest in 1989 facing down the tanks, calling for Ceausescu’s overthrow.

Sarah Cronin