In Darkness (W ciemności, Poland-Germany-Canada, 2011)

Out of the light

A producer may have pitched this as a high concept film where Kanal (Poland, 1953) meets Schindler’s List (US, 1993) without the latter’s saccharine. It’s the true tale of a Polish sewage worker who was paid to look after Jewish refugees from the Warsaw Ghetto. Robert Wieckiewicz plays Leopold Socha whose motivation, at least initially, is wholly pecuniary. It is a strength of the film that the protagonist is represented as a ‘warts and all’ human being and it doesn’t stint upon the Nazi’s atrocities. Both the lead characters are played by charismatic actors new to me, Wieckiewicz plays Lech Walesa in this year’s biopic of the Solidarity union leader; Benno Fürmann plays a German-Jew who doesn’t trust Socha.

The film’s portrayal, based on Robert Marshall’s book In the Sewers of Lvov, of people living in extreme conditions is psychologically acute. For example, the characters’ need for sex is emphasised despite them being ensconced in confined spaces with many others, including children. Jewish racism against the ‘Polacks’ is also shown. The set design, both above and below ground, is immaculate.

The pitch I imagined at the start of the article was, of course, jokey. The film took 22 years to bring to the screen – see this excellent article. The film not only takes us into the darkness of the sewers but also into the darkness of fascism (have you seen the film Mr Di Canio?); this is one of the key functions of  cinema: to take us to places we don’t want to go. In doing so it not only helps us appreciate what we have got but also, viscerally (I was blubbing by the end), helps us to feel the history. It is very difficult, for example, for young people to understand the misery that Thatcherism inflicted (and continues to inflict) upon many people; as a historical figure, the first female British PM, she can seem laudable.

I realise that this is the first film I seen directed by Agnieszka Holland so I have some catching up to do. Her use of the roving steadicam in the sewers conveys the stinking claustrophobia brilliantly and although there a few longuers, in a 145 minute film, they are necessary for the portrayal of human resilience in the face of human evil.

The Spirit of ’45 (UK 2013)

Attlee: man of the people

Ken Loach’s documentary, which celebrates the brilliance of the post-war Labour government, is a blast from the past in more ways than one. I can’t remember the last time when I heard the word ‘socialism’ used so frequently in a text and spoken with approval; probably Channel 4′s Eleventh Hour radical strand on Monday night in the 1980s. But here we have it, Clem Attlee stating, proudly, that Britain is going to be socialist. However, Ken doesn’t have rose-tinted lenses for, as Tony Benn says, the nationalised industries were always controlled top-down, often by the same people who’d managed them before, rather than by the people. However, the achievements of the time were wondrous.

Here Loach lets witnesses speak, and they do so with conviction; for example, the guy who explains how amazing it was to find a bathroom inside the council house he was moving into. And there is plenty of footage, from the likes of Housing Problems (1936), to show how things were before the war. These witnesses are now obviously old so it is doubly important to hear their perspective; such as the doctor who, on the day the NHS started, was able to tell a patient not to worry about paying for the medicine as it was now free.

Loach is obviously not celebrating the era for the purposes of nostalgia because we are on the verge of the disintegration of the welfare state as the vandals in government seek to destroy the mechanisms of equality. The last third of the film looks at the effect of Thatcher, the great destroyer, and we currently have a government of men who wish to fill her boots by taking the country to the far right. Today’s Daily Mail features a composite image merging Chancellor Osborne with Thatcher; certainly an honest comment.

I saw the film with two teenagers who struggled to keep awake. That’s not a reflection upon them, as teenagers tend not be interested in the past, and there are a lot of black and white talking heads in the film. But, of course, it is their generation that is going to lose the most if the rich are allowed to consolidate, and increase, their grasp upon the nation’s wealth. Youngsters need to look beyond themselves, as they have been taught to do in the fall-out of Thatcher (and Blair), and think of others to both save the planet (climate change) and themselves from a future of social strife and insurrection.

Film 4 homepage for The Spirit of ’45

Stoker (UK-US, 2013)

Who’s the nuttiest?

What happens when the director of the Vengeance trilogy (that culminated in the demented Oldboy, Korea, 2003) goes to Hollywood? Actually, not quite Hollywood as this is a Scott Bros. production (Tony’s last) and wears its indie sensibilities with its $15m budget. Park Chan-wook in America, certainly, but creating a particular Gothic world that is too uncomfortable for the mainstream.

What a cast; for the money or otherwise. I’ve despaired recently about Nicole Kidman, who seemed to have gotten lost in Hollywood, but she does a brilliantly brittle turn as the mother of the bullied, yet sinister, India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska – very good). Similarly excellent is Matthew Goode, all sinister charm, as Uncle Charlie who seems to have stepped out of Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943). Hitch visited small town America; Park visits the Gothic; the film’s title is a tribute to Bram.

Park certainly has an eye for composition and there are some stunning set ups and the cinematography, Chung Chung-hoon, is great. While there are some gut-wrenching moments, it’s not as visceral as Oldboy (well, not much is) and the horror is nicely balanced between shock and suspense.

Holy Motors (France-Germany, 2012)

Eva Mendes visits from Hollywood

I managed to miss all Leos Carax’s 90s films, not intentionally, so my bafflement with Holy Motors wasn’t surprising as it’s a personal reflection upon cinema. I didn’t even realise that Carax was playing the character in an early scene who opens a door, disguised as a hotel wall, with a finger that is part-key. On the other side there is a cinema packed with an audience. This audience is the first thing we see in the film; I think they all had their eyes closed (Philip French says they are dead). They appear to be (not) watching an early scientific film by Eitenne-Jules Marey.

The debt to David Lynch of ‘Carax’ ‘s hotel room is rooting us clearly in surreal cinema. We meet Alex (Denis Levant, who always plays an Alex in Carax’s films) who goes from appointment to appointment, in a limousine, playing different roles, which appear to be real. But we know they aren’t because we are watching a film…but are they meant to be real in the film? Maybe some of them are but probably not. Irritated by this? Don’t watch it!

I clued into Holy Motors being about cinema, as Alex finds himself in different genres, and the film certainly fulfills the surrealist imperative to annoy. It’s supremely arthouse, as your brain needs to be switched on, and includes visually dazzling sequences; particularly the green screen special effects scene when the characters are dressed for motion capture.

It doesn’t all work, the ‘merde’ character is particularly annoying, but there are more ‘hits’ than ‘misses’; Levant, however, is terrific throughout. I also enjoyed Kylie Minogue’s cameo as a gamine Jean Seberg figure shot in an abandoned apartment store the looked like it belonged in Blade Runner with its grandiose architecture and mannikin parts strewn around. Edith Scob, from Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (1960), plays Alex’s impossibly slim and elegant chauffeur… The references go on… and on.

Postmodern fluff or more than the sum of its playful parts? The final scene is truly absurd (I thought wonderful) and I’m sure it enraged many who were annoyed by the film. I’m not sure whether this is a profound film, a silly film, or neither; I need to see it again but I think, if I had caught the film in the cinema, it would have gotten into my 2012 top ten. Sight & Sound‘s October issue has plenty of useful contextualisation.

Black God, White Devil (Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol, Brazil, 1964)

Manuel y Rosa

I guess the English title has the benefit of pithiness that the original title (God and the Devil in the Land of Sun) but suggests that the film is about race when it isn’t. The film is about desperation of the dirt poor of the impoverished land the sertão, ‘backlands’ of north eastern Brazil. Cow herder Manuel kills his boss in rage in response to his appalling treatment and so, with his wife, go ‘on the run’. First they join a preacher, Saint Sebastian, who claims he’ll lead them to a ‘promised land’; then a bandit, a sort of low rent Robin Hood (though there’s not much evidence of giving to the poor), Corisco. They are pursued by Antonia das Mortes, employed by the church to kill anyone who threatens the status quo.

I’m afraid that summary makes the narrative seem more coherent than it is. Many of the events are portrayed indirectly, Eisentsteinean montage conveys massacres, but not the way of the Potemkin steps or his later dialectical style; the editing offer an impression of events rather than any political argument. Music, vital in Brazilian culture, structures much of the narrative; a mix of ballads, telling of the events of the film, and Villa-Lobos.

What’s most striking about the film are the compositions where people seem to be randomly standing about but, together, offer a vision of confusion, a land that’s lost its moral compass. The sparseness of the backlands of north eastern Brazil have their bleakness accentuated by the black and white cinematography in the ‘academy’ (4:3) ratio.

Glauber Rocha’s influences are many, not least the French nouvelle vague primarily through co-opting the Gallic attitude of ‘director as author’ rather than through stylistic devices. Like Antoine Doinel, the protagonist finds the sea at the film’s end;  the ocean has mythic significance as the ‘saint’ had preached that he would lead the dispossessed to utopia where the ‘land is sea, and sea is land’. As Lucia Nagib puts it:

‘Glauber’s mythic backland-sea formula expresses the harrowing feeling of this utopian country that could have turned out right but was fated not to from the day it was discovered. (Brazil on Screen: Cinema Novo, New Cinema, Utopia, (IB Taurus), p9)

Whilst the French were, initially at least, in love with Hollywood, the Third World filmmakers of Latin America had no love for America as they suffered under US-supported military dictatorships. As Corisco says, directly to camera: ‘The dragon of evil swallows the people to fatten the Republic.’ This emphasis upon the political had its roots in Italian neo realism; and, as noted above, Eistenstein – who worked in Mexico during the 1930s. This link details more of Rocha’s influences and this takes you to his manifesto the aesthetics of hunger’.

Breathing (Atmen, Austria, 2011)

Trying to live

Roman (Thomas Schubert) is allowed out of a juvenile institution on ‘day release’; his job is at a morgue. So far so melodrama, especially as Roman is almost as emotionless as a corpse. We follow his faltering steps into the ‘real world’ as he tries to find a compass in a society that treats him with contempt; we don’t learn of his crime until well into the film.

The narrative progresses slowly, routinely; typically arthouse as it demands our patience as we wonder whether it’s better to actually live a life rather than watch someone else live theirs. However, it repays patience with intense drama, when Roman is sent to pick up a corpse in the street whilst a distraught wife is still clinging onto hope that her husband’s still alive, an an emotional payoff at the end when… well, I shan’t spoil it.

Death remains a taboo in western society; consumerism is driven in part by a desire to deny it: cosmetics for everyone. Breathing confronts death, particularly in the scene where the morgue attendants have to prepare a corpse of an old woman who has died at home. We get to see what we don’t wish to see as the deceased body is carefully attended to by men who, hitherto, have been generally unlikeable. It’s a particularly powerful scene.

It’s written and directed by Karl Markovics, who played the lead in the terrific The Counterfeiters (Aus-Ger, 2007) and I’m looking forward to his next film.

Kill List (UK 2011)

I just didn’t see it

I commented that Dead Man’s Shoes (UK 2004) unsuccessfully tried to meld realism and genre; Kill List tries to do the same and similarly comes unstuck. Writer-director Ben Wheatley’s film was critically praised so maybe I don’t get it  but I was desperate for it to end. Maybe – see Avengers post – ennui has got a grip and I need to start doing something other than watching movies.

What I did like was the sound design that used bridges quite daringly, so the sound from the next scene started well before the cut. Performances were good and the low budget was spread very well in its use of Sheffield-area locations. The first 30 minutes, the domestic strife of the protagonist, is well set  up but when the film enters genre territory – he’s a hitman – it loses the plot (or me at least). We enter Saw territory with the extreme violence and I’m too old (bored) for that but, worse, when we reach the full-blown horror of . . . (spoiler alert!)

. . . Wicker Man territory I really could have cared less. Recent Hollywood horror has made the mistake of having unattractive teens as the protagonists so rather than worrying if they’re going to be ‘bumped off’ we’re actually cheering it (come to think of it, is that a subversion of the genre . . ?). And I really didn’t care what happened to this lot; even the cute kid.

What’s more, if you start in a realist vein then the horror elements should be rooted in reality. At least in Wicker Man the setting of an isolated Scottish island was sufficient to convince that the locals were doo-lally. But, in Sheffield? The Sight & Sound reviewer suggests that this might be a manifestation of post-traumatic stress syndrome, as the protagonist is a vet. It might have been but I didn’t see any clues.

Maybe genre shouldn’t be mixed with realism. Maybe we are at the end of genre; all the variants have been done and there’s nothing else to say… Maybe it’s the end of cinema!!! No, that’s definitely ennui.

Catfish (US 2010)

A documentary for the 'wired world'

This documentary, that follows the Facebook relationship between a New York photographer and a woman in rural Michigan, starts slowly, as there seems little point in making the film, but ultimately nails a keypoint about the Facebook era. Like Capturing the Friedmans (US, 2003), the documentarists seem to stumble upon something significant; Andrew Jarecki, who made the Friedmans, is credited as a producer of Catfish.

Shelley Turkle, in Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, states that ‘People talk about digital life as the “place for hope,” the place where something new will come to them.’ Without spoiling the film, Catfish finds itself investigating the way some people use, in this case Facebook, as a way of escaping their own lives.

Shot on a variety of devices, themselves part of the wired world we live in, of varying quality, Catfish has the look of a home movie, even the sound is wayward, that befits its subject. The two filmmakers, Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman , show themselves to be extremely sensitive young men, as does Nev, Ariel’s brother, the photographer, in how they handle what transpires. The subject of the revelation (you see I’m trying very hard not to spoil) is treated with a great deal of dignity and sympathy.