Telstar (UK 2008)

Carl Barât as Gene Vincent with the Outlaws/Tornados (Ralf Little, James Corden and Mathew Baynton

It wasn’t a good omen that this 2008 film didn’t get a release until Summer 2009 – and then only on 33 screens. I enjoyed it as a British film, but it faces all kinds of problems in attracting a wide audience. Perhaps it will finally find the audience it deserves on DVD.

For those not as ancient as me, Joe Meek was a self-taught genius of the 1950s/60s recording industry and the producer of several great British pop hits of the early 1960s. He was also a gay man when sex between consenting males was still illegal in the UK and to cap it all he suffered from depression and became addicted to uppers and downers. (The Wikipedia entry on Meek is comprehensive.) His was a story that came straight out of a pop biopic and it’s perhaps surprising that it hadn’t been produced as a fiction feature before (there have been two documentaries so far).  Telstar (the title of his most famous recording from 1962) was first a stageplay, written by Nick Moran and James Hicks and Moran is credited as writer-director of the film adaptation.

I think the film faces two common problems. The story is well-known to a relatively small group of 1960s music fans (and to a general audience aged 60+ who remember the songs). For this audience, the film will be attractive, but there will be doubts about the ‘authenticity’ of the script. For the general cinema audience, many of the references will be obscure and they will either be attracted (or repelled) by the appearance of many UK television personalities (the unfortunate James Corden in particular, cast as the famous drummer Clem Cattini). Inevitably, both audiences will be frustrated by the problems of compression that Moran and Hicks faced in presenting the last six years of Meek’s life on screen. The fans will feel short-changed and the general audience possibly bewildered. The latter is understandable since the story is told using quite a complex structure flitting between childhood memories, the final tragic scenes and the major events of the early 1960s. The most noticeable ‘invention’ would appear to be the collapsing of Meek’s two ‘house bands’ the Outlaws and the Tornados into a trio with flexible members.

This is a common problem with biopics and it is unreasonable, if understandable, to complain about the great gaps in the story. (It would be fascinating to learn something about Meek in the 1950s working as an engineer on major label recordings for instance.) Instead, I think it’s worth thinking about how the film works in terms of the British pop picture of the 1960s/70s and 80s, including the pop biopics. On that score, I think it matches up quite well with films like That’ll Be The Day (1973), although its stage origins do hold it back and the lack of budget means that every show on the road for Heinz and Gene Vincent et al seems to be shot in the same theatre. The stage origins also made me think of Little Voice (1998) and the flashbacks to Meek’s Gloucestershire childhood recalled Denis Potter’s TV plays. In some ways the story is similar to Control (2007), although, of course, that film looks and feels very different because of Anton Corbijn’s distinctive photographer’s approach. The other major film which comes to mind is the Joe Orton biopic Prick Up Your Ears (1987). Orton was another gay man and conflicted artist whose last days were also in 1967 in the same London borough (Islington) as Joe Meek.

The first half of the film plays as a comedy. Meek was an eccentric figure with his ‘recording studio’ comprising rooms in a flat above a leather goods shop on the Holloway Road (including the backing singer in the toilet). He was also into spiritualism and believed that his hero Buddy Holly had ’spoken’ to him. Passionate about his recording ideas (he was a genuine innovator), he is portrayed by Con O’Neill as short-tempered, slightly camp and slightly preposterous. O’Neill created the role on stage and he looks good on screen, though I do wonder if a more experienced director might have coaxed a slightly more nuanced performance from him. Some of the younger cast members do sometimes seem to be on a stage. The genre story of a band on the road with a ‘manufactured’ star is also good for several comic scenes. All of this is fine, but personally I would have done without the famous faces of the TV stars and gone for lesser known actors or musicians (there are several musicians in other roles). The comedy might then have seemed more a part of the narrative and the shift to tragedy in the second half would have been smoother.

The songs used in the film are mostly the original recordings and the overall sound design seemed fine to me. I was very taken by the opening credits and by the use of B+W filmed TV archive material from the early 1960s – but the closing titles looked clunky. Overall, I thought this was a very worthwhile effort that continued a tradition of British pop biopics and social dramas of the early 1960s. And if you were wondering, Kevin Spacey does a good job as that familiar figure from the period, the ‘Major’ who acts as Meek’s business partner.

Lakshya (India 2004)

Hrithik Roshan as the young army officer Karan

What to make of Lakshya? After Rock On!! I decided to look for some other films from Excel Entertainment and Farhan Akhtar and came across this DVD in a sale. The film is presented on 2 discs in a fold out package with an outer sleeve and a glossy booklet. At first glance, this matches the Hollywood packages that Excel and UTV are attempting to emulate. Unfortunately the impression is spoiled by the presentation on screen. A 185 min film in ‘Scope is compressed onto a single disc and my DVD player had problems with the coding in the central section of the film. The second disc does have some interesting material (including a ‘making of’ the film as a whole and a separate presentation of one of the dance sequences as well as some deleted scenes). This clearly was a big budget production with four major stars, location shooting in Kashmir and an international flavour to the crew.

The title ‘Lakshya’ means ‘objective’ or ‘aim’ and the central character Karan (Hrithik Roshan) is an upper middle-class young man with no real aim in life until, on a whim after watching an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, he decides to join the Indian Army. Eventually, he finds himself involved with his Punjabi Regiment in the Kargil War of 1999, when Pakistani forces crossed the LOC (Line of Control) in partitioned Kashmir. With the Pakistanis occupying one of the peaks and shelling an Indian highway, Karan finds his aim – to do the John Wayne thing and plant his country’s flag on top of the peak. The narrative utilises a flashback structure so that we meet the young officer first and then discover how he got there.

From what I’ve read and from the ‘making of’ documentary, it’s clear that the filmmakers here (father and son combination Javed and Farhan Akhtar as writer and director) intended to be as accurate as possible in representing the setting for the story and compared to what I know of mainstream Bollywood, Lakshya is a ‘realist’ film in the mode of mainstream Hollywood. The camerawork by the German cinematographer Christopher Popp is generally excellent, especially in presenting the mountain landscapes and the training moves of the Indian Army. Hollywood films such as An Officer and a Gentleman and The Eiger Sanction sprang to mind as I watched the film. I choose those references carefully as they represent two of the genre repertoires on which the film draws. Lakshya begins as a romantic drama and then transmutes into a patriotic war film with elements of the espionage thriller. There is no reason why this mixture shouldn’t work (although it is a tall order) but I wasn’t really convinced by any single genre element or indeed by the overall package. I was, however, impressed by many specific scenes/sequences. Is it me or is it the film? Lakshya was not a massive hit in India, despite its stellar cast (Preity Zinta, Amitabh Bachchan and Om Puri) but it does have some very enthusiastic supporters and played reasonably well in the US and UK.

Wikipedia’s detailed entry on the Kargil War/Conflict suggests several Hindi films that have been based wholly or partly on incidents associated with the war. I haven’t seen any of these, but I’m familiar with scenes from Mani Ratnam’s Tamil films and from Santosh Sivan’s The Terrorist. Many critics have suggested that it was Ratnam’s Roja (1992) that pushed Hindi film producers towards films more clearly focused on issues in ‘real’ India. In Roja an Indian computer engineer working for the Indian military is abducted in Kashmir. His young wife campaigns to get the Indian authorities to do something to get him back and the engineer also attempts to escape. There is some business with an Indian flag and clearly there are connections between Roja and Lakshya. Although it is much more slick and probably more ‘authentic’, Lakshya doesn’t seem to me as coherent as Roja.

What’s the problem? First, I don’t really care about the central character Karan. Partly this is just prejudice against upper middle-class pretty boys. Hrithik Roshan is a good dancer and he looks very handsome in uniform, but his performance as a ’slacker’ is really embarrassing. The other three stars have very underwritten parts and for me, don’t do enough in their roles (it’s especially sad that we don’t see more of Preity Zinta as a TV reporter. Perhaps this is a problem with the Bollywood star system and with its approach to genres more fully developed in other cinemas such as the war movie. The combat/army sequences need more space for other characters. Why is Karan in a Punjabi regiment? Who are the other officers in the regiment? Who are the squaddies? What stories do they have to tell? The cliché of British and American war movies – a squad of young men drawn from different classes and regions is there for a good purpose.

This kind of Bollywood film still requires songs, two of which have sophisticated dance choreography. It seems impossible for the producers to not have these – and indeed there is no reason why they shouldn’t be incorporated in the narrative. I think all the songs work to some extent. It is the sickly sentimental score in other scenes that I found to be a real problem. The issue is how to develop a tone that can bridge the romance and action scenes and I don’t think that was achieved. The film has been praised for the realism of the combat scenes but I wasn’t convinced. I’ve seen much better sequences of this kind of assault in recent Chinese and Korean films as well as earlier Hollywood efforts such as Sam Fuller’s films or indeed the Russian film about Afghanistan, 9th Company. Have the producers’ seen Santosh Sivan’s combat scenes at the start of The Terrorist?

The other major issue for me is the film’s literal ‘flag-waving’ patriotism. I’m afraid that I struggle with all forms of nationalism, so war pictures that go beyond a narrative of looking after your mates and seeing that they get out alive usually leave me cold. Again Lakshya seems to have been praised for not demonising the Pakistani forces. I thought it did do that to some extent, but I recognise that there was also an attempt to humanise them. The actual sequence when the film’s narrative switched to the Pakistani defenders on the peak threw me a little. Again this felt arbitrary and not thought through.

Overall, Lakshya is an interesting attempt to make a different kind of Bollywood film. It didn’t work for me, at least not as well as the producers might have hoped, and I doubt it found audiences in India outside the major cities, but this production team will eventually crack it, I feel sure.

Red Cliff (Ch/HK/Tw/Jap/Kor 2008)

Tony Leung (a little airbrushed?) as Zhou Yu

I thoroughly enjoyed Red Cliff. I’m a fan of wu xia, John Woo action choreography, Tony Leung and Takeshi Kaneshiro, so it couldn’t really fail.

If you don’t know the background to this, the most expensive Asian film so far, it is important to sort out a couple of points. In East Asia the film was released in two parts which together totalled over four hours. Part 1 was released in 2008 before the Beijing Olympics in China and a little later in other East Asian territories. Part 2 was released early in 2009. The ‘Western’ version is a single film (148 minutes in the UK). That’s the version I watched. It would appear that it cuts a great deal of the lead up to the ‘Battle of the Red Cliff’ and is therefore more action-orientated than the Asian Part 1. I thought it was quite coherent as a narrative and the only ‘wrong note’ in the whole film was a dreadful commentary in an American voice which attempted to explain the historical background over the opening credits. For a terrible moment I thought I was going to be presented with a film dubbed into American English. By contrast, in the Chinese version this history was put on screen as text in a scroll. God only knows why we couldn’t have had that in English. (I have no objection to American voices per se, but they aren’t appropriate in a film about 3rd Century China.)

I suppose it is odd to watch a grand Chinese epic – based on the historical records about the Three Kingdoms – at a time when the contemporary Chinese leadership is being held to account for the troubles experienced by the Uighurs of Western China, who feel oppressed by the Han Chinese. The film’s narrative focuses on the Han people of the ‘Southlands’ (the Yangtse Valley) finding allies in the kingdom to the East and fighting off armies from the North under a ‘Prime Minister’ who has the Han Emperor under his control.  This sets up a complex play about loyalties and ethnicities/nationalities. The overwhelming numbers of the Northern Armies (bulked out by the ’surrendered armies’ of other warlords) are matched by the military cunning, education and all round genius of the men (and women) of the South. I guess there will be some comments about the ideological projects of these various narratives about the founding myths of China but this one seems to stress the friendships, loyalties and honour amongst the victors rather than the ‘rightness’ of their enterprise.

This is a ‘global film’ which includes sound crews from Australia and digital effects from America and India as well as a cast drawn from China, Mongolia, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan. The crew are mainly Chinese but I’m sure there must be a few Koreans in there somewhere as well. The overall budget is listed as $80 million, which seems a bargain. For my money it’s easily as accomplished as Lord of the Rings or other Hollywood features.

I was a fan of John Woo’s work in Hong Kong but thought that is Hollywood output was generally poor. It was fun to see some of the old traits reappearing here with a warrior strapping a baby to his back in a rescue attempt a la the closing sequence of A Better Tomorrow and the use of caged birds and the inevitable dove/pigeon. Woo seems to have found his mojo in the fight sequences which were beautifully staged using wirework (I’m guessing) alongside CGI. (I’ve seen complaints that the fighting doesn’t look historically accurate, but this is a form of wu xia – martial chivalry – and flying through the air is conventional. (Don’t miss the final scenes.) But the biggest pleasure was just watching Takeshi Kaneshiro having a ball playing the strategist and playfully sparring with Tony Leung on top form. When Tony assumes his Zen-like calm and his firm-set jaw he has absolutely no rivals as the King of Cool. Perhaps I’ll buy the two parts from Hong Kong, it’s aggravating to think we are missing some parts of the film over here.

Looking for Eric (UK/Fra/Bel/Sp/Italy 2009)

Steve Evets as Eric the postie

The last Ken Loach film before this one (It’s a Free World, 2007) was released first on television in the UK and it dealt with the new brutalism of capitalism with its exploitation of migrant labour. For me it was the least enjoyable of the Loach team’s work in recent years. Looking for Eric is a return to mainstream Loach territory and a very enjoyable movie for a cinema visit. However, I guess that in the circumstances it is perhaps a little too ‘comfortable’ – although it has its moments in exposing current political issues. Perhaps it is the ‘happy ending’ and the football focus that has led some critics to see the film as a departure, a mainstream breakout film. I don’t think it’s either.

If you know Loach, I think that the two other films Looking for Eric most resembles are Raining Stones (1993) and My Name is Joe (1998). Raining Stones, written by the late and very great Jim Allen, is also set in Manchester with another well-meaning but hopeless working-class man this time caught in a spiral of financial doom. It is also one of the bleakest and funniest films to come out of the UK. My Name is Joe is a romance (one of Paul Laverty’s early scripts for Loach) bringing together a man seemingly trapped by his demons with a sensible woman from social services and set in Glasgow. If you’ve seen either of these films, you’ll not be surprised by what happens in Eric. Laverty has become a skilled scriptwriter and the whole thing works very well – although audiences will be puzzled by some of the relationships in Postman Eric’s dysfunctional family. (I’m grateful for an IMDB poster for explaining at least one plot point.)

Looking for Eric features a Manchester postman (brilliantly played by Steve Evets) who is helped out of his crisis of self-confidence by the appearance of the ex-Manchester United footballer Eric Cantona (playing himself – who could possibly impersonate him?). This is woven into the plot quite cleverly so that we understand why ‘little Eric’ might imagine himself talking to his idol. Don’t believe all those stories about this being a big departure for Loach. In 45 years he’s used all sorts of surrealist touches – remember the on-screen football score when the PE teacher pretends to be Bobby Charlton in Kes?

Cantona was famous in the UK for both his fantastic football skills and his assured way of dealing with the media via a series of wonderfully gnomic utterances – don’t leave the cinema before the end of the credits or you will miss Cantona’s most famous press conference. The film isn’t really about football, even if there are a few minutes of Cantona magic in video clips of his famous goals. Watching United usually gives me the same pleasure as root canal work at the dentist’s, but even I would admit that Cantona was a genius on the football field. Now he’s an actor and he brought the initial idea to Loach and Laverty. Cantona the alter ego offers sensible advice to Eric, both in terms of his relationship with his ex-wife and his problems with his stepsons. His most important advice is that Eric must rely on his teammates – the other posties who do care about him. What we see in the film is the ’saving’ of little Eric when he takes the advice offered. The warmth of feeling and the humour in the film is there in most Loach-Laverty films, but in this case there does seem to be something that might be called a happy ending. However, along the way we do get a firm and convincing message about how solidarity and collective action is the way to solve problems.

I must mention Stephanie Bishop’s performance as Eric’s ex-wife, Lily. Loach’s films always feature inspired casting and Kathleen Crawford, based in Glasgow, has worked as casting director on the last few Loach features. She’s done a great job. All the cast are Mancunians, or at least Lancastrians, as far as I can work out. Stephanie Bishop has no previous credits but I thought she was terrific. As Loach says on the film’s website, casting an actor like John Henshaw opens up so many possibilities because he can switch from serious drama to broad comedy in a flash. He matches the performances of Ricky Tomlinson in previous films. He becomes the team leader of the posties – most of whom are played by comedians from local Manchester clubs. Overall, the policy of ‘local casting’ means that we do believe that all of this could happen in a ‘real’ community.

Only one negative came from the screening – the print. You can never tell with digital prints whether the fault was in the original footage, the conversion to digital or the projection itself and the computer, but several sequences were presented in a way that made me feel like I was watching the film through a pair of old tights. Since Barry Ackroyd’s cinematography is usually one of the pluses for a Loach film, this was a real disappointment. Still, it couldn’t prevent my enjoyment. If you have a choice, try to see the analogue print.

As usual, this Ken Loach film opened earlier and wider in France where it will end up earning considerably more than the £1 million it has so far earned in the UK.

Katyn (Poland 2007)

The General attempts to lift the spirits of his Polish officers on Christmas Eve 1939.

I’ve waited a long time to see this film and I wasn’t disappointed. It may be the best film released in the UK this year – not in terms of technical accomplishment or artistic endeavour (whatever that means), but simply as a personal statement and a representation of enormous emotional feeling. Director Andrzej Wajda was 13 when the war began and his father, a cavalry officer, went off never to return. In the 1950s Wajda became one of the leading figures in the humanist art cinema celebrated across the world. For fifty years he has waited for the opportunity to make this film in which inevitably he would have to explore not just what happened in 1940, but also what it meant for the Wajda family and for Polish society.

If the name ‘Katyn’ doesn’t mean much to you, you should know that in 1940 Stalin authorised the murder of 20,000 and more Polish military officers and intelligentsia who were being held by the Red Army. The subsequent massacre in the Katyn forest outside Smolensk in Western Russia was uncovered by the Nazis in 1943 when they invaded Russia and used to make anti-Russian propaganda. It was then claimed as a German atrocity by the Russians in 1945 when they liberated Poland. The British fare badly as well since they refused to confirm the Russian responsibility for the massacre in 1943 for fear of offending Stalin as an essential ally.

What I found surprising (because I didn’t read about the film beforehand) was how Wajda tackled something so close and painful. Like many recent films about the ‘Eastern European War’, the outcome of the events is well-known so the script can’t really aim for surprising twists or narrative suspense. Wajda makes important structural decisions such as focusing primarily on the women at home rather than the men captured in 1939 when the Red Army invaded Poland soon after the Nazi attack. He selects characters who are archetypal Polish officers and their families – the General, the captain, the lieutenant, the engineer/pilot. He moves the story on quickly to show us the methodical actions of the Nazi and Soviet administrations and their attempts to remove all the potential leaders of Polish resistance. He shows us the immediate aftermath of the Russian occupation of all Poland in 1945 and compares the Nazi and Russian attempts to use Polish deaths for propaganda purposes. He hones in on the terrible decision for the survivors – to knuckle down and build the new Poland under Russian hegemony or to remain true to history – and perish nobly. When he does eventually show us the executions, we are aware of the true horror of what these events mean, not just in 1945 when the reality of the deaths is confirmed, but over the next 45 years of a Polish state established on lies.

I got home from the screening and read long screeds of complaints about the film on IMDB from people who found it ‘boring’ or ‘amateurish’. I’m always a little wary of such comments, especially when they come from Poles who recognise soap stars in the cast etc. and of course I can’t comment on the Polish dialogue, only on what the subtitler has offered. (I did recognise one of the players from We Are All Christs and from my perspective the casting was very good.) On the whole though I think these comments come from younger viewers whose sense of film language has been dulled by American action movies and holocaust melodramas. They seem incapable of following the plot and easily lost if the film moves slowly. On the other hand, I have to admit that Wajda himself takes no prisoners. If you don’t know the history it is easy to get lost. Next to me in the cinema were a young couple who talked through the opening credits and I had to bite my lip to stop myself telling them to shut up. Possibly they were young Poles not used to an art cinema ambience? Anyway, they soon quietened and watched the film in silence.

For me though this was a beautifully made film with a strong sense that every image was considered and every moment filled with subtle gestures and symbols – or perhaps they were heavy-handed for some taste? Inevitably there have been comparisons with Wajda’s 1950s trilogy of films about the Warsaw risings and their aftermath. I was prompted to think about these in the sequences in which young resistance fighters return to Kracow and attempt to avoid the soldiers of the new regime in 1945 as they refuse to accept the Russian view. I’m an old romantic, but for me the women were all believable and very beautiful, which made the pain of the narrative even sharper. The young women made me think of the German film about Sophie Scholl and I hope that this will be a film that young people will watch and will be moved by.

For a long time, I thought that Katyn would not be released in the UK. There are strong Polish communities in the UK dating from the arrival of Polish forces who escaped in 1939. They supported the Allied war effort and became part of British as well as Polish history. Wajda points to the difficult relationship between Britain and Poland in the dialogue amongst the Polish prisoners held by the Russians. There is another story to be told about Britain and Poland. I’m pleased that the UK Film Council supported Katyn’s release. I hope as many people as possible get to see it.

Two French Thrillers

Diane Kruger and Vincent Lindon in Pour elle

Two French thrillers were released in the UK by Metrodome without too much fanfare in May and June and I managed to see both in the same week on digital prints at the National Media Museum. My first reaction, much like last Summer’s when a swathe of French films appeared, was why don’t we get British films like this on a regular basis – interesting genre films with star names presented in ‘Scope? What’s not to like? Well quite a lot if you are certain British critics, but I was engrossed.

The two films are actually quite different. Of the two, I think Pour elle (Anything for Her, France 2008) worked best. It reminded me of classic crime thrillers – what the French call polars. The set-up is very simple. A young mother, Lisa (Diane Kruger) is arrested and convicted for murder on seemingly incontrovertible evidence. Her husband, Julien (Vincent Lindon) believes she didn’t do it and determines to spring her and reunite the family (Oscar is their young son). And that’s it. In some ways, the situation is pure Hitchcock with an innocent man forced into dangerous and criminal acts because he loves his wife. The difference is that Hitchcock would cast Cary Grant. The woman would be Grace Kelly and it would all take place in a glamorous fantasy world. But Julien is a teacher in a nameless Paris suburb (much like the teacher in Entre les murs). This time, however, we learn little about his classroom, except that his students seem rather docile and the writer/director Fred Cavayé has a little joke when one of Julien’s students gives a short talk about George Simenon and Maigret – as Julien looks out of the window pondering his next move.

Vincent Lindon is terrific – he could easily be a character in a polar by Jean-Pierre Melville with his gravelly voice, lugubrious expression and ‘bashed in’ face giving him the look of Belmondo crossed with Lino Ventura. The main criticism of the film appears to be that it is implausible – in other words that ‘ordinary people’ like this don’t do extraordinary things such as springing the partners from prison. Teachers can’t be ‘extraordinary’. Pah! I’ve known several extraordinary teachers, at least one of whom was an ex-paratrooper. But that’s not the point. If this was a Hitchcock film, nobody would worry about plausibility – and nobody criticises Batman for not being plausible. Pour elle is a genre movie and it includes several genre tropes related to getting hold of money and prison breaks. As long as the characters are plausible and the plotting shows intelligence, I don’t have problems.

Cavayé has the neat device of Julien pretending to write a book about a famous prison escapee (played by Olivier Marchal, director of 36, Quai des orfèvres). Julien gets all the pointers he needs, but can he carry them through? Much depends on whether we believe that he loves his wife and son and that he would do anything to keep them together. I think the script is generally pretty good. Everything is held together by Lindon and the action sequences are genuinely exciting and convincing. If you’ve seen 36, the ending is in some ways similar.

I hope that this does as well as Tell No One from 2007. It’s not as glamorous as that film and doesn’t have the same central Paris chic. It’s more noirish in every way. In France the film made around $5 million and in the UK it opened in the Top 20 from only 43 screens and with a healthy screen average of over $3,400. This bodes well, but the film probably won’t make it to North America as Paul Haggis and Lionsgate have already announced an American remake. That’s a shame, I think. Lindon is terrific and for much of the film, I idly wondered where I’d seen him before. He’s a prolific actor in French cinema and TV, but a little research soon answered my question – he’s the drunk who helps the three lads escape from the police when they try to steal a car in La haine (a film I must have watched a dozen times).

Claire (Sandrine Bonnaire, right) confronts Elsa (Catherine Frot, left) in Mark of Angel

The other recent thriller is Mark of an Angel (L’empreinte de l’ange, France 2008) – a more problematic proposition for me. I was drawn to the film as it was produced by the same team responsible for La tourneuse de pages (The Page Turner, France 2006) and features the same star, Catherine Frot. La tourneuse de pages is terrific and I hoped for more of the same. The two films are both psychological thrillers/melodramas which again have a Hitchcockian feel and Mark of an Angel also has something in common with Claude Miller’s Ruth Rendell adaptation Betty Fisher and Other Stories (France 2001). The narrative set-up is that Elsa (Catherine Frot) sees a small girl at a children’s party attended by her son. She becomes obsessed with the child, convincing herself that the girl is her own daughter who she had been told had died soon after she was born. Elsa is separated from her husband and struggling to work and look after her son. Her obsession leads her to inveigle her way into a tentative friendship with the girl’s mother Claire (Sandrine Bonnaire) in order to observe the child more closely.

The criticism of this film has also been based on ‘implausibility’, but this time it is complicated by the opening title that informs us that the film is based on a true story. I certainly fell into the trap of pursuing the implausibility argument, but only because I had the nagging feeling that Catherine Frot was too old to play the role of Elsa. I’m a bit ashamed of this reaction. Ms Frot is an excellent actor and I’m all in favour of starring roles for older women. There is no real reason why she shouldn’t play characters a few years younger than herself, although film is a pretty unforgiving medium. I’ve since revised my initial reaction for two reasons. First, I happily accepted Vincent Lindon as an older father in Pour elle, so why not Catherine Frot in this film? Secondly, children born to mothers in their mid-forties are now more common and in narrative terms it actually helps the film since it makes Elsa seem more ‘other’ in comparison with the younger Claire as the supposedly ‘natural mother’. It seems to me that Elsa also dresses younger at times.

Lots about the film worked very well for me. In fact it worked too well. I watched several scenes through my fingers because I found them painful and excruciating (i.e. extremely effective). There are some pure Hitchcockian moments in the film, including a wonderful sequence in a theatre where the girl is performing in a school ballet and both women are watching her. On my first viewing I found the ending of the film very hard to take. For some other viewers this was because they deemed it implausible. For me it just wasn’t ‘enough’ – I was hoping for more of a melodrama ending. I think it retrospect, I was too harsh on the film and I suspect that on a second viewing I would be more favourable. I don’t know anything about writer/director Safy Nebbou but he seems to have made several films that sound interesting – I’ll certainly look out for them.

Postscript (11 October 2009)

In her review of the film in Sight and Sound (June 2009), Catherine Wheatley suggests that Pour elle might be the first ‘Sarkozy-era thriller’. Her argument is that aesthetically the film is a slick, Hollywood-style action thriller, but with a production design that emphasises the cold unsympathetic state. She casts Julien as a conservative symbol ( a teacher of French) and specifically a representative of a traditional French community under siege. The police and the criminals are, she argues, predominantly Arab whereas Lisa and Oscar are almost ‘angelic’.

I’m not averse to this reading and indeed I did feel a sense of Julien almost like a Michael Winner style ‘ordinary man’ against the ‘filth on the street’. But I think that’s pushing it. On the whole, I still think that the script justifies Julien’s move to taking enormous risks. He is a driven man with an obsessive love for wife and child. The charge of racial typing does make me think again, but I’m not sure that the effect is quite what Wheatley argues. I will continue to reflect on this.

Microwave in London: Shifty (UK 2008)

Daniel Mays and Riz Ahmed on the poster for Shifty

In the last few years, the production budgets of UK films have been falling. The median figure of £2-3 million from a few years ago has become £1-2 million and many films are now being made for less. The expansion is in films which in industry parlance are ‘micro-budget’ and ‘no budget’. Two recent UK Film Council reports provide excellent research material on this trend. Shifty, written and directed by Eran Creevy was produced under the aegis of London Film’s ‘Microwave’ scheme. The Regional Screen Agency for London devised the scheme in order to widen participation and access for young London-based filmmakers. It offers support to make a film which must have only 18 days shooting and a budget of less than £100,000. So far, London Films has greenlit seven productions and currently has a fourth bidding period in which to find three more projects by June 26, 2009.

Shifty is the second Microwave film to get a release. It opened ‘wide’ on 51 prints on April 24 through independent distributor Metrodome, taking £61,000. After three weeks it was down to 12 prints after taking over £131,00. That might not sound much, but for a very small film it is an encouraging return and Metrodome must hope that they will more than double that revenue from the subsequent DVD release.

But is a ‘micro-budget’ film worth watching? Yes, is the short answer. ‘Shifty’ is the nickname of a young British Asian who we meet early in the film when he opens the door in his outer London suburb to his old schoolfriend Chris come back down from Manchester for a party. Chris soon discovers that Shifty has become the local drugs dealer. We discover that Chris left under a cloud of some sort . Over the next 24 hours we expect to see Shifty extricate himself from possible disaster in his dealing circle and Chris come to terms with why he left and what his friendship with Shifty still means to him.

So, rule one for low budget filmmaking in this context is to have a ‘tight’ script. In this film, the action is condensed into 24 hours and there are only around a dozen speaking parts and one primary location with a couple of brief motorway sequences. These restrictions keep down costs and impose some discipline on the filmmakers. In fact it’s sometimes argued that the real creativity in filmmaking comes from the ability to take simple ingredients and use them effectively.

Shifty succeeds, I think, for a number of reasons. First, the acting talent on show is high-class even if the budget is low. The two leads are amongst the best of young British talent. Riz Ahmed was in Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross’ Road to Guantanamo. He also has a music career. Daniel Mays has been around for a while on TV and in high profile films such as Vera Drake, Atonement and Red Riding. Jason Flemyng who plays Shifty’s immediate ’superior’ in the drug pipeline has been in many UK and Hollywood films including The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Second, the script and the camerawork are not over-ambitious. I’ve nothing against hand-held camerawork and witty dialogue, but striving hard to achieve an ‘effect’ in a well known genre when you have limited experience is taking a big gamble. As it is, the film is about the right length, so the narrative is sustained in its grip on the audience and provides an interesting twist (OK if you are one of those genre die-hards who always has to guess the ending, you’ll probably see this one coming, but for most of us, it will work).

Eran Creevy is a first time writer/director who has been working on film crews around London for the last five years. His DoP Ed Wild has been shooting films for around ten years and between them they have used the limited location opportunities well. Clearing streets and bringing in extras or, conversely, taking a guerilla crew out into crowded locations sets up production problems requiring money and expertise in the production team. Here , the scenes were seemingly shot early in the morning on deserted streets (and motorways). The result is a suburb with little life beyond the central action. This isn’t social realism. But it does represent what is to my taste the soulless suburban sprawl of much of  South East England. The film is located in a fictitious community, actually filmed in Harlow, Creevy’s home town. It isn’t the ‘inner city’, rather ‘crack in the suburbs’. There are one or two interesting compositions (such as the one linking a young mother using a pregnancy test with her two small children playing across the corridor) but mainly the action carries the narrative rather than the mise en scène.

Music is something else that costs, but films like this offer opportunities to composers and performers. The partnership responsible for this film are Harry Escott and Molly Nyman (daughter of Michael) who already have an impressive list of credits linking again to Michael Winterbottom and Brad Pitt. I confess that in the first part of the film, I was irritated by the music, but later on it seemed to work. I guess I’m not the target audience, however. On a first viewing, I thought that was a scene that didn’t work in terms of editing, but a second viewing suggests that I was wrong. On the whole, the editing is tight and the script works very well. It needs to because on low budget productions like this there isn’t time to go back and reshoot scenes if the editing won’t work.

At times the film did remind me of the hours I once spent watching student films (often shot on estates like this). But this is a superior first film that deserves exposure and I hope to use it in my teaching. My companions at the screening certainly viewed it as solid entertainment.

Resources

Film Education have some useful material for students and teachers. Interestingly the Metrodome person being interviewed on the site refers to the film as belonging to the ‘urban genre’ (like Adulthood/Kidulthood and Bullet Boy). I take it that this is a term borrowed from the black music genre (what used to be soul, r & b etc.?), also known as ‘urban’.

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Genova (UK 2008)

Will Holland as the older daughter, Kelly, in Genova

Having thought that I’d missed Genova, I managed to catch it in France where it is titled Un été Italian. I seem to have spent a long time extolling the virtues of Michael Winterbottom and defending him in the face of indifference or hostility. As a result, I was a little worried about seeing this feature which has hung around since last Summer before getting a release. It hasn’t helped that the only Winterbottom films that have been deemed commercially successful tend to be those that for me are his least interesting, such as A Cock and Bull Story (UK 2005). It’s a relief then that Genova is a big return to form for Winterbottom fans – and of course another commercial disaster.

For most reviewers, Winterbottom’s main distinguishing feature as a director is that he constantly moves from one genre to another and can’t be pinned down. The implication is that this is a problem, rather than an indication that Winterbottom is an auteur filmmaker who makes films for his own reasons. If he does draw on genre repertoires, it isn’t usually in order to frame a story in genre terms. For mainstream audiences this presents a real problem in that the films do not offer conventional structures – or rather they do not fulfil the expectations that generic story structures set up. This is certainly true of Genova, which perhaps has less ‘plot’ than any other Winterbottom film and instead offers the most intense and emotional representation of a brief period in the lives of the central characters. 

If Genova draws on any generic repertoire, it is the current cycle of psychological horror/ghost stories, but its clearest referent is not a modern Japanese or Spanish film but Nic Roeg’s adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s short story Don’t Look Now (UK 1973). In that classic film Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland are a couple who are deeply in love, but grief-stricken over the death of one of their children. When they visit Venice they are disturbed by a sense of foreboding in fleeting sightings of a mysterious figure. In Genova, a university lecturer (Colin Firth) loses his wife in a car crash which his two daughters survive. He decides to take the girls to the Northern Italian city of Genoa for the Summer to help with the grieving process. The comparison between the two films is valid but not helpful towards an understanding of what Genova is actually about. Don’t Look Now is a genuine melodrama/thriller with conscious attempts to draw in an audience through the strength of the bond between the parents and the sheer terror that threatens them in the potentially supernatural mise en scène of the dark canals. Genova is much more circumspect about what constitutes a ‘ghost’ and is in many ways a supremely realist film. In fact, it made me think about another film concerning grief on a trip through Italy – Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia (Italy 1953).

I’ve called Winterbottom an auteur, but I’m sure he would also credit the authorial contributions of his collaborators. The other ways to approach Genova are via its writer Laurence Coriat and its familiar crew members, especially Marcel Zyskind as cinematographer. Laurence Coriat wrote my favourite Michael Winterbottom film, Wonderland (UK 1999). She is also working with Winterbottom on a long-term project featuring Wonderland’s John Simm and Shirley Henderson and on a film with Marc Evans, a long-time friend of Winterbottom and Andrew Eaton and the Revolution Films set-up. Coriat is almost an ‘in-house’ writer and with the usual suspects on set, it would seem that Genova must have had a sense of coherence as a project. Having said that, Winterbottom’s shooting strategy and Eaton’s approach to squeezing evey drop out of the tightest of budgets must always make shooting a film like this extremely demanding.

The production set-up recalls Code 46 (2003) which also featured a North American star (Tim Robbins) plunged into the world of low-budget ‘guerilla filmmaking’ on the streets of Shanghai. Robbins was not too impressed by the rigours of the shooting method but Catherine Keener in Genova seems more receptive in interviews. Code 46 is a lot more plot driven, but both films tend to have narrative ‘gaps’ that audiences are expected to fill and endings which are very open. I like this and it doesn’t cause me problems.

Colin Firth now lives in Italy so presumably he found himself on solid ground. Catherine Keener plays a friend, an old classmate from Harvard, who works in Genoa. She helps widower Joe and his two girls travel to the city and arranges a temporary post for him at the university. Keener is a well-known in American Independent Cinema. The two girls are played by Willa Holland and Perla Haney-Jardine (who I later discovered I’d seen in the US remake of Dark Water). I that Firth is meant to be a Brit, though I didn’t really think about this as globe-trotting academics are pretty common these days. The low budget production includes a winter driving scene in Sweden and some UK work as well as a Chicago street scene and the main shoot in Italy. The only production issues for me were the casting of Kerry Shale (nice man, but aren’t there any other American actors in the UK – his presence makes me think of plays on Radio 4) and the use of Ryanair as the airline flying into Genoa (from the US?). The real benefit of course is the freedom to shoot in the Zyskind style.

What this means in terms of the emotional feel of the film is the disorientation brought on by hand-held ‘Scope camerawork with sometimes jarring cutting. Everything is filmed in available light, so we linger in darkened rooms or move between dark and light with all the problems of re-adjusting. This makes the film quite uncomfortable to watch, but matches the numbness and lack of focus felt by the characters. The architecture of Genoa also plays a part as characters (i.e. the girls) have to follow a route through narrow alleyways. Zyskind tilts the camera up to show us the bright sky struggling to reach down into the narrow alleys as the girls wonder where they are. This effect matches that of Christie in Sutherland in the similarly dark alleys and canals of Venice. The efect also carries over into a sequence in the woods close to the beach where another search takes place.

In a sense, Genova is an ‘anti-melodrama’. The characters get angry, but mostly their emotions are pushed down. So much in fact that I’ve seen complaints that the Firth character is a ‘bad father’ who seems indifferent to his wife’s death and unconcerned about what is happening to his children. I think he’s shown as behaving in the way many English men would. He suppresses emotion. In a melodrama, this would then ‘return’ to be expressed as an emotional release in some way, but here Winterbottom constructs a narrative with cold realism and the result for me was devastating. I’ve never really rated Firth before (I’m afraid I’ve generally ignored him) but here I thought he was excellent. Two crucial scenes with Catherine Keener struck me as the most psychologically ‘real’ I’ve seen for a long time. Here’s a movie I’d recommend to anyone prepared to question their own emotional responses to film narratives.