Review - Leviathan

The biggest challenge facing a viewer in the opening moments of Leviathan is working out just what in fact they are looking at. The film opens in darkness, presenting us with murky, indecipherable images and a soundtrack of mechanical sounds with a few men's voices being barely audible above the din. As our eyes adjust to the image and the camera begins to reveal more of its surroundings, we realise we are onboard a fishing vessel somewhere in the middle of the ocean at the dead of night. We are watching commercial fishermen hauling in a huge catch, with cameras apparently fixed to the helmet of one of the men giving us as subjective a view of this procedure as cinema can manage. At least we can be thankful that the film has no way of expressing the smell.

Co-directors Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel haven't kept any kind of objective distance from events on board this trawler, and instead they have plunged straight into the midst of it, using a number of small cameras positioned around the vessel and given to crew members. These cameras have captured the tumultuous nature of the sea, and the violent struggle between man and nature, with a visceral immediacy that is equal parts disorientating and exhilarating. Leviathan is also a powerful argument for the redundancy of 3D, as few film experiences are as immersive as this.

Lucien Castaing-Taylor's last feature film was Sweetgrass, which he co-directed with Ilisa Barbash (but went uncredited), and like that film, Leviathan is an examination of men at work, and a way of life far removed from regular society. But whereas Sweetgrass had a leisurely rhythm entirely appropriate for its portrait of sheep being herded across a mountain range, Leviathan possesses a harder and faster editing style; the film is a maelstrom rather than a ramble. The cutting is sharp throughout and from the vast amount of footage they collected from their multiple viewpoints, the filmmakers have astutely picked out a series of striking images that instantly imprint themselves on viewers' minds. From close-ups of dying fish packed inside the trawler's huge nets to a shot of blood-red water pouring over the side after the catch has been gutted, Leviathan consistently finds seemingly incidental details that feed our sensory experience of this vessel.

Towards the end of Leviathan, the filmmakers include a lovely shot of one fisherman sitting in the break room and slowly nodding off in front of the TV. It's a rare moment of quiet in a film that thrives on chaos, and while the men involved in the expeditions that Leviathan captures are all credited at the end of the film, they don't make any impression in the film itself. They remain on the fringes as they work diligently and efficiently, no more human than the machinery utilised in their process. Perhaps this is why I was slightly less satisfied by Leviathan than Sweetgrass. The shepherds being followed by that earlier film offered a point of engagement for the audience, their journey provided a narrative shape, and the fact that their way of life was coming to an end gave the film an affecting elegiac quality. This film doesn't offer any such hook for the audience, as Castaing-Taylor and Paravel disregard any rules of documentary filmmaking, and this approach can be both thrilling and vexing.

Even if I found it sometimes frustrating to watch, there's no denying the astounding formal achievement that's evident in Leviathan, with the expert editing and sound design being particularly praiseworthy. The filmmakers occasionally emit a whiff of pretension, through decisions such as opening with a quote from the Book of Job ("He maketh the deep to boil like a pot: he maketh the sea like a pot of ointment.") or listing the Latin names of every creature caught in the end credits, but they have created something spectacular here. Leviathan's signature image may be the remarkable upside-down shot of countless seagulls following the trawler, and that's what the film does at its best; it forces us to look at the world from a different angle, seeing commonplace occurrences through fresh eyes. Leviathan is exploring territory that's centuries old – in fact, it was filmed in the same waters that Melville used for The Pequod's epic pursuit of a whale in Moby-Dick – but the manner in which it has been created makes this primal struggle between man and nature feel dramatically new.

Review - An Oversimplification of Her Beauty

I'll probably need to watch An Oversimplification of Her Beauty again before coming to any firm conclusions about how successful it is. My first viewing of Terence Nance's picture was frequently exhilarating and occasionally exhausting. The title hints at oversimplification, but the movie is anything but as Nance dives into the complicated nature of his own love life. At its heart, An Oversimplification of Her Beauty is a rather straightforward story about a boy who is in love with a girl, but whose love isn't reciprocated in the same way. It's the adventurous and idiosyncratic approach he has taken with this story that makes if feel like something new, even if it's an approach that is just as likely to alienate viewers as it is to beguile them.

An Oversimplification of Her Beauty has its roots in another film, How Would You Feel?, which Nance made in 2010. Both films focus on the filmmaker's relationship with Namik Minter, a friend and fellow aspiring artist whom Nance has been besotted with from as far back as 2006. How Would You Feel? details a moment when Nance had set a date, only for the object of his affections to pull out at the last moment. This prompts a bout of self-questioning from Nance, as he replays the incident, and the moments that led up to it, over and over in his head, gradually giving us more information and context.

When Nance switches between this movie and the new footage that An Oversimplification of Her Beauty consists of, he creates the effect of a VHS tape being paused and ejected, to be returned to later. An Oversimplification of Her Beauty continues to document the filmmaker's pursuit of Namik in a variety of ways. The most startling and memorable of these techniques is the incorporation of animation into the picture. Nance doesn't limit his romantic reveries to just Namik, and his thoughts drift to many women who have won his heart before slipping away. These encounters are re-imagined and shared by the director through hand-drawn and stop-motion animation sequences, with Nance mixing and matching from his grab-bag of stylistic tricks to create something that feels disarmingly imaginative and playful.

But is there too much of it? Nance reportedly had a three-hour cut of An Oversimplification of Her Beauty before taking the film to Sundance, where he listened to advice and pared down his vision to a more manageable ninety minutes. That ninety minutes feels so densely packed, however, it's almost bursting at the seams, and some aspects of it inevitably feel short-changed. In particular, despite Nance's offer to Namik to make her own film of their relationship and the Q&A sessions he shares with her, we are never clear on her own thoughts on the matter. Perhaps that's because she herself is unsure of her feelings, or perhaps it's appropriate for how opaque Namik seems to the lovestruck Nance, but I can't help feeling a more balanced approach to storytelling might have offered more incisive moments.

Nevertheless, there are incisive moments dotted throughout the picture, and it may divulge even more on repeat viewings. My favourite sequence – aside from the brilliantly judged, immediately seductive opening – involves Nance telling Namik about a passage in a book that reminds him of her, only for her to read it and fail to recognise any resemblance. The scene touches cleverly on the way people in a relationship see things from wildly different perspectives and misread signals, and it's the kind of scene that will surely resonate with anyone who has found themselves in such a situation. For those that haven't, there is still much here to enthral, stimulate and impress. An Oversimplification of Her Beauty is the work of an artist trying to find new ways to express the purest and most complex of emotions.

Review - Tuesday, After Christmas (Marti, dupa craciun)

The recent renaissance in Romanian cinema has been built upon the ability to find extraordinary drama in the everyday lives of ordinary people, and Radu Muntean's Tuesday, After Christmas is yet another remarkable offering from this country's new wave. What makes this film one of the most notable achievements in recent Romanian cinema is that it is less preoccupied with the lingering effects of the Ceauşescu regime and instead more interested in telling a story about people who could live in any western country. The film opens with a shot of a naked couple in bed. Paul (Mimi Branescu) is a middle-aged, greying man; Raluca (Maria Popistasu) is blonde, pretty and quite a few years younger than her partner. As we watch them in their post-coital happiness, we are instantly struck by the easy, playful intimacy that exists in their relationship.

They are not a couple, however. Paul is in fact married to Adriana (Mirela Oprisor), with whom he has an eight year-old daughter, and as soon as we discover this fact we are simply waiting for Paul's infidelity to be revealed. That sense of anticipation is where the film's dramatic tension is drawn from, but the engrossing effect of Tuesday, After Christmas is unusual because very little happens in the film that could be described as typically dramatic. After that opening sequence, in which Paul and Raluca kiss, joke around and talk about their forthcoming plans, the next scene shows us Paul and his wife in the midst of Christmas shopping. They try to pick out a snowboard for their daughter (who is currently going through a "pink phase"), they try on boots and a jumper, and they generally act the way married couples do. The dialogue is naturalistic and revolves around mundane things, while the performers have the rare, precious ability to act as if nobody at all is watching.

This is the great strength of Tuesday, After Christmas. It creates a sense of life so commonplace and familiar we feel as if we have intruded into the world these characters inhabit. Muntean lets the film unfold in unhurried single takes, his camera maintaining a fixed distance and allowing the characters to wander around the frame, and through observing them in their day-to-day activities we come to know them as complex, real individuals. Muntean doesn't adopt a stance in his depiction of this love triangle, he doesn't paint Paul as a cad for his behaviour or Raluca as a homewrecker, they are simply people who have found themselves in a difficult, emotionally charged situation. There is still love between Paul and Adriana – we see it in the way he rubs her feet after a long day, or when she cuts his hair – but perhaps what he feels for Raluca is real love as well? Branescu is astonishing as a man trying to process these conflicting feelings and consumed by a deep sense of shame for the manner in which he has hoodwinked his wife for so many months.

Muntean takes his time to drop the revelatory dramatic bombs we expect, confident in the strength of his writing and the ability of his actors to hold our attention through seemingly inconsequential encounters. There is a simmering threat of an eruption in some scenes, particularly when Raluca and Adriana finally meet, with Adriana seeing this young woman as their daughter's dentist and nothing more while Paul awkwardly stands in the background, suppressing his gnawing guilt. That sense of guilt finally leads to him confessing to his wife, and the scene that follows – an unbroken take of more than ten minutes – is a masterclass in acting, with Oprisor providing a devastating portrayal of a woman watching her marriage of ten years crumble around her. She attacks Paul with a righteous fury and attempts to hold back her confused tears, but above all she feels let down by her man, and Opriso's delivery of the line "you are my biggest disappointment ever" is a killer blow.

Tuesday, After Christmas is a sad film but it's also an invigorating one, having been made with such intelligence and insight, and feeling so richly authentic. So many films dealing with the breakup of a marriage or the revelation of infidelity feel the need for hysteria and melodrama, but Tuesday, After Christmas just gives us a painful portrait of people dealing with real circumstances as best they can. We don't know what the future will hold for Paul and Raluca, for Adriana, and for their daughter Mara, but the strain shows as we leave them playing happy families for one last Christmas.