If you believe everything you see in the movies, 2012 is the end of the road for humanity. Last year, Roland Emmerich bombastically destroyed the world on that date, and now Fish Story predicts an equally bleak fate for us in just two years. This time, however, at least we have an obscure Japanese punk song from the 70's to save us all. Yoshihiro Nakamura's film spans multiple decades in less than two hours, giving us an apocalypse soon and finally spinning backwards to reveal the truth of its story, which has its roots in a book published in the 1950's. Near the end of the film, a character explains the meaning of the title, describing a "fish story" as a tall or exaggerated tale, and the picture has certainly earned that accolade. This shaggy-dog story is a good deal shaggier than most.
Where to begin with this most convoluted narrative? Nakamura opens in 2012, in an eerily deserted Tokyo, with its inhabitants having fled the city as a meteor looms high in the sky. With just hours left until impact, three men take refuge in a record shop and begin discussing the work of a little-known band called Gekirin who apparently invented punk a year before The Sex Pistols were formed, before they quickly disappeared from history. Their song Fish Story didn't sell, but in the years afterwards it became a cult item, partly for the cryptic lyrics ("This is the story of my solitude, if my solitude was a fish") and partly for the minute-long silence that occurs where the guitar solo should be; a gap that has been lent a variety of spooky interpretations. In 1982, we see Masashi (Gaku Hamada) being freaked out by the rumour that a woman's scream can be heard in the silence, and later being told that he has a future part to play in the world's salvation. In 1999, we see two of Masashi's fellow students waiting on the beach for the end of the world as predicted by Nostradamus. In 2009, we see schoolgirl Asami (Mikako Tabe) fall asleep on a ferry and wake up in the midst of a terrorist hijack, and Gekirin's Fish Story provides a constant soundtrack to this seemingly unconnected weirdness.
In the end, we find out that everything is connected, but Nakamura keeps the truth under wraps right up to the finish, and for a long time we just have to submit to Fish Story's momentum, trusting that the director knows what he's doing. He makes it easy for us to have that trust by directing with real confidence and verve. The camerawork and editing has a lively snap to it, and his staging is frequently witty, not least in the excellent sequence on board the hijacked ferry, when a waiter with ninja skills (Mirai Moriyama) is called upon to save the day. While it may appear at times that Nakamura is simply throwing everything he's got into the mix, Fish Story is actually crafted in an impressively coherent fashion, with the frequent shifts between time periods being handled gracefully, and the director only allows us to be as confused as he wants us to be. Tamio Hayashi's screenplay – an adaptation of Kotaro Isaka's novel – is peppered with smart dialogue and eclectic cultural references and the unexpected twists kept me gripped and entertained for at least an hour.
After that point, Fish Story began to grind its gears a little. The longest section of the movie (at least, it feels that way) takes place towards the end and explains the meaning behind that mysterious minute of silence on Gekirin's final record. Unfortunately, the travails of the band, whose members are easily the least interesting on display, have now dramatic weight, and this portion of the film feels baggy and self-indulgent. Even more disappointingly, the truth of the silence, when it is unveiled, is a desperately mundane and underwhelming one. It's a letdown, sure, but it's not enough to cripple the movie, not when Nakamura draws so many fine performances from his actors in the other strands of the film, and the director still has an ace up his sleeve that manages to rescue his film from a flat climax. In the final scenes, Nakamura and Hayashi reveal how every character and every unusual event in this bizarre film was connected, creating a dazzlingly inventive butterfly effect that's both impressive and charming. It takes a long and winding road to get there, but right at the last moment, Nakamura's tall tale finally won me over.
Noah Baumbach's last three films have had monstrously self-absorbed characters at their core, and the films have grown increasingly hard to take. The director's latest is Greenberg, and the title character is one who is so irritating and charmless I found it a fruitless chore to endure two hours in his company. This is a source of great frustration to me, because I always find a lot to admire in Baumbach's work. His direction has a tight sense of claustrophobia that places us right alongside his neurotic characters, and his caustic writing frequently offers up moments of clarity, insight and dark humour. Against all of that, however, there's the simple fact that I found both Greenberg and Baumbach's previous film Margot at the Wedding quite exhausting to watch, and there is precious little reward here for those who stay the course.
Despite the overwhelming narcissism of the central character, the first person we see onscreen in Greenberg is someone other than him. Her name is Florence, and she's played by Greta Gerwig, the actress making her first attempt to build on her mumblecore popularity in higher-profile pictures. Florence is the personal assistant to the Greenberg household, and when the family leaves for a month-long vacation, she is left to contend with Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller), a depressive carpenter who has moved temporarily to Los Angeles while he recovers from a breakdown. Florence's brief is to check in on him occasionally, and her prime concern is for the family's dog, but the pair of them – both bored, lonely and lost – begin a hesitant and awkward relationship. Neither Roger nor Florence seem to get a great deal of fulfilment from this on-again off-again setup, and there's not much fun to be had in watching it either. He's a miserable, selfish jerk who lures her in only to repeatedly reject her; she's a passive doormat who offers little resistance to his emotionally abusive behaviour.
Despite this, Florence remains an appealing, sympathetic character, thanks to the charming understatement Gerwig brings to the role. Rhys Ifans also excels as the only one of Roger's former bandmates who is still on talking terms with him, Greenberg having ruined their dreams of a record deal years earlier. It's quite touching to see how Ivan dutifully stands by his old friend out of some vague sense of loyalty, even as he is belittled and aggravated by Roger, and this relationship is one of the few in the film that really feels true. The central character never quite rang true for me, though. Greenberg trades heavily on Ben Stiller's frustrated, neurotic, aggressive screen persona, but he plays his part in a single tiresome register.
We expect Greenberg to soften slightly towards the end of the film, and he does, just a little, as he finally begins to show a hint of consideration for those around him, but is it worth wading through the self-loathing and misanthropy for this brief moment of epiphany? Particularly when it is depicted through such laboured scenes as the extended party sequence in which Greenberg makes a fool of himself, or the silly morning-after sidetrack that almost sees him journeying to Australia on a whim? Greenberg is a film defined by its eponymous figure – it is narrow, cold and sour – and while Florence keeps giving him a second chance, I couldn't find the will to embrace something that was so intent on pushing me away.
With Four Lions, Chris Morris is making his feature debut as a director and the result is every bit as bold and uncompromising as we have come to expect from him. The notorious satirist, who brilliantly spoofed TV news with The Day Today and caused a media storm with his Brass Eye paedophilia special, has chosen Islamic extremism as the subject of his new film, following a group of would-be suicide bombers as they prepare for their forthcoming jihad. The film opens with the group making their video testimonies, which are disrupted by a toy machine gun that looks ridiculously small on camera and debates over which of them is "the most Al-Qaeda," and Morris subsequently charts their progress through a Pakistan training camp, experiments with homemade bombs and arguments about what exactly their target should be.
This might not sound like natural comedy material, but that's presumably why Morris has ventured into this territory in the first place, to mine fresh laughs in an area that other filmmakers have shied away from and to make light of a subject that only inspires terror and fear in the public. Four Lions is set in Sheffield and uses the standard comedy template of a gang of likable losers getting into something that's so much bigger than they ever realised. Omar (Riz Ahmed) is the leader of the group and, by some distance, he's the most level-headed character, which isn't hard when you look at the numbskulls he has aligned himself with. The second most prominent character is Barry (Nigel Lindsay), an ignorant, permanently enraged white Muslim convert who has fixated on the idea that the best possible target would be a mosque, in order to radicalise fellow Muslims across the globe.
Of the bunch, only these two seem fully committed to the cause, and one of the weaknesses of Four Lions' screenplay is the sketchiness of its characterisations. Morris doesn't elaborate on the reasons behind his characters' actions, and the rest of the group seem to be going along for the ride purely because they are suggestible enough to follow whatever Omar and Barry tell them to do. Fessal (Adeel Akhtar) is an amiable dope whose big idea is to attach explosives to trained crows and fly them into "one of those buildings that's full of Jews and slags," while Hassan (Arsher Ali) is a teenager hired by Barry after causing a stir with fake explosives at a public debate. However, the most stupid character on display is Waj (Kayvan Novak), a childlike figure who can't even tell the difference between rabbits and chickens. Morris is sometimes guilty of writing Waj as too stupid to be believable, although the manner in which Omar treats this character allows the director to make his point about the way extremists manipulate those weaker than them.
But what exactly is Omar's motive? At times, even he seems unsure of the path he has chosen, and I was mystified by the glimpse Morris allows us into the comfortable middle-class home he shares with his supportive wife and young son. "You were much more fun when you were going to blow yourself up, love," Sophia (Preeya Kalidas) tells Omar during one of his many moments of self-doubt. These gaps in Morris' characterisation leave Four Lions feeling a little raggedy and slapdash, and the film is uneven in its distribution of laughs, but it's worth waiting through the dry patches for those moments when Morris hits the target. He has a brilliant knack for blending surreal elements into dramatic scenes, such as Omar explaining the jihad to his son by using The Lion King as a metaphor or a pair of police snipers trying to ascertain whether a wookie and a bear are the same thing. The dialogue is grounded is a very prosaic reality, mirroring the small-time mentality of the characters (Fessal wants to blow up Boots because "they sell condoms that make you want to bang white women"), and Morris' direction is superbly detailed, with great little touches like the glimpsed news headline, "Asian man's head falls out of tree."
The most interesting thing about Four Lions, however, is the way Morris sacrifices laughs in the final twenty minutes and makes us realise that he is going to follow through on the harsh realities of his characters' choices come what may. His direction becomes energised with a nervous pulse, and as the final reckoning looms, Four Lions develops a sense of pathos, and these absurd characters suddenly become oddly sympathetic figures. "I'm sorry lads," Waj states, "I don't really know what I'm doing," and in these final moments Morris lays bare the futility and misguided nature of the violence they have put so much preparation into. It is a daring filmmaking choice, and it pays off, delivering a powerful and resonant climax. By exposing his characters' foolishness and underlining the way they have painted themselves into a corner through confusion and peer pressure, Morris cuts through the ridiculous comedy of their bumbling to end on a note that feels painfully, tragically real.
The Girl on the Train is based upon a shocking real-life story. A young woman, riding alone on an RER train, was set upon by a gang of thugs who mistook her for a Jew. They ripped her clothes, they cut her hair and her face, and they drew swastikas on her stomach. In a country already simmering with racial tension the incident became a huge story, enraging the nation and drawing the condemnation of President Chirac. Then people discovered it wasn't true. The woman had completely invented the scenario, cutting herself and drawing the swastikas on her own body, and when the truth emerged, the focus shifted from the crime itself to France's complex race relations and the media's sensationalistic coverage of the event. All of which is ripe material for André Téchiné, the French filmmaker whose films have often focused on intriguing personal stories against the backdrop of political unrest.
In adapting Jean-Marie Besset's play, Téchiné – who co-wrote the screenplay with Besset and Odile Barski – has created a fascinating character study, even if the true motives of its central character remain murky. He spends the best part of an hour letting us spend time with Jeanne (Émilie Dequenne), and in that time he drops in a variety of potential reasons why this seemingly ordinary young woman would suddenly decide to cry wolf in such a spectacular way. Jeanne is a woman in her early twenties who seems lost. She begins a relationship with the charismatic Franck (Nicolas Duvauchelle) and her mother (a slightly miscast Catherine Deneuve) sets her up with a job interview at the law firm run by an old friend. But when her relationship with Franck ends in disaster and she is rejected by the influential Jewish lawyer Samuel Bleistein (Michel Blanc), it appears to send her into an emotional tailspin that prompts her outrageous accusation.
Téchiné has always enjoyed fracturing the narrative structure of his films, and he divides The Girl on the Train into two parts, labelled Circumstances and Consequences. The first gives us the opaque causes of Jeanne's behaviour and the second details the fallout, with Téchiné employing the same detached yet energetic approach to both. The Girl on the Train is hardly the director's most fully formed work, there are too undeveloped strands lingering around the edges of the picture that leave us with a clutch of loose ends, and Téchiné's take on the narrative fails to really explore the themes and dilemmas in sufficient depth. Particularly perplexing is the amount of time spent following Bleistein's son and his relationship with his ex-wife, which seems to have little bearing on the main subject. It remains terrifically watchable, though, with the lively editing keeping the film in a compelling state of perpetual motion that's encapsulated by its recurring motif of Jeanne gliding through the streets of Paris on rollerblades, free and without a care in the world.
Such an enigmatic central character is a challenging role for an actress, but Émilie Dequenne's superb performance captures all of the role's complexities – Jeanne's sense of aimlessness, her yearning for attention – while maintaining an intriguing sense of ambiguity in her characterisation. Was there a clear thought process behind Jeanne's folly, or was it simply the irrational act of a frustrated, disaffected youth? Téchiné is drawn to these mysteries of human behaviour and he leaves us plenty of room to speculate on the reasons why, while he focuses on the family's attempts to rectify the situation. In the second half of the picture, Michel Blanc emerges as a figure of calm authority, lending emotional support to Jeanne's mother and patiently drawing a confession out of the misguided girl. In these scenes, Jeanne finally seems to appreciate the full weight of what she has done, but that self-realisation has come far too late. The effects of a single lie can be impossible to contain once they have begun, and The Girl on the Train portrays this inexorable ripple effect with style and intelligence, even if it never reaches the depths that Téchiné is capable of.
Every discussion about Michael Winterbottom's The Killer Inside Me seems to centre on the film's violence, so perhaps I should start there before broadening my scope to discuss the film that surrounds it, a significant portion of the picture that some people seem to have forgotten exists. There are two key scenes of violence in the film, and both involve the protagonist Lou Ford (Casey Affleck) beating a female victim senseless. In the first, he reduces a once-beautiful woman's face to a bloody mess with his gloved fist, while the second sees him felling a female character with a single brutal punch to the stomach, and standing by as her body twitches in agony and shock, before all life finally drains from it. Ever since The Killer Inside Me premiered at Sundance, people have fixated on these incidents, they have dominated reviews and interviews, and they have drawn comparisons with films as notorious as Irreversible. That, I would suggest, is exactly how Jim Thompson would have wanted it.
Thompson's The Killer Inside Me was published in 1952, and over half a century on it is still a shocking, compelling and unforgettable read. The author places us directly inside the mind of a sociopath, although Lou Ford, the seemingly upstanding sheriff in a small American town, keeps his murderous impulses carefully concealed beneath a bland, genial exterior. Casey Affleck, who plays the lead role, has already shown us how brilliantly he can display the ambiguous motives and duplicitous nature of an unlikely killer with his extraordinary performance in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and he is magnificent as Thompson's disturbed antihero. He uses his boyish good looks, lazy drawl and crooked smile to project an image of a perfect lawman for a small 50's American town. "I've known you since you was knee-high to a grasshopper," Sheriff Bob Maples (Tom Bower) tells Ford, "and I know you've never done anything wrong."
Lou Ford's wrongdoing begins when he starts a relationship with prostitute Joyce (Jessica Alba). He has been sent to run her out of town but the pair are soon enjoying kinky sex and making plans for a future together, although he quickly ensures she won't be going anywhere. Thompson's book filtered its events through the warped mind of Lou Ford, with him acting as a seductive but wholly unreliable narrator, and Winterbottom gives his film the same skewed perspective. Even as he beats Joyce to a pulp, she continues to profess her love for him between blows, and throughout the film we are never allowed to be fully confident in the veracity of what we're seeing. This slant on Ford's violent acts is perhaps part of why they are so hard to stomach. The second murder of Ford's sweetheart Amy (Kate Hudson, doing her best work in a decade) is not explicitly violent compared to much of what we see in cinemas today – it consists of one punch and one kick – but the force of the impact and the fact that we experience it from the killer's point of view is what gives these scenes their disturbing edge. The director refuses to look away during these sequences, and he holds his gaze on Amy's slowly dying body for as long as Ford does.
On the whole, Winterbottom's handling of The Killer Inside Me is most impressive. This is a director with no signature style, one who can adapt his approach to suit whatever material he turns his hand to, and here he does all he can to bring the source material to the screen intact. His direction is unfussy and unobtrusive but graced with smart touches, with Marcel Zyskind's glossy cinematography and the eclectic soundtrack choices providing an effective contrast with the bleak darkness of the story. The tone of the film veers from the horrific to the darkly comic via the overblown, and Winterbottom follows that meandering path with confidence, only occasionally slipping in his judgement. He struggles most visibly in the final third, when his absolute fidelity to the written word threatens to backfire. Bill Pullman plays Billy Boy Walker exactly as written by Thompson, but his scenery-chewin', tobacco-spittin' cameo struck me as jarring, unconvincing and unbalancing for the film. It's the kind of thing that works so much better on the page than the screen.
The devotion shown by Winterbottom and screenwriter John Curran to the novel is ultimately The Killer Inside Me's trump card, however. Not only have they captured the details of Thompson's narrative, but they have captured something far trickier to nail down – the author's style and spirit. The film is pure pulp with a pitch-black heart, and the conviction shown by all involved gives it a weight and potency that is bracing. The violence will remain an insurmountable hurdle for some, and that's understandable, but the filmmakers were absolutely right to film these scenes with the faithfulness and forthrightness that they have done. The violence in The Killer Inside Me is shocking, vivid and painful, and why on earth shouldn't it be? Such an unwavering refusal to compromise is the only way to do a writer like Jim Thompson justice.
