Italian politics is rife with corruption! American teenagers are unhappy! These are just two of the startling revelations offered by the following collection of films:
Il Divo
Before Il Divo begins, director Paolo Sorrentino puts a glossary onscreen that is supposed to explain who everyone is in the complex story he's about to unfold for us, that story being of former Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti and his alleged ties with the mafia. Frankly, it didn't help me much, and I did struggle to keep up at numerous points during the subsequent two hours. The occasional fog of confusion didn't hurt my viewing experience, though, because I absolutely adored this film. Fans of Sorrentino's earlier pictures The Consequences of Love and The Family Friend will already be aware of the incredible confidence and imagination he can bring to his direction, and he's firing on all cylinders here. He seems to be simply incapable of shooting a dull or ordinary scene, and every single minute of Il Divo is energised by his ceaselessly dynamic camerawork, creative compositions, and startling soundtrack choices. It's not all bravado though, he includes a few beautiful, quiet moments – particularly between Andreotti and his wife – and at the centre of the picture, Toni Servillo gives another mesmerizingly understated performance. Absolutely entrancing.
Che
The first test Che had to pass at its gala this weekend was to survive a frankly disastrous screening in which the projector broke down twice, once in each half. I'm not sure how much we missed as a result (the first breakdown appeared to leave Che with a mysteriously broken arm), but I doubt it would have made that much of a dent in this picture's four-and-a-bit hours running time. For the most part, I was impressed and absorbed by Che, although it lost me somewhere around the three-hour mark and never quite drew me all the way back in. The first half cross-cuts between Che's role in the Cuban revolution, and his 1964 appearance at the United Nations (shot in newsreel style black and white), while the second jumps ahead a few years to focus on his attempt to spread the revolution to Bolivia, a campaign that ultimately ended in failure and his own death. Che is a remarkable accomplishment in many ways. Soderbergh approaches the subject with his customary intelligence and his HD digital cinematography captures the lush, vivid hues of the Cuban and Bolivian jungles in which he fought. Each half has a couple of standout set-pieces which are superbly orchestrated, but the film remains strangely muted throughout, which is perhaps why I felt a sense of fatigue midway through the second section. I'm not entirely sure that Che needed over four hours, and I'm not sure that Soderbergh's film really gets into his character or expands our view of him beyond what we already know, but the film is utterly fascinating, and del Toro's quiet, commanding central performance is superb. You know, I'm still digesting Che and I haven't quite made up my mind about it, but thank God there are still American directors around like Soderbergh who are willing to make such ambitious, uncompromising and stimulating fare.
American Teen
American Teen is a documentary following four stereotypical high school students – the blonde bitch, the basketball star, the unconventional misfit, the lonely über-nerd – in their last year before graduation, but I use the term "documentary" loosely. A lot of this film felt false to me, and it seemed obvious that much of the incidents had been staged (or at least, acted-out by the participants) for the benefit of Burstein's camera. Of course, many documentary filmmakers have incorporated fictional elements into their films – consider Herzog's quest for "ecstatic truth" – but this felt more insidious; an attempt to generate false drama in a story that has precious little of its own. Not only is American Teen a lame, uninteresting piece of work that fails to illuminate its subject, there's also something morally dubious about it.
Before American Teen started, a short documentary called Kids + Money played. This 32-minute film, directed by Lauren Greenfield, is compiled from interviews with dozens of teenagers living in LA, in which they discuss their attitude to money and consumerism. The kids often speak with an amusing lack of self-awareness, but occasionally they'll offer an insightful comment that sheds light on the pressure they feel to conform, and the way material possessions act as a status symbol in their lives. Nothing particularly eye-opening, but it's a frank, tightly edited and funny piece of filmmaking, and it gave me more food for thought than American Teen could offer at three times the length.
The Brothers Bloom
I was one of the naysayers who didn't think Rian Johnson's Brick was quite as successful as many people felt it was, although it undeniably displayed a lot of promise, and I think his follow-up The Brothers Bloom is more of the same. It's clever, occasionally impressive and frequently amusing, but it also seems inordinately pleased with itself, the story doesn't make sense in a lot of places, and the ending is a mess. Johnson has an obvious love of words, with his screenplay containing a number of neat lines, and the bigger budget afforded to him here allows him to display his strong visual sense in a variety of global location. The film is horribly uneven, though, and the nature of the piece – everything is a con, except when it isn't – keeps us at an emotional distance, anticipating being hoodwinked, and just waiting patiently for the next twist to arrive. Adrien Brody and Mark Ruffalo put in a decent shift as the conmen siblings of the title, but it's the women who are the film's strongest suit, with Rachel Weisz and Rinko Kikuchi both turning in fantastic, surprising performances in the kind of quirky roles that could have gone very wrong in other hands (I think this is the best display of Weisz's career). This is a passable caper movie, and Brick fans will probably find a lot to love in it, but I'm still waiting for proof that Rian Johnson is anything more than a crafty sleight-of-hand artist.
The Silence of Lorna
After four extraordinary films in a row – including two Palme D'Or winners – perhaps the Dardenne brothers felt it was time to shake up the old formula a bit. Although it explores similar territory to their earlier work, The Silence of Lorna feels like a step in a new direction, with a more plot-heavy narrative, some audacious storytelling decisions, and camerawork that is more restrained than usual. The story centres on Albanian immigrant Lorna (Arta Dobroshi), who has married a junkie called Claudy (a wonderfully sympathetic Jérémie Renier) to get Belgian citizenship as part of an ongoing green card scam. The gangsters she's working for plan to kill this addict and make it look like an overdose, so Lorna will be free to marry a Russian who has paid for the privilege, but she has started to get cold feet as her feelings for Claudy have intensified. Halfway through the picture, the Dardennes throw in a plot development that's so jarring and unexpected it seemed to throw the whole audience into a state of confusion for a short period, and after that The Silence of Lorna develops into a quite different film, and moves into risky, uncharted territory for these siblings. Fortunately, their command of the medium is as formidable as ever, and they draw astonishing, breathless drama from some of the later scenes; and while the ending will divide opinion, I found it to be a brave and haunting climax. At the centre of it all, Lorna is one of the Dardennes' most intriguing characters, and in the luminous Arta Dobroshi, they have discovered a new star.
The day after The Silence of Lorna's premiere at the festival, I was fortunate enough to meet both Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, and then I sat down for a chat with the film's enchanting star Arta Dobroshi. Both of those interviews will be published within the next few weeks, but both discussions did cover some of the major plot points in some detail, so I would recommend avoiding them until you've seen the picture.
Coming up this week – We're into the final stretch, and the last LFF update will include trips into the crazy minds of both Charlie Kaufman and Hunter S Thompson (Be afraid, be very afraid!), before Danny Boyle closes the festival with his Indian fantasy Slumdog Millionaire.
After their Oscar-winning Cormac McCarthy adaptation No Country for Old Men, whatever Joel and Ethan Coen chose to do next was likely to be a disappointment, but I have a sneaking suspicion that Burn After Reading might have been something of a disappointment whatever the circumstances. This pitch-black farce is a comic riff on the Coens' favourite theme – a bunch of fools falling over themselves in the pursuit of money – and as amusing as it is, there's something missing at the heart of it. Set in Washington, the plot spins on a disc that belongs to ex-CIA man Osborne Cox (John Malkovich). He has just seen his career go up in smoke after his superiors suspected him of having a drinking problem ("You're a Mormon" he responds to one of them, "next to you we all have a drinking problem"), and he has decided to resign in protest and work on his memoirs (or, as Malkovich deliciously pronounces it, "my mem-wah"). He's oblivious to the fact that his wife (a chilly Tilda Swinton) is carrying on behind his back with married federal marshal Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney), who, unbeknownst to her, also trawls internet dating sites looking for one-night stands.
As ever with the Coens' films, nobody knows anything, but two employees of Hardbodies Gym – Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) and Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt) – think they have the upper hand when they find the aforementioned disc, and believe they can use it to blackmail Cox. Linda thinks this is the answer to her prayers, the fastest possible route to getting the cash she needs for the extensive plastic surgery she desires, while Chad thinks – well, it's hard to know what Chad thinks, if anything. He has the goofy, carefree demeanour of a man who doesn't really like to give his brain much of a workout, and he is beautifully embodied by Pitt, in a performance that is undoubtedly the movie's highlight. After playing sad wistfulness in films like Babel and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, the addition of a haircut that resembles his Johnny Suede pompadour miraculously seems to have de-aged him by twenty years, and he plays Chad like a clueless overgrown child. It's a pleasure to watch because Pitt has always had a gift for comedy (which has been sadly underused for many years), and he has some smashing moments here. Watch the way he narrows his eyes in what he believes to be a threatening manner when he first meets Cox, and watch how those eyes cloud with confusion when Cox angrily turns the tables on him; it's a terrifically funny piece of acting.
The Coens have always had a knack for creating such roles, of course, the kind of characters that seem perfectly suited to the actors selected for them; they seem to tap into something hitherto unrecognised in that actor, and that so often has a freeing effect on the cast. The same trick works for Malkovich, who probably gives his best performance in this film since he played, well, John Malkovich (his repeated line of exasperation-"what the fuck!"-is almost always funny). But while the gags are frequent, they're generally mild, and occasionally the Coens make the audience's chuckles stick in their throat when they suddenly bring a violent edge into the picture. This is nothing new, of course, as anyone who remembers Steve Buscemi's encounter with a woodchipper will testify, but in Fargo the violence was offset by the deep sense of compassion Frances McDormand brought to the role of Marge. You could say the same about the Leo and Tom's relationship in Miller's Crossing, or the funny, oddly touching friendship between The Dude, Walter and Donny in The Big Lebowski. Burn After Reading doesn't have that core of emotional truth to hold it steady while the characters hurtle around and careen into each other at an increasingly frenetic pace, and as a result, the offhand way in which the Coens deal with two of the film's most likable characters just comes off as cruel.
So we laugh, but the laughter is hollow. I don't really get the sense that Joel and Ethan care about this plot or the people involved in it, and aside from Pitt and Malkovich, the characters are thinly conceived. McDormand's performance is one of her most strained, and George Clooney isn't pushed very far by his turn as an ageing lothario. The real pleasures are to be found in small moments, in the dialogue between two befuddled CIA agents played perfectly by JK Simmons and David Rasche, or in the completely unexpected reveal of an odd contraption that Clooney's character has been building in the basement. But Burn After Reading is just a collection of fitfully amusing touches, rather than the kind of fully-formed, byzantine narrative that we know the brothers are capable of, and it never recovers from an abrupt, bloody twist about an hour in. "Report back to me when... I don't know... when it makes sense" Simmons tells his underling halfway through the picture, but it never really does entirely make sense, and that doesn't seem to matter. The disappointing ending just feels like a half-hearted shrug, and I responded in kind as the credits rolled.
Over the past thirty years, Terence Davies has only made six films – if you count his Trilogy as one feature – but that small collection has been enough to see him regarded as one of the greatest of all British filmmakers. His work is unlike anyone else's; the Trilogy, his masterpiece Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes are all deeply personal films drawn from his own childhood experiences, and structured in a way that reflects the passage of time and the nature of memory rather than following any standard narrative rules. After making those films, Davies moved into the world of literary adaptations, and 1995's The Neon Bible was a disappointment, but as the director himself admitted, it paved the way for his spellbinding version of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth five years later. That film should have opened up more avenues for Davies, but instead he found himself out in the cold for eight years, until a commission to make a documentary about his native Liverpool brought him back into the spotlight. I met Davies last week to discuss Of Time and the City, his childhood memories, and the poor state of a film industry that can neglect one of its true artists for almost a decade.
This film is a very subjective story about your own memories of a particular time and place, and yet it has received a great reception at a number of festivals around the world. Why does this picture resonate?
Gosh, I honestly don't know, because it was made with the most modest of intentions, and a very modest budget I might add. Perhaps it's because I think people recognise truth. I've tried to be as truthful as possible, and I think that may prick their own memories, and make them remember their hometown. That's what it seems to do, but I don't know how that's achieved, because that certainly wasn't the intention, it really wasn't. It's odd things – like a lot of people pick up on the pomegranate, but it was exotic, because you only had fruit at Christmas as that was the only time you could afford it. We had one pomegranate that we cut and we ate it with a pin, as I recall. That seems to prick a lot of memories, but how that's achieved I have no idea, and I'm as bemused as anybody else [laughs].
Memory is a funny thing, and you can never tell what will spark something off in a person's mind.
No, but if you're true to it, people will respond, and – while I'm not saying I'm in their class – you don't have to be Russian to like Chekhov or German to like Schubert, because they're saying something which is universal. People have been kind enough to say this is saying something universal, but I never thought it would. I just tried to be as truthful as I could be, but it was subjective. Someone said at one of the early shows that we didn't show the Toxteth riots, but that didn't affect me. What people don't seem to realise is that when you grew up in a certain part of the city in the 50's, you very rarely left it. You know, you went to school, you went to church, if you were Catholic, you went to the movies – and there were eight within walking distance of my house, not counting the eight in town – and Toxteth was a long way away, so if you had no reason to go there you didn't go. All I was trying to do was to make an honest, subjective account of the time I lived there, from 1945 to 73, and that's all I ever said I wanted to do.
You mentioned you were fortunate enough to have eight cinemas within walking distance. What was it that cinema gave you in those years, was it an escape from your life? Was it a glimpse of another world?
It wasn't an escape, because even though I had grown up in a slum, in those days you weren't told you were deprived, and you didn't feel deprived. Everyone was in the same boat so you accepted that and everyone helped one another when they could. You never, ever thought of yourself as deprived. Actually, I didn't realise it until Mark Kermode said it to me, "You seemed to go to the cinema like you went to church", I was just mesmerised by it. My first film at seven was Singing' in the Rain, that was the very first thing I saw, and if that's not enough to mesmerise you for life I don't know what is. We were a lot less sophisticated then, so when I was eleven and one of my sisters took me to see Young at Heart – which was the first time I saw Doris Day, and fell absolutely in love with her – a lot of the street scenes were actually shot in the studio, but we didn't know that. We just though that's what America looked like. There was nothing like the information technology that there is today, and we believed that's what it was like – they all lived in these fabulous houses, they were all rich, they all had these wraparound teeth, and they all had big kitchens. Of course, when I went for the first time I was disabused of that! [laughs]
When you talk about going to the cinema like you went to church, do you mean that cinema filled the void when you lost your faith?
I didn't lose my faith until I was 22, so it wasn't as synchronous as that. I'd always loved films since I was introduced to them at seven, and I didn't lose my faith until 1967, which was a long time later. I had always fought against it because I had been told "That's the devil's work. If you have any doubt at all, it's the devil", and that was a long process, the seven years from 15-22 were awful and I never ever want to go through anything like that again. It was a great, huge doubt, wanting to be forgiven even though I hadn't done anything, and wanting to be made like everybody else. There was nothing. It was an awful period.
Do you still get the same thrill from cinema today?
No, it's gone. I've lost my ability to suspend my disbelief. Now I'm conscious of syntax, and if it's wrong, if I feel the tracks or cranes are used wrong, I just get into such a fury I can't concentrate on the film. I just think, "Why are you tracking, for no reason? Why are we looking down like this? Whose point of view is it?" I get very angry about that. I get angry about sloppiness as well, and I can't abide sentimentality. I mean, it's so easy to make people cry, it's much more difficult to move them, and just before a person cries we usually hear the same music on the piano and we think, "Here we go again". Can't I be moved because I feel moved, and not because you're telling me to? And there's very little now that I feel is cinematic. Certainly, a lot of cinema language has been absolutely destroyed by television, because they use syntax all over the place, and that has demeaned it and cheapened it, so it's very difficult to see something cinematic now. The charm has gone, the magic has gone, I wish it hadn't but it has.
I was reading about the way Of Time and the City was funded, and over 150 parties applied for this commission. After the trouble you've had getting anything made over the past decade, how confident were you during this process?
I just assumed we wouldn't get it, and then I couldn't have been disappointed. [laughs] I just thought, why would they give money for a documentary to someone who's never made one before? They did, I'm very glad to say, because it was the first work in eight years, which is a long time, but I never really believed we would get it, if I'm being absolutely honest.
As you had never made a documentary before, how did you approach this film? It feels to me like a film very much of a piece with your fictional work; you could easily stand this film alongside Distant Voices, Still Lives.
Thank you, that's a compliment. I just tried to be true. Looking at material which is not your own is very liberating, because you didn't shoot it, and it's not your eye. I was astonished at how beautiful a lot of it was, really astonished, both black and white and colour. I said, "These are the areas I want to deal with", and then new material came in, and that pricked new ideas, which was fantastic. In a way, I was writing the film and the narration as we were cutting it. The problem was to make the sequences work. The first sequence that came to me was The Folks Who Live on the Hill, I was in the car at the time and I was about to ring Sol Papadopoulos (the producer) and say, "I can't do it, I've got cold feet". Then that sequence came to me and Sol rang me and I said, "We've got a film". I've always been fascinated with memory and the nature of time, ever since I heard The Four Quartets read aloud, on television, over four nights, from memory, by Alec Guinness in '62.
You wouldn't get that on TV these days.
You certainly wouldn't! And no autocues, he actually memorised them. It was a fabulous reading. The only other reading that came close to it, and possibly equals it, was about two years ago when Paul Scofield did the whole of The Wasteland and The Four Quartets, on radio, and he was as good. It was such a revelation. But I am obsessed with the nature of time and memory, and what gets me angry about films which are supposed to be about memory is that they're always linear. Well, memory isn't linear, it's cyclical and associative, it doesn't go in a straight line, and that's what makes it fascinating. And how do we perceive time in reality and in film, where the cut always implies the next thing that happens? What if you subvert that? What if you dissolve, and then use a series of cuts to subvert that, and begin cutting again? Which time are we in? Are we in parallel time, are we in time gone by, are we in time future – where is time? That really does fascinate me. If you dissolve, people know time has passed, and nobody has told them, they just know. How do you get over that sense of time passing, while sometimes making time feel suspended? Because as a child, you're not aware of time passing, it's as if you're living in the same continuum all the time, so how do you get over that? I love that, I think I'll always experiment with time and memory because it's eternally fascinating.
That style of putting films together to reflect the cyclic nature of memory sets your films apart from any others. What are your influences? Do they come from film or is it more from other art forms?
I've drawn more from other art forms, particularly poetry and music. If you listen to a symphony you don't have to be a musician to follow it, you can follow with your inner ear and your emotions. I was influenced in roundabout way by musicals because that's what my sisters loved, and it's what I loved because I was taken to them all the time, and the melodramas of the 50's like All the Heaven Allows. We didn't know what directors did, so nobody could have given a toss who Douglas Dirk was, we just went because Jane Wyman was in it and she wore a wonderful frock, because it was Technicolor, and because you cried at the end, that's why we went. In those days, you had what was called the big picture, and the supporting picture. The big picture was always American, except when it was a comedy, because British comedies were better. And everyone went, literally everyone went; and people like Margaret Rutherford, Alistair Sim, Joyce Grenfell – they were loved. You could feel this love for them as they came on the screen, it was real love, and they were intrinsically funny. Very often they didn't say anything, but they were funny, and as soon as you saw them you were primed to laugh. So there were those influences too, and also listening to northern women, who are funny. I was brought up by my mother, my sisters, and their friends, and I love listening to women talk, particularly northern women, because they're so funny. It's all of those little things which combine to come through your refracted psyche and your eye.
Speaking of the influence of music, it is such an important element in the construction of your films. How does that work; do you know the songs you want to us before you start, or are they inspired when you see the footage being put together, or does it happen more instantaneously than that?
It's a mixture of all three, really. The big thing that happened in the late 50's in most northern towns was that the slums were cleared, and these estates were built which we thought would be the new Jerusalem. I thought of The Folks Who Live on the Hill because I'd known it since I was a child, and that was absolutely instantaneous. When I was at drama school in 73, I used to go and borrow records from the library, because I couldn't afford records and I was only on a grant. I discovered the Bacarisse Guitar Concertino, which I've loved ever since, particularly the slow movement, and when that sequence was written I had that piece in mind. At other times the sequence came first and the music after, and sometimes the music came first, but it's always instinctive, and I know when to say "Stop it now". I said to Liza (Ryan-Carter) who cut it, "When we do cut these sequences, cut it mute, and then put the music on, and see where the cuts fall". That's always very exciting, because sometimes they fall in exactly the right place, or sometimes we have to tidy it up a bit to ensure that when we fall on a certain phrase we start on new image.
Where did you find all of that footage?
Literally all over the place, the source was huge. I lost track of where it came from to be honest with you, there were so many sources.
Some of the footage is incredible, and I guess for someone like me who's of a younger generation, the shocking thing is that these slums were still being inhabited within the last 30-40 years. It's quite recent history.
It was startling to me too, because I grew up in one and didn't realise how bad they were, it was awful. When you grow up in one that's your only world and you have nothing to compare it with, but even I was horrified by them. It was just awful.
And one particularly pointed sequence you include juxtaposes the Royal Family celebrating the coronation in 1948 with the terrible conditions the Queen's subjects were living in.
It just shows what a parasitic institution the monarchy is. She's always going on about doing her duty, which is just nauseating nonsense. If she had done her duty, she would have said "Right, I'm going to go around that kingdom now, see how people live, come back to parliament and say "Do something about it"". That's what she should have done, but of course they never do.
I think you've blown your chance of a Knighthood now, Terence.
[Laughs] Well, they might make it a Damehood, which would be very tempting.
You left Liverpool over thirty years ago, does it still feel like home?
18 Kensington Street is my home, and that'll never change, because that's where I was happiest. Well, for four years anyway, between the death of my father in 52 to the moment I went to secondary school in 56, those were wonderful years. That's my spiritual home, but it's long gone and it's in a Liverpool that doesn't exist anymore, other than in my imagination. Liverpool is completely alien to me now, I just don't know it anymore.
During the past eight years when you've been away from cinema, how close were you to getting films made?
Some things were commissioned for a small amount of money, and then you'd spend literally years waiting until people finally came back to you and said no. It was pretty awful, but what was shocking was the level of ignorance. 25 year-olds who know nothing telling me how to write a script, and that is really hard to take. You just want turn around and say "How many scripts have you written? How many films have you directed?" They've done some tedious media degree or else that Robert McKee crap, and then they think they have the right to tell you how to write a script. That's the hardest thing of all, the level of ignorance, especially when it's allied to arrogance, it's awful. It's little Britain trying to do Hollywood on the cheap and we can't do it, Rank lost a fortune trying to do it in the late 40's. Why don't we have the courage to look at our country, to look at stories that arise naturally from these islands? We've always got to be validated by America – why? We're like the 51st state, with all the indignity that implies. If we're not careful, within the next twenty years whatever culture we have will disappear, and we will just be like Hawaii but with lousy weather.
I saw your appearance on Newsnight Review recently when you said "For one Brideshead Revisited you could make three real films", and that must have been the most frustrating thing for you, seeing these films getting made and thinking about what you could do with a fraction of the budget.
Not so much me, but others. I mean, where does a young filmmaker go now? I have no idea how they get their first film off the ground. That could have helped talented youngsters, that's what's depressing, and it is so formulaic. Given the fact that it is about the privileged classes, do you really care about someone floating around Oxford with a teddy bear? I can't get worked up about that. Now, had they told it from the point of view of the teddy bear I might have been interested [laughs]. Each time they kept cutting to the liner I was hoping it would be the Titanic, but alas, no such luck [laughs].
Have you been given any indication that the success Of Time and the City is having might reopen some doors for you?
I've written three scripts in the last eight years, and we were very close to getting the closing finance on the first one, which is a romantic comedy. You come back to England and what do you get? "Oh, I really want to see the script, please send the script", and then they say they've used up all their money, so you wonder why did they ask to see the script, and you're back down to earth with a bump. It's the same old nonsense.
After doing such a marvellous job adapting The House of Mirth, are there any other works of literature you have a particular desire to do?
Yes, there's a Scottish novel called Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, which everyone in Scotland knows but it's considered one of the great unknown novels. They did it on BBC1 on Sunday nights in 1971, and I lived for Sunday nights, it was wonderful. I've done an adaptation of that and I'd like to do that, because it's a great work. I'm also in the process of adapting an Ed McBain novel called He Who Hesitates.
Is that one of the 87th Precinct novels?
It is, and it's the only one which is told from the point of view of the murderer. I think it will be very interesting indeed.
My second update from the London Film Festival features a crazy Christmas, a nightmarish wedding, and an American President who is all too real.
A Christmas Tale
In his onstage introduction, director Arnaud Desplechin said his latest film was inspired by the work of Wes Anderson and Ingmar Bergman – how's that for an odd couple? – but such a description doesn't prepare you for the film itself. A Christmas Tale sees a whole dysfunctional family coming together to celebrate Christmas and to see if anyone has the compatible bone marrow that might save the life of matriarch Catherine Deneuve; and from this setup Desplechin subverts every expectation to deliver one of the most dazzling and satisfying pictures of the year. The emotions are complicated but true, the characters are richly drawn, and the director audaciously juggles the tone – slipping comedy into a dark scene, undercutting lighter moments with tragedy – in a way that might make your head spin, if he wasn't so sure-footed in his approach. Desplechin uses every trick at his disposal – split-screen, irises, puppetry, characters talking direct to camera – and it's both impossible and unfair to single out members of the cast for praise, as they are all individually magnificent, and they create a magnificent ensemble. This is staggeringly brilliant filmmaking.
Waltz with BashirAri Folman's animated documentary was a huge hit at Cannes this year, but I got next to nothing out of it. I'm not sure why it left me so cold; the film has a striking opening sequence and much of the animation is imaginative and beautiful. But that animation only really worked for me in the fantasy sequences, or in the recreations of Folman's wartime experiences, and when he used the same technique to depict the straight-to-camera recollections of those involved with this incident, I simply wondered what the point was. The animation doesn't work in these sequences, it gives the people a flat, dead-eyed look and strips them of personality, and their dialogue seems oddly stilted. The whole premise of the film feels contrived (Folman is trying to remember a massacre he wasn't present at), and much of the sequences between the director and the people he visits appear scripted to fit his narrative. Only the insertion of real-life footage – something I could see was real – held any impact for me, and I felt completely detached from everything else. Underneath the vivid aesthetic, Waltz with Bashir is repetitive, vague and disappointingly dull.
Rachel Getting Married
After I got home from this screening I looked up a few reviews for Rachel Getting Married, and I came across Roger Ebert's, which includes in its opening paragraph the question "Wouldn't you love to attend a wedding like that?". Well, no is the answer as far as I'm concerned. Honestly, I thought this film was hellish and it often felt like it would never end. Jonathan Demme tries a little too hard to reinvent himself by adopting a shaky camcorder approach that's supposed to make us feel like we're a guest at Rachel's nuptials, but it worked too well for me, because I felt trapped within the most boring and drawn-out celebrations imaginable. Does every guest have to make a rambling, uninteresting toast? Does every guest have to perform a musical number? What the hell is this, a wedding or an open mic night? This is ridiculously indulgent stuff, but even when the film isn't turning into an amateur revue, it still misses the mark. Screenwriter Jenny Lumet generates conflicts and blowups out of some deeply contrived and unconvincing situations, and the film rarely manages to be either witty or insightful. The performances are uniformly very good (although others impressed me more than the much-praised Anne Hathaway), but in almost every other respect, the film is a dead loss.
Two Lovers
I like James Gray as a director, but I'm glad to see him moving in a new direction after a couple of decent crime pictures. His new film Two Lovers is a romantic drama that showcases the director's strengths while still displaying some of his limitations. He doesn't have a particularly strong visual sense, but he does know the place he's filming in, and Two Lovers benefits from that strong, authentic atmosphere. Once again he teams up with Joaquin Phoenix who gives an impressive (if slightly overplayed) performance as a man torn between the nice Jewish girl his parents have set him up with (Vinessa Shaw), and the sexy, slightly crazy drug addict who lives upstairs (Gwyneth Paltrow). Of course, it's hard to feel too sorry for a guy whose most painful decision is to choose between Gwyneth Paltrow and Vinessa Shaw – either way, he's got a pretty nice consolation prize. Two Lovers is formulaic stuff and the ending is both flat and predictable, but it's very well done for the most part, and the cast is excellent all the way down (Isabella Rossellini and Elias Koteas lend strong support).
Wendy and LucyAfter the superb Old Joy, writer/director Kelly Reichart returns with another low-key film that manages to grip in an understated way. Michelle Williams gives an outstanding performance as the young drifter trying to make her way north, sleeping in her car, and with only her beloved dog for company. Reichart draws great drama from the obstacles that stack up in Wendy's path, and alongside Williams, there are excellent supporting turns from Will Patton and Wally Dalton. The film really makes you care about what happens to Wendy and Lucy, showing us a world where the tiniest act of kindness can mean everything, and the final scenes are deeply affecting. A modest but memorable piece of work, and Reichart is clearly a filmmaker to watch.
Achilles and the Tortoise
It's good to have Takeshi Kitano back. After losing his way slightly with bizarre, self-obsessed works like Takeshis and Glory to the Filmmaker, Kitano is back on track with this very enjoyable film. OK, so it's not really less self-obsessed – Kitano himself takes over the lead role in the second half of the film, and all of the paintings we see are his – but it's a much more straightforward and engaging piece of work. The film follows the life of a painter, starting with his early introduction to art as a child – drawing and painting anything and everything – before tragedy disrupts his development. Later, we revisit him as a student struggling to find his voice and growing increasingly disillusioned with art school, and finally "Beat" appears as the middle-aged painter still obsessively painting but failing to find any success, and gradually losing the support of his family in the process. Achilles and the Tortoise is overlong and it grows more repetitive and narrow as it progresses, but there's a lot of good stuff here. Kitano keeps throwing tragic curveballs into the generally light-hearted mix – sometimes to jarring effect – but his direction is full of typically surreal touches, and some of his character's attempts to break new artistic ground are very funny.
Still WalkingThe third film in this article to start with the same premise – a large family, haunted by a past bereavement, is drawn together for a specific event, and we watch as they interact, with little tensions and secret disappointments appearing in their relationships. Whereas A Christmas Tale is boisterous and hyperactive, Still Walking is a quiet study; calmly yet incisively observing as the story unfolds at a steady pace . Still Walking is the new film from Hirokazu Kore-Eda, who made one of the decade's great films in 2004 with Nobody Knows, and who once again shows an incredible ability to draw perfect, unaffected performances from actors both young and old. The film is utterly captivating from the opening minutes, with Kore-Eda brilliantly developing his characters in authentic and natural ways, and giving his marvellous cast dialogue that is both witty and insightful. There's hardly a false note in the film, and it left me with that rare feeling of elation one feels after watching a near-perfect work of art. Ozu, whose films are a clear influence, would surely approve.
W.
There's a better film to be made about the presidency of George W. Bush than this; but on the other hand, W. is a much better film than you'd expect a rushed Oliver Stone biopic to be. Stone's broad-strokes approach charts the life of Dubya, depicting his aimless days as a drunken youth trying to escape his father's shadow, his rise as the governor of Texas, and his first term in office, up to and including the invasion of Iraq. The film's narrative leans a bit too heavily on the relationship between Bush and his father (an excellent James Cromwell), but Stone generally finds a decent balance between the different time zones his picture exists in, and the picture is consistently enjoyable all the way through. The biggest success lies in the casting, with Josh Brolin working wonders in the central role, and Elizabeth Banks is impressive as Laura. Elsewhere, Bush's administration is superbly brought to life by Richard Dreyfuss (Cheney), Thandie Newton (Rice), Jeffrey Wright (Powell) and Scott Glenn (Rumsfeld); and the film ultimately depicts its subject as a well-meaning but naive character, who is easily pushed and manipulated by his inner circle (Colin Powell is shown as the sole voice of reason). The psychological profile of Bush never goes deeper than that, and there are important gaps in the story (the 2000 election gets a single mention, and the film ends before Katrina), but I suppose that's to be expected in a film that was frantically made to meet a deadline, and which is unable to get a wider perspective on the sitting president. W. is no Nixon, but it's a solid, intriguing piece of work.
Not a bad week then, with at least two of the festival's best films on show, but the highlight for me was the opportunity to meet two directors I have great admiration for. On Monday I interviewed Terence Davies, to talk about his new film Of Time and the City, his Liverpool upbringing, and his painfully long absence from cinema, and that interview will be published in full next week. Then, the following day, I met Atom Egoyan and we spoke at length about Adoration and some of the director's earlier films (that interview will also appear here in due course). How pleasing it is when you meet people you respect and they turn out to be as open, intelligent and thoughtful as these two were.
Coming up this week – Steven Soderbergh's Che, Hunter S Thompson, corruption in Italy, African boxers, The Brothers Bloom, and Steven Soderbergh's eagerly awaited sequel: Che II: Electric Boogaloo.
The London Film Festival started on Wednesday, and in the first of a series of despatches from the LFF, here's a brief rundown of what I've seen so far. Consider these brief summaries as teasers, as I'll be writing full reviews of these pictures in due course.
Frost/Nixon
A powerful performance from Frank Langella lends an illusion of depth to this superficial and rather flat adaptation of Peter Morgan's stage play. Ron Howard directs in his usual bland fashion, doing little to add a sense of urgency or life to the drama, and the first hour is a drag, with much clumsy expositional dialogue and some unwelcome straight-to-camera segments. After while it settles into a slicker, more enjoyable rhythm, and the interview scenes between Langella's Nixon and Frost (well played by Michael Sheen) are always engaging, particularly the last one. Is it Ron Howard's best film in years? Undoubtedly, probably because the story and actors are just too good for him to screw it up, but judged against more normal standards of excellence it doesn't seem very impressive.
The ClassLaurent Cantet's Palme D'Or winner is a marvel. Set over the course of a single school year, the film observes teacher François Bégaudeau (a real-life teacher, the film is based on his book), as he educates a multi-cultural classroom in an often combative fashion. The film is primarily set within that single room (the film's French title, Entre le murs, literally translates as Between the Walls), and Cantet's three unobtrusive cameras catch the fast, fiery exchange of ideas between François and these teenagers as the film touches on race, gender, national identity, class, sexuality, and ultimately a teacher's responsibility towards his students. The fascinating thing is the way Cantet portrays François as a flawed character, who often loses control of his boisterous charges and whose reaction is occasionally downright unprofessional. The result is a portrait of school life that is realistic, complex, and exhilaratingly alive.
Miracle at St AnnaWoefully clumsy, preposterous, contrived, weighed down with subplots and ridiculously bloated, Spike Lee's war epic is also the loudest film I've seen this year, with both the sound of battle and Terence Blanchard's fucking incessant drums and trumpets being played at ear-splitting volume. Having said all that, I found individual parts of it to be absolutely brilliant, and a reminder of how vital a filmmaker Lee can be, but those isolated highlights feel awfully insufficient when set against some of the bewildering choices the director makes as he trudges through this 160-minute ordeal. There are about six different narratives jostling for position at any one time, the film is riddled with anachronisms and distracting cameos, and while the performances are generally good, the characterisations are broad rather than deep. Sure, the final scene bought a tear to my eye, but I hated myself for it, feeling I'd been hoodwinked by a manipulative and ridiculous film.
Adoration
Atom Egoyan's beautifully structured new film focuses on a teenager who creates a new past for himself, telling friends and classmates that his father was a terrorist, before the story spirals out of his control. Egoyan's direction is crisp and elegant as he moves between different time zones and parcels out fragments of narrative information. He draws superb displays from his actors, including his wife Arsinée Khanjian and Scott Speedman, who suggests real layers of anger and pain in his underplayed performance. Adoration's plot is convoluted and some may balk at the coincidences and revelations that come into play, but the film is fluid, touching, and full of intriguing ideas. If you don't like Atom Egoyan's films then you probably won't like this. But I do, and I did.
BronsonCharles Bronson is Britain's most notorious prisoner, a man who has spent 34 years of his life in jail, mostly in solitary confinement. As Bronson (real name Michael Peterson) has spent a lifetime creating a persona for himself, Nicolas Winding Refn's film plays less like a biopic, and more like a vision of that life filtered through his own skewed perspective. It's a brave idea, but it doesn't work at all. The framing device has Bronson (played by a physically transformed Tom Hardy) appearing on stage in front of an audience, often in clown makeup, to tell his story, and these surreal sequences are mixed up with repetitive scenes in which the central character violently takes on groups of prison guards single-handed. The only part of the film I really liked was a central segment in which Bronson struggled to readjust to life on the outside, but the film never gets inside the mind or under the skin of its subject. The one unqualified success in the picture is Hardy, who offers a display of stunning authority and charisma, but as good as his performance is, it's clear the filmmakers don't have a clue what to do with it.
As well as seeing these films, I spoke to James Toback last week about his new documentary Tyson, and that interview will be published here closer to the film's release date.
Coming up this week – We spend Christmas with Arnaud Desplechin, Rachel gets married, Oliver Stone tackles Dubya, and I meet one of Britain's greatest filmmakers.
