A Review of Irreversible

Irreversible is the first film I’ve watched by Gaspar Noe and wow it’s made an impact. Starring Vincent Cassel (fantastic in La Haine) as Marcus, Monica Bellucci as Alex and Albert Dupontel as Pierre. The performances are all great, the film making’s fantastic, but half way through I had to WALK OUT just to show Mr Noe where he could stick it. You might be able to spot me in the crowd.

“IT’S THE END OF CINEMA” “I HAVE A MORAL COMPASS”

But the fact that these nerds had objections to a 10 minute rape scene as the centre piece of a feature film is understandable no? I saw this comment underneath the video.

In spite of the Cannes cinema audience’s general track record of taking ‘melodramatic’ to unchartered extremes, I don’t think this is an example of the classic template: ‘conservative meets progressive art’ as that insightful Youtube comment suggests. Sometimes, you can make a good case for following knee-jerk reactions like this, and I’m guessing the man behind it would agree. But we’ll come back to all this in a tick.

Irreversible is a story of a woman’s rape told in reverse, where the attempted vengeance by two men, Marcus and Pierre, is followed by their journeys up to that point. The plot structure keeps the motivations behind their actions ambiguous, until the characters are built in reverse order, as character traits and key information is uncovered. This has the brilliant effect of allowing the film to begin chaotically and then mellow down to something richer, which is normally the opposite of what you’ll find in *yawn* chronological films. After the rape, we go back to the party Alex left, the journey her, Marcus and Pierre take to it, and finally back to her flat. It’s a story about sex, violence and consequence. But I haven’t talked about what it all actually looks like yet!                And that’s the best bit, so…

If you haven’t seen it. The camera’s probably what’s going to set the film apart for you. It floats and spins like a gyroscope, in sometimes random, sometimes deliberate movements like a phantom. At times you feel like your eyes have been hijacked, you’re on a very long roller-coaster, twisting through events which are hard to predict. At others, while your eyes are still transfixed, events are easy to predict and the camera stays still. Like a camcorder, there’s also a lot of digital noise which makes details within the darkness hard to make out, and largely contributes to the grimy, rough-honed aesthetic. The paring of this visual choice with some very unconventional camera movement puts a new twist on a look you’re probably familiar with from low-budget assorted indie and horror films from around the same time. So even though the movements are alien, there’s something about the camera quality which makes situations feel real, a bit like Friedkin’s ‘documentary aesthetic’ from the French Connection,  Irreversible shows the capability to jump between realism and surrealism. (A quality of David Lynch’s work I like a lot).

There’s also a lot of animated digital cropping going on, in case you weren’t dizzy enough. In common with movies like Birdman, Irreversible mimics a continuous shot, and a continuous movement, hiding cuts in flat textures and whip-pans. This infers continuity where it doesn’t really exist but, then again, it’s a valid way to navigate an unavoidable problem if you’re gonna go with this narrative structure.

^Plot of the film in convenient Graph form^

Now, the meaning of the film is where Irreversible falls down a bit for me, because [SPOILER] if you’re going to pull that “It was all a dream” shit on me, then I should look back and discover new things about the characters that flesh them out somewhat, given this new context. Mulholland Drive is the best example of a film which clings to your mind in this way, but Gaspar left me high and dry here for a number of reasons.

And that number is 2

Here are too reasons Gaspar left me high  and  d r y  !

1. My current theory on the ending of Irreversible is that we’ve exited the premonitions of Alex and Marcus’ minds, but our main focus is on Alex’s experience.

Alex either chooses not to go out based on her premonition, or because she finds out she’s pregnant – conception being one of these notionally chaotic events in life. Or it could be a combination of the two, whereupon her pregnancy sheds new light on how she’s exploited as a sex object throughout her part of the film.

There’s also another possible fork here, she could have made the choice not to go, or it could be that ‘Time’, by some mysterious power of will, has erased our timeline, scorched earth style, to start a new one.

Two shots, one at the beginning and one at the end could support this, the first moves clockwise and the other moves anti-clockwise from a birds-eye view. Which implies that time is physically reversible, whereas concurrently, the emotional impact of the rest of the film, for Alex and us, is irreversible (we did it bois).

Now, generally I’m a fan of open-ended films but the trouble with this is that there are too many options and I’m not a fan of any of them because there’s no definitive point where time changes or ‘destroys’ itself.

2. IFFF the characters are inside a dream side-characters may represent slightly exaggerated versions of themselves within Alex’s and Marcus’ mind, but it’s not clear if we’re in nightmare reality or an eerily real dream because some characters are as real as the next, while there are others who are full on 10/10 whacky.

 

But… but…

Am I just becoming the narrow-minded reactionary like them there French people from the beginning of our journey?

Is it – *gasp* – exploitation? To film a woman being raped and then in the nude? The horror of that moment is undeniable and real, there’s no ‘male gaze’, just an uncompromising presence, I don’t think that’s exploitative. I think it is unnecessary to have a sex scene afterwards though, even if it does underline certain themes.

Then is it objectionable to include a ten minute rape scene in a film at all? Well it depends who sees it, but yeah, I think it’s actually quite important to portray something as taboo as rape in an objective way, and the fact that it’s filmed in such jarring contrast to normal physical violence is a testament to that intent.

Those festival goers found it horrifying because rape is horrifying, if that makes you kick up a fuss, fair enough I say.

This all assumes that Irreversible had some real-world benefit to womankind which can’t verify, maybe the film’s only lasting effect has been to inflate the name of Gaspar Noe.

But emerging from these thicketed thoughts, Irreversible is an unforgettable film, I found the drama and delivery extremely captivating and I recommend it to anybody with thick skin and an iron stomach.

8/10

 

My Review of Yardie

Idris Elba’s ‘Yardie’ is his first attempt to direct a feature film and I’d say he did a good job. It’s not Shawshank (also by a first-timer) by any measure but seeing a project with this amount of ambition through from beginning to end can’t be done by your average human, and Idris Elba isn’t, he’s a DJ, an actor, a boxer, a pilot.

I didn’t even need to know he was a pilot, I just typed ‘Idris Elba pilot’ into Google and there’s a video of him doing corkscrews in an aerobatic plane. No don’t look it up to confirm, you know it’s there, it exists, he’s Idris Elba.

Back to Yardie. It’s a story about a boy who grew up mourning the death of his brother who was shot while campaigning for peace between two warring gangs in Kingston Jamaica. He matures into a ‘wild dog’ who’s hungry for success and and still looking for revenge on whom he believes is his brother’s killer. His cousin (or other brother I can’t remember) shoves him off to London, where his wife and daughter live, with a kilo of coke to trade, what could go wrong?

The women in the film are written with realism and the respect you’d expect from Elba, a guy who grew up in the 70s and 80s in East London, where most of the film is set. Although I couldn’t exactly call them ‘independent’, what the female characters in Yardie want most is to make a better life for their kids and that gives them a lot of power. A scene which stood out to me was where ‘Dennis’ the main character, breaks into the house of a man he wants to kill, but only the man’s wife and kids are there. Now I was expecting her to stand up for herself in some way, but the way Naomi Ackie as ‘Mona’ exploits D’s moment of weakness was a nice touch, it was one of the only times in which the story-lines intersected in a non-obvious way.

The jukebox soundtrack, although it was bound to be, was pretty good, and it also worked well on location as Elba chose to use live music, preferring not to overdub in post. Although I enjoyed it’s energy, the music has little to do with the plot, it didn’t enhance the feeling of any scenes apart from when the music existed actually in the scene. The people who made Yardie obviously love music and have a deep connection to Jamaican culture, but this doesn’t translate to anything vital to the plot, or feel very meaningful to the characters, at least not as much as the spiritual aspect of Rastafarianism which features quite heavily.

It’s shot mostly conventionally, other than a few moments of inspiration in some cool POV shots. There’s also one instance where Dennis stands in front of a painting at his council flat with the same colour pallet as previous shots of his home country, there are also moments where his brother is lit with metaphors n stuff in mind. Mostly the film isn’t built to be particularly subtextual. Sometimes there’s too much coverage of different angles, sometimes there is too little, and the camera doesn’t linger on things it should for the sake of emotional impact.

Performances are mostly good, it’s refreshing to see a cast of mainly unknowns. Aml Ameen and Shantol Jackson make great leads, and also shout-out to Stephen Graham, I was in awe of his constantly changing accents, it looks like he took some inspiration from Gary Oldman’s character in Leon: The Professional. I also like the changing accents as a dramatic way to illustrate the clash between English and Jamaican culture, Elba also didn’t feel the need to make their dialogue more understandable – which I respect. But it felt like the actors were wringing out the good material from a below-average script without any subtext or complexity, that I felt like it was a waste of a good cast, and perhaps, good directing from Idris.

As well as the wooden dialogue, the dual story-lines turn-out this kind of semi-realism, or enhanced realism that I don’t really get behind. Why at one moment, is the drug kingpin free-firing an Uzi on the roof of his nightclub, screaming for D’s blood, and in the next, D hangs around, carefree in East London, calling his brother? It’s like danger only exists when the plot wants it to.

D kills, I don’t know, about five people in the film and comes away completely unscathed by his Christian wife, his conscience, the law, or the other numerous associates of two powerful gangs who’ve lost hundreds of thousands of pounds by his hand. The finale of the film is meant to be bittersweet, Dennis has had the revenge he sought but only after realising who the real killer was. Was that the Righteous path? Does that sequence of events have any lasting emotion or consequence?

I guess not oh here’s the credits.

The problem isn’t even that I can’t sympathise with the guy, it’s that he doesn’t seem to operate by normal earth rules. Part of the film wants to be gritty and contextual, to capture a changing London in the midst of new migration and youth culture, but the other has a pull towards action movies that can’t be reconciled.

Even though I haven’t lived in that time or place, from what I’ve heard about it, and what I know about the films I’ve enjoyed in the past which try to depict a period, is that community and personality in side-characters is essential if you want the thing to feel real. The bonds between new migrants to the UK in just one block of council flats must have been very close. Walk into a pub or a squat in a rough area and there are bound to be some characters, even demonstrating the structure and class aspirations of society at the time by including Yuppies would add some personality and humour. I guess this type of attention to detail will come to Elba with more experience and freedom to experiment but it was something really holding the film back for me.

I wouldn’t recommend this movie but I also don’t think I’ve seen the best from Idris. There’s no question that more films from unique backgrounds, telling unusual stories need to be funded, but maybe it’s a better idea to give the bulk of that money to people with more commitment to the craft.

6/10

Review: Deep Red

Deep Red // Profundo Rosso by my fav little Italian boy Dario Argento filmed slap bang in the middle of a ‘golden age’ of Italian horror of the 70s is touted to be one of his best creations of the giallo variety. Although the plot on the blurb had me worrying that this would be a sleeker repeat of his first film Bird With the Crystal Plumage – i.e. a man witnesses a murder and seeks to identify the killer. It’s immediately evident that this film is written, edited and shot by a far more experienced director and screenwriter in Argento, with five years of experience behind him, in this period it seems he’s reached his creative stride.

Unexpectedly, Deep Red is markedly better produced than Suspiria, probably his most celebrated film. The dubbing doesn’t feel as uncanny and the whole thing is generally better edited and performed; although the visuals and overall experience don’t really hold a candle to it in my eyes. Maybe the reason behind Suspiria’s frayed edges was it’s ambition in terms of set design and lighting, whereas Deep Red only adapts to existing interiors.

Something which has survived from Argento’s earlier work however, is the influence from Hitchcock, thinking about The Lady Vanishes (1938) for example, the similarities with Deep Red are rife…

A quirk of an initial mystery, for some reason, means the protagonist has to try and solve it on their own. Maybe it’s because people don’t take women seriously, maybe it’s because the Police don’t take artists seriously. This solitude will mean they doubt their own memory, until it is proven correct because…

• There are hidden details in the initial event that would have been missed by the protagonist, and the audience, until new significance is drawn to it through flash backs or re-enactments.
• The protagonist recruits a companion who makes unwanted sexual advances towards them – but the protagonist warms to them over time as they encounter more dangerous situations.
• A song bookmarks a hidden mystery which is somehow linked to the initial event.
• The victim writes a message on glass for the protagonist to find.
• Loads o spooky birds

So Argento takes script elements from Hitchcock’s playbook, then affixes the usual tropes like black gloves and a long leather coat, significant objects in some kind of toolbox, lingering on body parts like eyes or the impact of the weapon, Gothic lighting, blood, an omniscient killer, home invasions… a lot of home invasions. I didn’t know it was that easy to cut off electricity and break into someone’s house before Argento movies.

Though I wasn’t expecting anything world-shaking, this being a horror film, Deep Red writes the main relationship maturely in relation to gender equality and sexual politics. One of the main points it makes is that women can be smarter and stronger than men, and that works in the story as well – it doesn’t preach about it. That said, there are definitely points in the script where I almost wanted to shout cut!

The side characters are not very memorable, two men who are supposed to have witnessed the murderer in the first scene but mostly have very little to do for the story, but one of them dies in an entertaining way so that’s a plus?

Although it’s slightly better than Suspiria, the sound mixing is pretty terrible. I’m a fan of Goblin’s songs individually, once again there is certainly more variety than their job with Suspiria, but the way they fade up and down draws so much attention to their presence that there were only a few points in the film where the soundtrack invoked an emotional response from me – and not a “hey this is a cool song” response.

Also the music playing over the murder scenes took most of the suspense out of the situation. The score goes from spine-tingling suspense with the song I mentioned before, to jaunty, up-beat drumming. Which, apart from not fitting the tone at all, implies the murder won’t be stopped, and so there’s no point in rooting for the victim. So am I supposed to enjoy this in a sadistic way or appreciate the juxtaposition, à la Tarantino?

*swirls mug of whisky*

I don’t think it works anyway.

*downs flask of tea*

As per usual I really enjoy Argento’s cinematography, though some editing is questionable, I assume that stems more from a lack of available footage than poor judgement in post production. Camera movements generally flow very well, complementary with dialogue and staging. It isn’t a surprise that, along with hipsters like Friedkin, Argento was an early adopter of steadicam technology in the following decade.

One small thing Deep Red lacks and I actually miss from Bird with The Crystal Plumage are ultra-wides of our character amongst large buildings, or being chased/chasing on foot through the city – because that kind of thing really daunts you and gives you a feel for a directors vision of the cityscape. So many great movies benefit from this, I’m talking M, The Third Man, Bicycle Thieves, The French Connection. The beginning of Deep Red sets this up with a beautiful shot (below) but drops it quickly.

From the blurb, or by just reading the script, I might have assumed Deep Red was only a competently written detective thriller. But with the detail and flourishes Argento brings to the mix, it becomes a film I’ll want to return to.

7/10

Review: Selma

• Hello, this is me having written the full review. I have realised through reading it again how it is boring negative and preachy, so I’ve decided to sprinkle in some things which make me happy and laugh, so you can read and not chug to a halt like a sad tractor – Yay!

Selma is useful if you know literally HECK ALL about MLK and the civil rights movement. The film is quite transparently engineered to entrench itself as an historical document, but reaching that goal means the dialogue is loaded with artificial significance, characters don’t speak like real people and the suitably emotional music leaves you with very few moral questions to chew on. The lighting is soft and bland and the frame lacks a lot of depth. The racial violence is censored by the camera for a low age rating and almost romanticised for it’s sacrificial value.

To clarify, because saying something like that could be taken the wrong way, my point isn’t that the film shouldn’t mourn for people who died in the midst of civil rights protests, it’s that I don’t like it when the death of an individual is co-opted for a cause or identity as though that’s their sum total value.

What’s linked to this sort of style, in film-making terms, is that real violence doesn’t happen in slow motion, nor without blood. If you want to shock the audience, show violence for what it really is: fast, ugly and devastating.

❤My cat likes to rest her chin on my lap❤

The film only raises MLK’s responsibility for these people’s suffering with half a heart. Though his cause was good, no question about it, to say that he pursued and achieved such changes with non-violent means is clearly false. Reading into the film a bit, he’s clearly using the media to expose horrible violence and systemic oppression by staging it in microcosm, and using his own supporters as bait. 70 million people watched the first march across the bridge to Montgomery, would it have had such a large audience had it happened when people were busy at work? I’m sure MLK felt some kind of conflict about this but when this argument is put in Lyndon B. Johnson’s mouth as a way for him to delegitimize MLK, it also delegitimizes the argument which is actually central to the strategy of the civil rights movement.

✨✨I love to meet new friends because of the in-jokes only we find funny✨✨

In focusing only on the achievements of protesters and campaigners from 1965, the film does not acknowledge the wider context of slavery, nor the work that still needs to be done in modern day America. The tone at the end of the film is a celebration, and MLK’s story is now part of a specifically American folklore, along with George Washington, who’s picture hangs between him and LBJ in the White House. But the human man George Washington owned slaves, and the right MLK is trying to uphold in Selma, was an amendment ratified 71 years after his death!

🌸When a kid gives some money to a homeless person or street performer🌸

Selma isn’t actually a bad film by normal standards, the performances are actually quite good, particularly from David Oyelowo, but when a historical drama tries to be more than a biopic, have an arc which doesn’t actually fit history, and deal with such a huge topic it’s much easier to get a lot wrong.

💖💖4/10💖💖

Some images from ‘Welcome to Leith’

Welcome to Leith is a documentary by Michael Nichols and Chris Walker about a tiny town which is almost overrun by Nazis and their families. The plan, orchestrated by dark-wizard Craig Cobb (14% African), was intended to create a voting majority and to install a white ethno-state in rural North Dakota USA. The story records how the locals cope and interact with these newcomers.

A family of five show the weapons they’ve had to purchase to feel safe from the Neo-Nazi next door neighbour. Coincidentally the name of new topical ABC sit-com.

Citizens of Leith set the house, bought by Nazi leader Craig Cobb, alight. Themes of creation and destruction are very present in this film.

Children watch their mother learn how to shoot.

Nazi man and instrument of the organised takeover describes his ambition to become a chef. In the same scene, his son lists off some words he’s learned at school which begin with the letter ‘N’ , the tension at that point is pretty hilarious. A laugh out loud moment for sure.

Newly released from prison on probation, Crag Cobb has to spend the night in a motel because his house is crispy and he doesn’t want to attract any attention. It’s a time in the doc for some reflection, the first time the camera is let into a personal space where he’s not the center of attention. You can tell that he’s tired of the situation, but upholds government conspiracy and takes the opportunity to show us his modified Nazi Bible. Oh Cobb, what a silly billy.

I actually felt a bit of sympathy for Craig Cobb by the end, I mean look at him, with his trainers and whitening hair. Does he see a divine mission in the surrounding grey drizzle, outside of the online forums? Despite his oath that younger Nazis/white separatists will continue the effort when he’s gone, there’s definitely a sombre tone that’s not entirely down to the film-making. After all, he’s been banging the same drum for close to 50 years, and for all the like-minded people he’s met in that time, it’s still got to be lonely playing the villain.

 

Review: Betty Blue

Not sure yet if #BettyBlue is a soft-core porn or not. It’s a story about a French handy-man and aspiring writer who meets a passionate and tempestuous woman with an ambiguous history.

They bang, like a lot, but eventually the quirks of a short term relationship turn into real hurdles they have to overcome.

Zorg, the male protagonist, must go to increasingly drastic lengths to keep Betty and him together, though her monthly spurts of insanity don’t make that at all easy. The camera doesn’t have an exploitative focus but there is a huge amount of dirty, dirty human flesh. Given that this is a common criticism of the film, I’d say that Jean-Jacques Beineix wanted to treat sex and nudity with openness and without the physical and social barriers normally imposed by our inhibitions and dramatic norms.

There is a lot of natural chemistry between cast members, Beneix does a great job working with the rhythm and movement in the social environments he creates. The characters are hedonistic, are also acutely aware of what they think matters in life and what doesn’t. When they get wasted on Tequila the conversation often reduces to breathless laughter about absurd social conventions, myths, and perhaps their goals and aspirations, as if drinking helps them accept their insignificance. Conversely, love matters the most, but brings suffering.

Specific colours like blue and yellow as recurring motifs are dotted throughout Betty Blue in the sets as paint, and Zorg’s yellow jacket. The two colours blend together in several shots of huge sky and setting sun, maybe signifying the potential of the relationship, or it’s all consuming/awe inspiring quality.

The pretty consistent use of the colour red could also connote fertility, and also danger in blood…but we’re getting a little too GCSE for my liking.

Even though the look, the ideas and the performances are all great, the script and plot feel purposeless, jumping from one location to the next and staying too long on scenes which don’t have a point or have already made it. I understand that for Zorg, this relationship is like running on an accelerating treadmill, so the plot will be about escalation rather than your usual cyclical themes and whatnot, but in this case also, I didn’t feel the  panic he started to exhibit towards the end, I just felt vaguely frustrated that he didn’t get Betty any help before it got crazy. You’d be right in telling me “They’re both insane!”. Both characters do refer to each other as such, but I don’t think Zorg is mad, just short sighted.

Saying that though, I did think the cross-dressing element was interesting. Zorg robs a bank and sneaks into hospital dressed like Betty. While he mourns her descent, he also experiences life from her perspective, leering old men ogle him in his disguise; a comic (i guess) way of describing Betty, who’s beauty can deflect scrutiny away from her true self, as it does for the audience in the first act. A security guide also proposes he and the disguised Zorg run away “Like Bonnie and Clyde” something Zorg seems to like because maybe that template is how he sees himself and Betty.

That’s as deep as it goes for Zorg’s cross dressing though, there’s no more hints of gender dysphoria or lasting psychological effects of having to fulfill the man and the woman’s role, just a cheesy voice over.

Betty Blue might be an interesting one to come back to, the plot and the script are not very worried about conserving momentum, but maybe it’s a problem I have with the format. If this was more of a ‘road trip’ movie, I might have accepted the discontinuousness-ness    …   ness.

And could you could call Betty’s character writing ‘progressive’? (using quotations marks because I don’t know what that word would mean in the context) because if one was so inclined, one could sum up Betty Blue as a 3 hour version of the comment “Don’t worry, she’s only on her period.”

weak 7/10

Review: Citizen Kane

I was very impressed by #CitizenKane, the cinematography, lighting, make-up, set design is all extremely creative. I was reminded of the Gothic lines and shadows from Fritz Lang, the framing from Conrad Hall’s work on Butch Cassidy, the Coen brothers dialogue, and a huge amount of Scorcese particularly from something like Wolf of Wall Street. The use of tight editing is so impressive for the time.

I wasn’t touched by it like I would be by other films I like and admire. Maybe because, although that might be the intent, I felt like the film never stopped narrating itself, so I could never grow to ‘love’ him, as the film keeps telling me to do. I wasn’t totally convinced by his arc either. It’s hinted by the skeptical friend Jedediah Leland, that Kane’s idealism would be corrupted by conservative newspaper men, but there is a missing link before and after he leaves to marry Emily, the President’s cousin. After he returns, his avoidant and selfish personality starts to become apparent. Maybe because at that point he’s reached the goals he set out to achieve and wants to conquer the malaise brought by a lack of any new ones.

• After watching a clip from the scene in the image above, I caught the journalists carrying prop guns, could this be a tell that Kane’s created a mob rule? Certainly his money makes him impossible to compete with even if his company doesn’t use any violence.

I might have been more convinced of his arc, had the visible circle of people around Kane grown nastier as did his success, maybe Welles thought it would be better to remove him from those environments in the film so that it could be more of a singular character study.

I mentioned Scorcese before, but what Orson Welles tried to do with Citizen Kane was much more ambitious, even though I have issues with how this is presented, the title has some great irony in retrospect. That’s because he’s a man caught between wanting to be treated like an equal while exploiting his wealth to distance himself from them, all the while the press sifts through his personal life for profit as if he can live up to the myth they created and he exploits. I suppose it’s an early critique of celebrity culture, culture which perpetuates itself based on these aspects of human nature, society and capitalism. What the film indirectly says too, however indirectly or maybe by accident, is how easily society can be manipulated by promises, platitudes and scandal, forgetting about the people behind it all.

I’m not in love with Citizen Kane, it actually drags a little in the third act. The scenes of the opera and Kane’s palace, ‘Xanadu’ though framed very nicely didn’t capture the madness it represented, and the reincorporation of Rosebud was a little too neat for me because it broke both the third person narrative and the mystery I actually would have admired had it ended that way.

This film has so much demonstrable drive and relevance to this day, both in society at large and in film making, that it’s hard to, if not love, then like it vigorously.

It gets a 8/10

Remind me never to use the word v̶i̶g̶o̶r̶o̶u̶s̶l̶y̶ again. It’s 2am and I don’t have the energy to synonym

 

Review: 45 Years

I don’t usually rave about films as stripped back as this one by Andrew Haigh, the last primarily naturalistic film that had such a big influence was Hidden (or Caché if you’re feeling fancy). 45 Years has the same emotional creep in common with that film, and a similar theme of a restless and hard-to-control past. But it doesn’t feel a need to add any style that would be out of the ordinary, that’s because the drama’s written all over Charlotte Rampling’s face as she struggles to reconcile her long marriage to Geoff (Tom Courtney) with a serious relationship he had before he met her, that ended in tragedy.

It’s clear that Geoff’s character, in his unfiltered way, after hearing the news that his old partner’s body had been discovered, is drawn into a double life. One where his old self is drawn to that stage of his life.

The film really does a great job of hammering home this growing separation between them, and this is done with an impressively wide breath of cinematic techniques, executed with subtlety and in tune with the world … the world, of Norfolk.                 “Wow it’s like I’m actually there” you’ll say as Kate walks through the village high street, picking up very specific noises of people passing by. “I hope she doesn’t kill him!” you’ll exclaim as a steady tap drips and a queezy green light flickers on Rampling.

Particularly in the first third of the film, shots of the couple can both bring them together and alienate, with understated choices of focus and angle. And as well as sounds, silences work to bring out the unsaid, and I wholly agree with Adam from YMS in his ‘Best of 2015’ review that the actors are given a lot of room to process their emotions in the take. You really can track Rampling’s face like a graph and with much more honesty than the dialogue permits.

I’m in awe of the premise, admittedly it’s presentation in the narrative might be part of the impact it’s had but the way it feeds into themes of change and decay while at the same time embroiling the characters in their past selves is really something, because it literally and physically is that juxtaposition (SPOILER: I’m talking about a frozen body). For our main couple, it’s an unfortunate situation because the film forces you to view the situation sympathetically and also objectively.

Should Goeff take responsibility for his mistakes in the past? I mean he’s practically a different person now, it was nearly 50 years ago, it looks like he might have dementia, and after all he didn’t lie, he only hid the truth, isn’t that different?

Should Kate forget the past she wasn’t even present for and support her husband through this emotional period? He locked some pretty turbulent stuff away from her so that he could almost subsist on two relationships, isn’t that hurtful and intentionally dishonest; wasn’t she supposed to be enough? Harvey Dent, can we trust him?

Anyway the end of the film contains one of my favourite visual metaphors to date, I’m gonna pinterest that shit all over my timelines because it’s so gloriously ambiguous. There’s a war still raging in my head about if it could be labelled romantic or depressingly fatalistic. I’m not at all sure if I want to grow old in the same way these people have ended up doing.

But that’s just me, you should definitely give this film a try, and be patient with it because you’ll probably find it leaving thoughts and feelings like skid-marks on the surface of your toilet bowl brain.

8/10

What’s so interesting about The French Connection?

I don’t know why but I’ve come to a bit of a brick wall trying to review this film as if it’s a fresh take. So instead I’m going to share some things I found interesting from the director, William Friedkin’s DVD commentary, because, the way I see it, and believe me, the way you’ll see it too, the miracle of how this film was made is half the intrigue.

Something which struck me in William Friedkin’s descriptions of what happened on shooting days was how ad-hoc the whole process was. He explains how, on numerous occasions, he would stage the actors before letting the camera operators on set so the cameraman would have to follow action as it happened. There wasn’t much time required to set up because most of the film is shot outdoors or in public places, embracing natural lighting and lens flare. The interior lighting, according to the cinematographer Owen Roizman, was intentionally minimal, he worked to mimic and enhance the already present lighting in the room to disguise any hint of artifice. Roizman also utilized a type of film stock which was especially adapted to low light conditions, with an increased ISO, resulting in a granier output we would now associate with modern documentary style pictures, lasting through to the digital era. You could compare the spirit of Friedkin and Roizman, now, to Sean Baker’s lo-fi camera work or Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, in how the urban environment can accommodate and complement fiction.

This was all part of what Friedkin calls his documentary aesthetic, learned from a background in documentary film making. As a result, events feel as if they’re happening on the fly, where decisions are working inside characters’ heads and not connected to a predestined narrative.

Part of this concerted effort to create the most authentic ‘impression’ of the real case as possible was helped by having a very close relationship between the police force and the production crew. The two detectives who were instrumental in breaking the real case, Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso were on-set consultants, and would supervise the realism of each scene, little touches like how Egan and Grosso would play ‘good cop bad cop’, how Egan would shake up a drug cocktail in a bar bust or incorporating the real method for measuring the purity of heroin.

Friedkin even hired Egan and Grosso as actors as well as regular on-set consultants. Before the shoot started, they took Friekin, Hackman and Sheider on busts with them. Egan and Grosso were also extremely well connected, almost famous in the police force at the time, which meant they could contact a considerable number of working police officers to pose as extras in the two bar busts and in the final scene. For the scene in the Grand Central station subway, police actually helped manage the crowds so the crew would have enough space to film.

The huge amount of help received from the NYPD in shooting is surprising given a few notably illegal methods Friedkin used to pull off some set pieces, normally the preserve of films with much higher budgets and major studio backing. At one point in the film there’s a traffic jam caused by friends of Friedkin stopping their cars and blocking the road, and the famous car chase between Jimmy ‘Popeye’ Doyle and an elevated train was filmed by dodging between real traffic, sometimes reaching speeds of 90mph. The crashes we see in the film are real and unplanned with a mixture of stunt drivers and hapless members of the public.

But I get the feeling that even if Egan, Grosso and all the rest knew about the reckless lengths Friedkin went to, they wouldn’t have cared too much. I think this film would have had some cathartic significance, for a case which must have left a bitter taste in their mouths. For despite the real work and passion poured into cornering the heroin dealers, most of the guilty parties were ultimately offered suspended sentences and the king pin, Jean Jehan managed to escape and avoid extradition from American law enforcement in France until his death. The film itself seems to exist in part to please people like Eddy Egan, at the end of the movie, Gene Hackman’s character kills the cop who’s based a man from a rival department, whom Eddie apparently said he wanted to kill at the time. (I’m sure he’s really a big softie)

Although the actual filming being extremely quick and cheap (although they went 300 grand over budget) Friedkin was not under-prepared, he describes knowing the case inside and out and the reason they could have so much freedom on set is because he knew the case well enough to be able to collage together a narrative.

The scenes which make up the picture are compressed embellished, hand picked excerpts from a 2 year long operation. They did not storyboard or work with scripts because Friedkin, and doubtless others, already knew roughly what they wanted from the scene, in it’s entirety. In the DVD commentary, he talks over actors, recreating the key points of conflict from beginning to end – in blueprint. I can imagine how helpful this guiding hand must have been for the actors where there is room to experiment and go off script, which again contributes to the natural feel.

Friedkin’s guerrilla style borrowed from film makers like Jean Luc Godard, coupled with an obsession comparable to Eddie Egan’s for the case of the French Connection, as well as how the city of New York operated as a host for narcotics dealing and smuggling gives this film a unique and authentic vitality which not many others could muster at the time or since.

As someone who wants to make stuff, hearing about how all of this chaos and improvisation resulted in a great film is inspirational, and knowing that most of what’s happening is plucked directly from real experiences and executed with real risk will make watching The French Connection again a much richer experience.

Review: Sexy Beast

Sexy Beast is the first feature film effort from ya boi Jonathan Glazer, who you might know from other films like Birth and Under The Skin, the latter I have seen the former I haven’t.

Before I dive into the hard-hitting nitty-gritty of Sexy Beast, I’ve got to preface by saying  Under The Skin is one of my favourite films of all time, and as I haven’t opined online about it before, I might as well put it here as a digital record before I die under suspicious circumstances on the 10th of February 2027. If you want to skip this look for some bold text underneath two pictures.

Under The Skin is a film which, since I watched it in, I think, 2015 has stayed with me and creeped into my thoughts ever since. In the silence and in the breath-taking score by Mica Levi there are questions about what it means to be human, what it means to be a man or a woman, and what it could feel like to experience outside of your perceptual and emotional capability, whether that’s an alien space ship, or empathy. The narrative, aided by camera, sound and score which work in perfect tandem, guide an alien into acting against her programming, for lack of a better word, because this alien species’ motivations could clearly be beyond me or the film.

When I say ‘the camera guides’ it’s because this was the first time I’d seen a type of filming which felt impersonal, by which I mean totally removed of any familiarity or connection, because to the protagonist, at the beginning, the people walking in the street aren’t worth much more than walking meat-sacks, or some foreign substance on a petri-dish. Conversely, at points of extreme vulnerability, the camera scales up from a subjectively impersonal perspective to then demonstrating the crushing impassivity of nature, which is what the nameless protagonist imitates, and then ultimately succumbs to in the end.

HEYOOOO

Boom Sexy Beast time. A simple story about ‘Gal’ (Ray Winston),  retired gangster living in Spain who’s unexpectedly called up by an ex-associate ‘Don Logan’ (Ben Kingsley) whom he’d clearly wanted to cut ties with. Don has been sent to convince Gal to come back to London for a bank job.

Firstly, I like that Gal isn’t your usual gangster, especially being played by Ray Winston, the mother of all tough guys. Actually, Sexy Beast is a story about a gangster gone soft, he, and his friend are both in genuinely loving and stable marriages, and they count themselves lucky for having been able to escape a lifestyle where loyalty means risking your life as routine. Now, he’s settled down and has more than money to lose, but unfortunately, as the trope goes, you can never really retire.

Ben Kingsley’s performance in this steals the whole thing, his posture is stiff, he’s abrupt, unpredictable, violent, psychotic, controlling, he’s really fantastic to watch, every little expression could be significant because it might hint the beginning of an explosive outburst. Although the performance was great, I don’t think the script allows as much depth from him as I think he’s due. Even though there are allusions to a backstory, when he’s challenged we’re not shown any other response from Don that isn’t anger. This is apart from one scene in which he’s left alone outside on the patio, but there were many more opportunities to make him tragic as well as intimidating.

Similarly, Gal’s character tends to tell rather than show. We are told that he doesn’t want to go back to London, and he more or less tells the camera that he loves his wife, but there aren’t any creative ways any of this is demonstrated.  A way to solve this could be to add early scene between him and his wife DeeDee in bed, where their relationship doesn’t start and end with lust. That way when Don comes in to attack, it’d feel much more like an invasion of space, and DeeDee’s past as a porn actress would feel subverted. Again, it feels like the writing from Louis Mellis & David Scinto are pulling between tragedy and comedy rather than allowing them to work together.

I might be stating the obvious but the film does feel like it was made by a first time director purely because of the number of styles it juggles, ideas and influences which don’t quite work together.

For a lot of the film the quality of the camera is floating and distant, this works when we are explicitly inside Gal’s head but when the story demands detail from the characters it doesn’t deliver. For example there is a scene in which Gal’s sitting at a table with his old cronies, and there’s no dialogue between them, only laughing. Gal is supposed to be distant and stressed so this technically works as a dramatic device, but as a consequence, the other gangsters, who we’ve been told to fear, turn into featureless mush. The use of food as a defense mechanism is also something I thought was overlooked by the writer/directors. In his dreams Gal is reluctant to look up from his meal to face the beast, but there aren’t any similar moments like this in scenes which take place in the real world.

The editing generally stands out as a mark of quality like in a scene where Ben Kingsley, playing Don, recounts conversations within conversations, where exposition is delivered through different characters in dialogue and experiences. At one point in Don’s monologue we actually see inside the mind of top-gangster Teddy Bass (Ian McShane). This and the editing throughout was of a really high quality, but then again I thought the ‘Beast’ which makes his appearance in Gal’s visions and the above thumbnail was a hammy metaphor, even though I give Glazer props for experimenting.

Another point where the writing lacks some skill in my eyes is the Pool Boy character, sort of a surrogate son for Gal, even though he doesn’t have any lines and only seems exists for us to sympathise with Gal, and serve as a plot device for the third act. Chekov’s Hunting rifles were not a good addition, they were too damn convenient for the plot I tell you.

Sexy Beast commences a lot like PTA’s Punch Drunk Love, with a cataclysmic event in the protagonists life as a metaphor for the dramatic upheaval which’ll come shortly after. This event happens to be a huge boulder landing thud in Gal’s swimming pool, and the upheaval is Don’s appearance, which leads to a confrontation in the same spot. The misjudgment of this climactic scene changes the face of the whole film in my opinion. The crux of the film should have rested on the dry gulp and consternation on Gal’s face as he realised covering up Don’s death meant performing the heist. It could have been a fantastic scene where the characters argue while the pool fills with blood, in the same spot as the boulder. The stark division between the second act and the third, from Spain to London felt like I’d missed a step, rather than faced an inevitability.

I have to say In Bruges was a much more streamlined take on a similar though not identical story overall, where the criminals have developed a distaste for their profession. I say this mainly because it kept a consistent location, In Bruges is in Bruges, Sexy Beast is in Spain then in London, but it doesn’t feel deliberate, it feels like the writers wrote themselves into a corner then ran with it.

Again, I actually enjoyed this film a lot, it’s funny and at times very tense. It’s put together very well for a first time director. Films which tend to provoke the most out of me tend to be good – verging on great, where eversoslight improvements to whichever aspect of production would make the film exponentially better, this is one of those.

Under the Skin is better tho

Weak 7/10