REVIEWS
Catch Me Daddy Reviewed by Allan Hunter The relentless pursuit of fugitive lovers is a time-honoured plot, but Catch Me Daddy invests the outcome with a particularly grim inevitability. This is not a film in which anything is likely to end well. The feature debut of music-promo director Daniel Wolfe, co-written with his brother Matthew, relishes walking on the wild side as it offers a bleak vision of a postindustrial Britain and of a Pakistani family in which a father’s sense of honour is more prized than life itself. It covers similar territory to Shan Khan’s recent UK theatrical release Honour, but with much more cinematic flair and dramatic credibility. There will be critical support for a film that shows some of the promise previously glimpsed in the early work of Thomas Clay or Paul Andrew Williams, but it could never be termed a crowdpleaser. The oppressive tone and the occasional burst of shocking, blood-spattered violence will render any critical approval hard to translate into a significant theatrical appeal. Catch Me Daddy begins in a manner suggesting Bruno Dumont had decided to make a film in the Yorkshire moors. Robbie Ryan’s evocative cinematography is one of the film’s true stars. There is a real feel of damp and chill, mist and mud and a silence broken only by whistling wind or the patter of rain drops on a caravan roof.
DIRECTORS’ FORTNIGHT UK. 2014. 107mins Director Daniel Wolfe Production company Emu Films International sales Altitude Film Sales www.altitudefilment.com Producers Michael Elliott, Hayley Williams Screenplay Daniel Wolfe, Matthew Wolfe Cinematography Robbie Ryan Editors Dominic Leung, Tom Lindsay Production designer Sami Khan Music Matthew Watson, Daniel Thomas Freeman Main cast Sameena Jabeen Ahmed, Conor McCarron, Gary Lewis, Wasim Zakir, Barry Nunney, Ali Ahmad
The caravan is a temporary home to BritishAsian girl Laila (newcomer Sameena Jabeen Ahmed) and her Scottish boyfriend Aaron (Conor McCarron from NEDS). There is a sense too that any moments of domestic bliss are just the calm snatched before the storm. The slategrey skies are a sign of the reckoning to come. In true Romeo And Juliet fashion, Laila has defied the will of her family and now her brother Zaheer (Ahmad) is closing in, determined to bring her home to their father Tariq (Zakir). Assistance in tracking her down is provided by gormless psycho Barry (Nunney) and his cokesniffing sidekick Tony (Lewis). Zaheer also has a
car-load of associates determined to see honour upheld and defiance punished. It is only a matter of time before they all collide. The never-ending misery is wearying and some of the tough-guy dialogue hard to catch. There are a few welcome signs of the affection and anguish felt by Zaheer and Tariq for the course of action they are following, but most of the Pakistani pursuers are little more than onedimensional thugs. The ending is also more likely to frustrate than intrigue. There are issues of tone and substance that might temper enthusiasm for Catch Me Daddy, but it still contains some real promise.
deep water — Julien, a dealer in industrial machinery who lives in the small town of SaintJustin and lives an ostensibly happy domestic life with wife Delphine (Drucker) and their young daughter. But at the start of the film, we see Julien enjoying a torrid sexual tryst in the hotel room of the title, in the company of Esther (the film’s co-writer Stéphanie Cléau), the local pharmacist, who is also married. Precisely what has happened as a result of the couple’s secret liaison is teasingly spelled out in snippets of information, and it is not until nearly an hour in that the film reveals in full the nature of the case in which Julien is caught up — and the reason he is being interrogated by local police and examining magistrate Diem (a brilliant, hawk-like Laurent Poitrenaux). We are in prime Simenon territory, and classic French thriller territory too, in the tradition of Clouzot and Chabrol (paid homage in the image of a single droplet of blood). But the film’s daring execution is more in the mode of the modernist fragmentation of Alain Resnais, weaving a complex network of close-ups (showing telling details of both symbolic and narrative import), while the sound design knits voice-overs, overheard dialogue, legal testi-
mony and unnervingly repeated lines of dialogue, to vertiginous effect. Stéphanie Cléau, plucked eyebrows making her resemble a ’40s film siren, is an unnerving, seductive presence and Amalric evokes desperation and anxiety in his inimitable way. The film is elegantly shot by Christophe Beaucarne in Academy ratio — inducing claustrophobia, as well as invoking classic cinema — and the editing is a jigsaw tour de force by Francois Gédigier. A knowingly florid retro score by Grégoire Hetzel completes a delicious package.
The Blue Room Reviewed by Jonathan Romney Indefatigable French actor Mathieu Amalric has had an odd occasional career on the other side of the camera, jumping with magpie eclecticism from theme to theme — family comedy, political media, the new burlesque scene — with hit-and-miss results. However, he scores his most accomplished directing achievement yet in The Blue Room (La Chambre Bleue), in which he also stars — a tense adaptation of a Georges Simenon novel. The film is on one hand deeply traditional — a small-town story of a crime investigation hinging on adulterous passion and bourgeois secrets. On the other hand, this is a clipped, fragmented piece of cinematic modernism, shuffling its time frames in a staccato narrative that makes for a tense, involving experience from start to finish. The criminal and sexual content — including full-frontal male and female nudity — echoes of a classic Gallic film noir tradition and a terrific lead performance from Amalric should make this a hot item for distributors and festivals alike, despite its unusually concise running time. Looking more haunted and vulnerable than ever, Amalric plays the classic bourgeois in
n 20 Screen International at Cannes May 17, 2014
UN CERTAIN REGARD Fr. 2014. 76mins Director Mathieu Amalric Production company/ sales Alfama Films, elisabeth@alfamafilms. orange.fr Producer Paulo Branco Screenplay Mathieu Amalric, Stéphanie Cléau Cinematography Christophe Beaucarne Editor Francois Gédigier Production designer Christophe Offret Music Grégoire Hetzel Main cast Mathieu Amalric, Léa Drucker, Stéphanie Cléau, Laurent Poitrenaux, Serge Bozon