AT HOME
WITH MICHAEL HOOTMAN
THAT COLD DAY IN THE PARK
) THAT COLD DAY IN THE PARK (player.bfi. org.uk). This early Robert Altman is already a distinctive work with its slow zooms which seem to fracture space and give a sheen of unreality to the action. It stars Sandy Dennis as a sexually repressed and generally rather strange woman who takes in a young man but, in the first of many ambiguities, it’s hard to work out if these feelings are maternal, charitable, sexual or some mix of all three. Dennis is, as usual, brilliant. An actor with limited range, she still cornered the market in nervous, awkward women with a volcano’s worth of repressed emotion. The unnamed man (Michael Burns) flits between Dennis and his family home, and a sister who doesn’t try to hide her incestuous feelings towards him. The movie is full of great scenes – a visit to a birth control clinic and Dennis’ minor descent into hell to pick up a prostitute are brilliantly realised. With its unhinged female protagonist, it’s a companion piece to Polanski’s Repulsion, though whether your boots-on-the-ground feminist would find it a criticism of patriarchy or simply misogynistic is, to me, unclear. ) TRUE ROMANCE (Arrow Blu-ray). Quentin Tarantino’s romantic thriller about a comic store worker (Christian Bale) falling for a recently recruited prostitute (Patricia Arquette) is given a fairytale gloss by director Tony Scott. The
) PERSONAL SHOPPER (player.bfi.org.uk). Kristen Stewart plays Maureen, the eponymous gofer for an unsurprisingly demanding supermodel. Apart from doing the most materialistic job imaginable – pandering to the whims of an egotistical monster – Maureen is also a medium who is trying to contact her recently deceased brother. Olivier Assayas’ movie is a weird mix of the perils of being a female wage slave (it bears similarities to the later The Assistant) coupled with a number of unambiguously supernatural events. While its grip on the audience never slackens, it doesn’t really cohere into a meaningful whole. There are too many unanswered questions: why does Maureen share the same heart defect which killed her brother when it doesn’t serve the plot? What’s the narrative point of the one act of violence? Is the film satire? And if it is, what is it satirising? Icily stylish, it’s like Lynch but without that director’s sense of wonder. ) INGMAR BERGMAN VOL 1 (BFI Blu-ray). This is the first of a four-volume collection of the director’s works. Presented over five discs, result is a strange, queasy, funny and ultimately vastly entertaining movie. It’s a pop-culture makeover of Terrence Malick’s Badlands, and shares the earlier film’s xylophone theme tune. The plot centres on the couple ending up in possession of a bag of uncut cocaine and their attempts to turn it into hard cash. While the leads are great, the exceptional supporting cast – including Gary Oldman as a white Rasta druglord, Christopher Walken as a chillingly psychotic criminal, Bronson Pinchot’s loser film exec and Dennis Hopper as Bale’s father – come close to stealing the show. Why queasy? Its best scene also contains dialogue so racist it’s unimaginable it could be filmed today – a man who knows he’s about to die wounds with the only thing available to him: words. It’s a verbal duel of menace, threatened violence and something that might be comedy or just the audience’s nervous laughter, but it showcases Walken and Hopper at their most brilliant and Tarantino as a kind of Pinter but without the trappings of taste. This edition comes with hours of extras, including commentaries by Tarantino and Scott, cast interviews plus – most importantly – the ‘downbeat’ ending from the original script.
the box set features 2K restorations of eight early films (1944-1950) written or directed by Bergman. Although perhaps considered rarities even amongst cineastes, they foreshadow themes and tones which he would develop over the following five decades. Special features include an audio interview, a video essay on the filmmaker and a 100-page book of essays.
PERSONAL SHOPPER
TRUE ROMANCE
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