Vérité September 2014

ISSUE #18

V é r i t é PALO ALTO SEPTEMBER 2014 EDITION

FILM CRITICISM & CINEMATIC DISCUSSION

The Coppola Dynasty Continues to Thrive

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Nick Cave / Disfigured Cinema / Pride / Pi-Fan Festival / reviews / and more...

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Editor’s Letter

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he 58th London Film Festival is almost upon us and at Vérité our mouths are watering at the prospect of one of the strongest line-ups in years.

We know from our festival travels in 2014 that attendees are going to be treated to some tremendous cinema, some of the very best from this year’s circuit. But, while we are certain the likes of Mr.Turner, Foxcatcher and Winter’s Sleep will keep cinephiles happy, we see no reason to go in-depth in our coverage on films that we will be featuring in a few months or even weeks after the festival is over.

Instead, we want to draw your attention to the likes Mia Hansen-Løve’s French House music pic Eden and Carol Morley’s follow up to Dreams Of A Life – The Falling. One of our regular contributors Ben Nicholson is out in Toronto and has been raving about Ukranian drama The Tribe and Pedro Costa’s Horse Money. This month’s MIFF report sees

Elisa Armstrong praising indie spookiest It Follows and our regular columnist Evrim Ersoy has told us we absolutely must not miss Bruno Dumont’s new ‘comedy’ Lil’ Quinquin.

For a magazine like Vérité, which has an international flavour and contributors form all over the world, the festival affords an opportunity to catch up with some of our writers and get the inside track on some films we might otherwise miss.

And we’re delighted that this year, two of our finest writers – Stuart Barr and Christine Newland – will be officially covering the festival for us. You’ll be able to read their updates on the Vérité blog up leading up to – and throughout – the festival.

Finally, we are taking a short break form the monthly publication cycle – but we will be back soon. Keep an eye on the website and our twitter feed for updates. Enjoy the issue!

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Thanks for reading, Jordan McGrath & David Hall

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“The imagination is a pretty precious source of protection.”

Nicholas Ray

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Contents Features

Columns

Reviews

The Comfort in Being Sad - p8

Deep in my Heart I do not Weep - p38

A Most Wanted Man - p60

Kelsey Eichhorn talks all about Palo Alto and the ever-growing, generation-spanning Coppola cinema dynasty.

Stuart Barr discusses one of the highlights of British Cinema in 2014, Matthew Warchus’ joyous Pride.

Grand Piano - p61 Ida - p62 Maps to the Stars - p63

Don’t Look Away - p14

Jordan McGrath discusses the legacy of the facially disfigured within cinema - Past, present and future.

Masters of Cinema - p52

Cleaver Patterson discusses yet another release from the MoC collection. This month it’s Busby Berkeley’s musical, The Gang’s All Here.

Pride - p64 Rob the Mob - p65 Salomé - p66

The Frighteners - p22

In Defence... - p56

David Hall takes a look at Nick Cave’s eclectic forays into cinema, both behind and in front of the camera.

Sam Moore argues for the stylistic dynamism behind Brian De Palma’s 1998 conspiracy thriller, Snake Eyes.

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You and the Night - p67 Palo Alto - p68

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THE COMFORT IN BEING SAD Kelsey Eichhorn is beguiled by Palo Alto – the new film from the youngest member of the Coppola directing dynasty

words by Kelsey Eichhorn

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pril (Emma Roberts) sits at table. A picture of adolescent naiveté in a soft grey jumper and collared shirt, she stares sullenly at her homework, plays with her hair and reaches eagerly for the distraction of her mobile phone. “Alright, step one for doing homework”, says her soccer coach Mr. B ( James Franco) as the camera cuts back to a two-person shot, “is to turn off your phone”. With a somewhat unnerving touch of familiarity, he wrestles the phone from her hand as she innocently flashes one of those coquettish smiles that seem inherent to all teenage girls. The static camera holds on the two of them in a simple frame, sat side by side behind Mr. B’s round kitchen table, allowing the tension to build naturally and undeterred throughout the scene. “Now, its simple”, Mr. B explains, “history is just explaining why things happen.” “But what if I don’t think there’s a reason for something happening”, counters April. “I do things all the time, for no reason”, she continues, her

lack of self-awareness further emphasising her adolescent demeanour in the scene. “That’s because you’re young and you don’t know why you do things”, explains Mr. B, “but there’s always a reason.”

There’s always a reason. While Franco’s character is hardly a fountain of philosophical wisdom, never were truer words spoken. Arts criticism is, by nature, subjective. Claiming a definitive “best” of anything is generally risky, but I feel pretty confident in categorically claiming that the absolute ‘best’ films are films where there’s a reason: films where aesthetic decisions have a purpose beyond basic style and at the very least reference, if not enhance, the film’s content.

All those who can remember, even vaguely, back to secondary school English, will be well versed in the basic components necessary to analyse a story’s content.

Themes, symbols, metaphors and motifs are about as basic as narrative analysis gets, so that the very use of the phrase “X is symbolic of Y” will likely produce eye rolls from any film critic worth his or her salt. But this

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doesn’t mean these markers of content aren’t powerful.

The basics become cliché for a reason; they are fundamental - the building blocks of all that comes after.

While film is undoubtedly a narrative art form, as is literature, it is also fundamentally visual. And it is only by embracing the visual nature of the medium that the full narrative potential of a film can be realised. It takes many directors their entire careers to learn this; sadly some never do. Sure, they understand the rudimentary elements of filmmaking - they went to film school and learned their 180 degree rules, their shot-reverse-shot configurations and the importance of the establishing shot to accompany their three-part plot structures, but they never truly grasp the narrative potential of a film’s style. As one of my favourite directors, Joachim Trier, once explained to me, “I think you can get by letting the actors do their thing, covering it in the full shot and two close-ups and then letting the editor cut it together…you need to be the brain that says ‘cut, wait a second, this isn’t doing it’. You need to say ‘here’s a different way of looking at, of shooting this scene that reveals something more complex, more experiential and expressive.’”

It’s always refreshing, therefore, to see young directors

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who instinctively know this. For them, the visual and the narrative are one and the same, a giant block of creative possibility from which to carve, file and polish the perfect film. Maybe it is Gia Coppola’s cinematic lineage - the Coppola family is about as close as one gets to film royalty and the young Gia was almost certainly raised on the masterpieces of her art. Yet she doesn’t appear to be resting on her familial laurels. While debut feature Palo Alto show clear signs of influence from various filmmakers, including aunt Sofia and may not be earth-shattering in its innovation, the film proves itself an encouraging cinematic lesson in the capabilities of narrative and a promising first appearance from the young filmmaker.

Adapted into a screenplay by Coppola herself, Palo Alto is based on a collection of short stories, written by James Franco and which were inspired by his adolescent life in Palo Alto, California. The film has a vignette style plot that entwines itself in the angst-y soul-searching that is fittingly vague in the way of that indeterminate age. From here, two ostensible lead characters emerge.

Emma Roberts provides an endearing performance as shy sixteen-year-old soccer player, April, a girl with questionable role models for parents and who struggles

to maintain an outward attitude of apathy despite her naturally contemplative demeanour. The object of April’s desire is the equally shy and introspective Teddy, played exquisitely by Jack Kilmer. And while Teddy is likewise enamoured with April, their shyness and the subtleties of their connection render them ships passing in the night.

So, while the impressionable Teddy runs wild through life with his volatile best friend Fred (Nat Wolff ), who is chasing the physical attentions of Emily (Zoe Levin), April quietly navigates the changeable social scene and embarks on a clandestine affair with her soccer coach ( James Franco) under the guise of babysitting his son.

Palo Alto is a film of contrasts and comparisons. No coming of age film exists without the customary juxtaposition of childhood and adulthood and with Coppola’s protagonists caught in that volatile transition between innocence and experience, it’s no surprise the film is full of all the symbolic hallmarks of that rebellious age. Plaid-wearing hipsters chug from bottles of liquor surreptitiously seized from parental stores in an effort to impress their meticulously manicured female companions. Marijuana exchanges hands in abandoned parking lots to be consumed in poetic defiance on lonely swing

sets in vacant playgrounds, vestiges of a childhood rapidly receding in the rearview mirror. And cigarettes, once the ultimate screen symbol of poise and sophistication, make a sweeping comeback in Palo Alto, as precocious teenagers offer each other a light with the practices easy of that infamous pickup line.

It is obvious that while sex, drugs and rock-n-roll, the ever-stereotypical privileges of the ‘adult’ class, thrive with carefree abandon in the Palo Alto teen’s life, there’s undoubtedly something of their repressed childhood innocence that lingers. While smoking up in the car, Fred engages Teddy in what ostensibly is a game of make believe, asking him who he would be if he travelled back in time. Teddy, like all children, answers that he would be the king. The aftermath of a house party where the illicit booze has flown freely finds April cuddled up in a fluffy pink duvet with her two best friends - the new, hungover take on the beloved childhood sleepover. Teddy spends community service hours at the children’s hospital reading books about rabbits and “Rainbow Gremlins” while April alternates afternoons with Mr. B and jumping with wild abandon her bed and posing in her mirror.

And what ever happened to wishing upon a star? Instead,

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towards the end of the film, the camera finds April sat on her front doorstep, face turned up the stars, eyes closed and a small, hopeful smile on her face as she wishes on, of all things, her last cigarette.

Embracing the power of juxtaposition, Coppola’s script is an accomplished character-driven narrative. As April and Teddy emerge as the film’s protagonists they are also expectedly, the film’s only fully developed characters. Pulling their stories from an amalgamation of short tales, Coppola crafts her leads by surrounding them with primarily one-dimensional secondary characters. Acting, in turn, as character foils, the stereotypical step father, distracted ditzy mother, stoner single-dad, gossip queens, hipster skaters, and eager younger siblings provide specific points of contrast and comparison from which April and Teddy’s personas emerge. Even Fred, who is fighting his own emotional battle with the myriad pressures of adulthood, (and, one suspects, even graver challenges) and Emily with her heartbreaking search for affection in all the wrong places, serve primarily to illuminate key traits that are both present and absent in the film’s two young leads.

But Coppola’s film doesn’t stop there. Beyond the symbolic juxtaposition of childhood and adulthood, of protagonists and foil characters, emerges a subtle and

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meaningful juxtaposition of style with content. While there is nothing particularly progressive about Autumn Durald’s cinematography, it is beautiful and powerful in its simplicity. The film is littered with lingering closeups: April smoking a cigarette, watching Mr. B interact with her teammates, or dreamily sprawled across her bed, Teddy absent-mindedly watching Fred’s antics, shyly observing April, or pondering the ceiling lost in his own thoughts. Add to this long tracking takes of sunlit treetops, ethereal shots of hair blowing in the wind out the car window, and a trendy indie soundtrack that accompanies evocative montages of teenage life, and the film takes on a dreamy, languid quality. Mixing off-screen audio from disparate scenes with slow-motion cinematography offers not only a useful manner of progressing time and exposing key narrative information, but also a revealing contrast tangible and emotional content of the film.

Palo Alto has been described as “slow” by more than a few, and it’s undeniable that film’s pace is more akin to average, day-to-day life than the condensed cinematic time to which audiences have grown accustomed. The plot unfolds slowly and carefully and carefully over the hour and forty minutes, such that a summary of what happens in the film could ostensibly be articulated in no

more than a few sentences. Alfred Hitchcock famously stated that “Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.” Gia Coppola proves the master wrong. The slow, contemplative style of Palo Alto provides an intriguing juxtaposition to the volatile and sporadic content, indicative of its teenage protagonists. As April explains to Mr. B, she does things all thing time for no reason at all, and seemingly so do her peers. April, Teddy and Fred leave yet another house party to visit the town graveyard on a whim one evening, running in gleeful freedom down the centre of the road and carving a heart into the bark of an old oak tree. Fred draws in the children’s books at Teddy’s volunteer job, and drives his car into the cement wall of the parking lot. Emily offers sexual favours to any boy who shows her the slightest attention, while Teddy joins Fred in cutting down a tree and April eats lunch sitting in her school locker. Their actions often peculiar and erratic - knee-jerk responses without consideration for consequence. They are the result of emotions that half the time the characters can’t even recognise and it is the slow, contemplative gaps in the action that offer the necessary reflective window onto this intricate narrative.

The result is a film that in some respects holds a mirror up to its audience. There’s something so universal in Teddy and April’s respective quests for identity and

meaning that even the most cynically-minded can relate.

As the film draws to a close, Teddy sits quietly alone in a deck chair in front of a fire pit as the hectic vibe of a house party pulses around him. Emerging from the living room’s sliding glass door, April joins him and her offers her a light. As April stares into the firelight she explains dispiritedly to Teddy how she thinks all movies, TV shows and pop culture today is pointless and it is Teddy’s response that she’s crazy, that she doesn’t care about anything, that seems to finally shake April from her film-long introspective daydream. She looks up, directly at Teddy and says softly “I wish I didn’t care about anything. But I do care. I care about everything, too much.” While the statement may seem clichéd in the context of a coming-of age film, it is an admission that garners a sigh of relief from the audience. And so the film comes full circle, proving, undoubtedly, that there is always a reason. Everything, the entire film, has been steadily building tension towards this one point of realisation. And while the scene has the definite feel of the beginning rather than the end of something, it somehow provides a fulfilling sense of resolution. It is difficult to articulate exactly what April and Teddy are searching for, but the important thing is the sense that eventually, they will find it.

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DON’T LOOK AWAY The changing face of disfigurement throughout cinema’s history gives hope for the future argues Jordan McGrath words by Jordan McGrath

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ou wanna know how I got these scars?”

Heath Ledger’s wild Joker asks gangster Gambal, whom he’s just out-smarted, in Christopher Nolan’s towering blockbuster The Dark Knight. His voice is grainy and composed – but maniacal in nature – as he points to the two elongated slits that rise from each side of his mouth.

Ledger’s demeanour is fidgety, as if an evil Tom Waits has decided to rampage his body, the Oscar-winner’s tongue darting out to the side of his mouth randomly feeling the scar tissue as you and I would an annoying ulcer that is agitating our inner-cheek. He then continues to narrate the story of his abusive father and the shocking violence of his drunken fury. We all know the scene. “Why so serious?”

Was it the tragedy of seeing his mother slain in such a way that fuelled the Joker’s descent into madness or was it

his own butchering that tipped him over the edge? Many directors would focus their attention on this, to attempt to explore and discover the reason behind the insanity, so why does Nolan not? Perhaps he understands that the Joker’s past doesn’t necessarily have to dictate his present unpredictable psychopathic tendencies (the Joker actually gives a number of explanations for his disfigurement within the film) or simply that he recognises the character is fully aware his scars make people uneasy. And so his repeated insistence of mentioning them, when approaching a victim, demonstrates his own conscious understanding on his menacing visage – exploiting it as a tactic to hold control of proceedings.

The inclusion of facially disfigured and deformed characters has been common practice to highlight villainy in cinema from its inception. Society’s historically ingrained fear of anything not considered the ‘norm’, an inferiority

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that unfortunately has not diminished over the years, makes it remarkably easy for filmmakers to illustrate a character’s ‘bad guy’ motives purely by including something solely visual. Obviously used to scare and disturb, the disfigured are seemingly a tool for most directors to create automatic intimidation. You can go back to Howard Hawkes’ aptly titled version of Scarface in 1932 through to Victor Laszlo in Casablanca and up to A Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddy Krueger in the 80s and beyond. And that’s not including most Bond villains (including Javier Bardem’s turn as Raoul Silva in Skyfall).

Scars, burns or others ailments are frequently the blueprint for evildoers in cinema.

Even The Dark Knight has another disfigured antagonist in the form of Aaron Eckhard’s Harvey Dent.

The once charming and valiant ‘White Knight’ District Attorney of Gotham is transformed into the unhinged, murderous Two-Face when his love is killed and half his face left scarred and burned due to an acid spill. Comic books often use facially disfigured characters, with writers and artists illustrating the impetus of a character in a medium where dialogue and exposition is minimal.

The growing concern from individuals who suffer from different kinds of facial disfigurement is that the constant representation of film characters, which may

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have similar conditions as their own, as criminals and immoral individuals, is seeping into the cultural zeitgeist; leading to negative real-world behaviour towards them.

It’s actually become that much of an issue, and such a recognisable stable in cinema, that the charity Changing Faces launched its campaign Face Equality in Film back in 2012. They also produced their own short film where campaigner Leo Gormely, who has burns to the face, plays the lead. The film astutely and intelligently challenges many perceived or subconscious prejudices audiences may have of disfigurement.

As I attempt to remember my first experience on the subject I am transformed back to being five or six.

I sit slack-jawed and giddy in front of Richard Donner’s kid-caper The Goonies. It’s the perfect film for my age group, brimming with playfulness and a joyous sense of adventure. But then, Jeff Cohen’s loveable klutz Chuck is captured by the evil Fratelli family and placed in the basement – alongside Mama Fratelli’s third son who is confined to his chair with chains and craving a Baby Ruth. Sloth struck fear into my childish mind as if a monster just crawled out from under my bed. His misplaced eyes, abnormal shaped skull and unyielding strength would burn itself in my memory. On repeat viewings I’d always fast-forward his introduction.

Terrified, squinting through my eyes and the VHS static, I yearned to be back with the film’s heroes. Of course, at this young age, I wasn’t aware that it was the filmmaking that was causing my fearful reaction, not Sloth’s contorted features. The character’s disturbing reveal is a cunning plan from Donner to juxtapose the character’s inner-innocence.

Sloth wasn’t a monster, or indeed a villain, he was the victim and – in a way – the unlikely hero of the piece.

Nostalgia-induced memories of him tearing his shirt to reveal the Superman logo holds a relatively special place in my heart, with the famous “Hey you guys!” becoming a playground favourite for me and my friends.

The world in which we live is one where beauty can be labelled as currency; attractiveness alone can be a career prospect. Look in the windows of high-street retailers, everything from fashion outlets to opticians to pharmacies; all have models advertising their products. Stunning faces gaze down on us on a daily basis, programming the public to react in a positive manner to aesthetically pleasing features –a subconscious societal imprint many of us don’t even notice. Percolating and oozing influence into the behavioural responses of modern culture. Our face is the brand which we sell, and how people first make their judgement on our character. If that brand is tarnished, it’s

harder for people to accept.

As I’ve mentioned this isn’t just a modern flaw, look back at the era of silent cinema and there are more than a few telling examples. In 1923, Wallace Worsley’s adaptation of Victor Hugo’s classic The Hunchback of Notre Dame (starring screen favourite Lon Chaney as the tender Quasimodo) was a huge success, breaking financial records worldwide. Then, two years later, the actor would inhabit another iconic role as Erik (The Phantom) in director Rupert Julian’s version of The Phantom of the Opera. Julian’s sweeping melodrama of the obsessed, mutilated composer and the beautiful young singer, Christine (Mary Philbin), who he yearns for, is a true spectacle of the silent-era. Julian’s brooding camera is constantly alive with movement and action that infuses the film with an epic sensibility. The sprawling levels of the Opera House’s gothic dungeons – endless crooked corridors and trap doors – as disfigured as its antagonists horrifying image. However, drunk on betrayal and hatred, Chaney’s Phantom isn’t quite the helpless victim like his version of Quasimodo. In equal measure tragic, confused, tormented and vengeful, his oppressive presence in the Opera House as wicked and cruel as his reputation. But its Julian’s insistence of highlighting society’s inadequacies when casting The Phantom that enable the film to

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exist on an extra-level. Ostracised for being grotesque, it’s his mistreated life, (robbed from anything resembling a normal human existence) abandoned as a ghost to haunt the shadows of the Opera House which has driven him to madness. His sadness drawn by a single desire – to be loved, something as a human-being he believes he deserves. Brutal and beautiful, Julian’s epic tragedy is a cinematic crescendo.

Love is strong, and for those who believe they will never share it, an ever-present sorrow. In 1928, Universal Studios exec Carl Laemelle was looking for their next big hit. Chaney had jumped ship to MGM and after the success of his first American release, The Cat and the Canary, Laemelle asked director Paul Leni to take charge of another adaptation of a Victor Hugo novel, and so The Man Who Laughs was born. Leni, who’s sharpened his teeth within the German Expressionism movement, brought his own distinctively European style to the picture as well as celebrated German actor Conrad Veidt, who he had worked with on one of his previous films, 1924’s Waxworks, to take on the lead as Gwynplaine.

Set in the 17th Century, under the vicious rule of King James II, Gwynplaine’s father, a noble-man, is slaughtered after refusing to kiss the King’s hand, after returning to England to find his son. “Oh, he’s well”,

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the snarling King explains, “but a Comprachio surgeon carved a grin upon his face so he might laugh forever at his fool of a father”. Gwynplaine’s endless smile would be the main visual influence when illustrator Jerry Robinson created the Joker 12 years later. The young Gwynplaine lives alongside the Comprachio’s for a while, a scarf worn tight around his face to cover his deformity, but when the gypsy clan are banished from English shores he is left for dead. Wandering the barren English landscape he discovers an orphan infant girl, saves her and is taken in by travelling showman Ursus (Cesare Gravina).

Time passes, and now grown, he and the orphan girl he saved, Dea (Mary Philbin in yet another memorable role) are deeply in love. But she is blind and unaware of his disfigured face. Ursus, who has now turned the two into a carnival attraction, putting on plays under the title of ‘The Laughing Man’, explains to the besotted Gwynplaine that Dea could never love him if she knew the truth about his grin they could never be together. But as Gwynplaine’s true identity is revealed he is thrown back into the world of noblemen and royalty, none of which accept his appearance. A soulful love story as well a tale of social integration, in the dying embers of silent cinema, Leni delivered possibly the final ‘great work’ of the era with The Man Who Laughs. The revelatory Conrad

Veidt delivers a performance of heart-breaking countenance, his eyes aching with emotion, is worthy of a comparison to Maria Falconetti’s ethereal turn in Dreyer’s The Passion of the Joan of Arc. Leni’s distinct visual flourishes the use of dark shadow and his unique sinister set-design, so obviously adopted from his German Expressionism background, gives the film an obstinately harrowing sensibility. A foreboding dread hangs over the film like a thunder cloud - evidentially contradicting the soft poignancy of the story as if Leni is consciously toying with his audience in shooting such an innocent character with the stylistic verve of one of Universal’s own classic monsters.

A film which owes much to The Man Who Laughs, but manages to retain its own elegant melancholy, is David Lynch’s The Elephant Man. After the crazed, nightmarish experience of Eraserhead, the American auteur shows calm restrain as he chronicles a relatively short period in John Merrick’s life. Lynch’s approach allows the film to exist on a level somewhere directly between hope and sadness. Cherished black-and-white expressionistic influenced photography perfectly captures the emotional dichotomy. Another period film, this time set in 19th century, we see the same carnival ‘freak show’ setup similar to The Man Who Laughs, with Anthony Hopkins’

Frederick Trevers discovering the deformed man who society have labelled a ‘monster’. Trevers himself believes him to be an idiot, and pays to examine and present him to his fellow doctors and peers. It’s not until he is re-admitted to the hospital after Merrick’s owner, a terrifying Freddie Jones as Bytes, beats him that Trevers finds Merrick to be a gentle, charming and intelligent man.

However, like The Man Who Laughs, and other releases such as Mel Gibson’s 1993 picture The Man Without a Face, Lynch’s prerogative isn’t to highlight the soft soul of this ‘monster’ but to show the ugliness of society’s prejudice. John Merrick is a metaphorical mirror for audiences to gaze deep into and see themselves. To allow the opportunity to judge yourself as you may have Merrick at the beginning of the film. Our lens is Hopkins’ Trevers, who originally exploits Merrick as he sees nothing but a scientific discovery. In his original lecture to his peers, he explains that he has not seen such a ‘perverted or degraded specimen of a human-being’ in his life, a comment that instantly illustrates that Trevers sees himself as superior that Merrick. He is cold and disconnected to his subject, treating him as if a prizewinning donkey at a fair. But the evolution of their relationship develops from abjection, through pity, right through to respect. In The Man without a Face, that lens is young Chuck as his fear

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of Mel Gibson’s scarred outcast develops into a father/ son dynamic that he desperately requires.

There’s a momentum evident in the first half of The Elephant man, where Lynch teases John’s shocking features, it’s a slow build, increasing tension and intensity. It’s a certain mise-en-scene normally withheld for horror – tension then shock. But when Lynch finally delivers that first shot, as the nurse brings him some food, and she screams, there is no attack. All that greets her is a just as frightened man screaming in fear incited by her alarming reaction. John Hurt’s performance as Merrick, under the restriction of heavy prosthetics, is a genuine master class in understatement and sorrow.

But that reveal, the build and shock, is repeated throughout history in cinema when regarding a disfigured character. The heavily dark, expressionistically lit environment, loaded angle shots – mostly in profile – and, if the director wants to give into every cliché, a crash of thunder and a crack of lightening just to add that little more to the foreboding atmosphere. It’s fascinating to realise that the movie camera, like the characters in the piece, seems to develop over time - becoming more accustomed to show a disfigurement as our attachment to the character grows.

Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (Les Yeux Sans Visage) is yet another example of that adopted slow-building tension. Undoubtedly, Franju’s masterpiece, out on Blu-ray courtesy of the BFI next month, is more genre orientated that many of the titles I’ve already mentioned but it’s intriguing to see how these stylistic techniques translate through genre and time.

Eyes Without a Face was released in 1960 and an infamous screening at the Edinburgh International Film Festival led to seven audience members fainting due to the disturbing imagery on show in one of its most famous sequences. The story of Doctor Génessier (Pierre Brasseur), a brilliant surgeon and professor who, after being at fault for car crash that completely disfigures his daughter’s face, experiments with a unique skin-grafting procedure which results in his assistant Louise (Alida Valli in a truly chilling performance) going out onto the streets of Paris and kidnapping pretty young women. The intent is to drug them and surgically remove their faces, in an attempt to reconstruct the doctor’s beautiful daughter Christiane’s (Edith Scob). On the level of a Hammer horror directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, Franju’s impeccable achievement is one of the best horror films ever made.

The famous image – that expressionless white mask,

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which Scob sports for most of the film, is an eerie inclusion that allows a certain innocence and purity to the character and disguises any idea of motivation we would see otherwise. Her introverted but inquisitive behaviour doesn’t hide the fact that she never refuses or tries to fight against the procedure her father is trying to achieve.

On the outside she is an imprisoned victim but internally she yearns for beauty once again, and for a life out from behind the mask before seeing the errors of her ways as she realises that she is just another one of the dogs of which her father experiments on, the task of achieving a successful operation as much fuelled by ego and guilt than love. That incredible final shot of Christiane as she strolls into the forest, un-masked, alongside the dogs and below the doves she’s just set-free. All of Génessier’s animals, including Christiane - now free - are as visual as poetry gets.

As medical procedures developed and plastic surgery began to penetrate the social consciousness, it was only time before a Frankenstien-like narrative found its way onto screens and Brasseur’s subtle and understated mad-scientist, Génessier, was a refreshed character for a new generation. Franju, foreseeing the speed of technological advances opened up a world where it was possible to cure disfigurement and deformity. It was cosmetic surgery before it would become the cultural phenomenon it is today, where people can alter or correct any imperfections they have. Antonio Banderas’ disturbed Dr. Robert Ledgard in Pedro Almodóvar’s unsettling The Skin I Live In a fine example of Franju’s lasting influence.

Vanity is a concept we all understand. And one that runs most of modern society. But what Eyes Without a Face highlights so fiercely is the paradoxical nature behind the ugliness of some individuals’ incessant and obsessive search for beauty.

Alejandro Amenábar’s Open Your Eyes (Abre los ojos) and the American re-imaging Vanilla Sky, directed by Cameron Crowe, are both dark, twisted parables on such vanity.

Each driven by a handsome lead character who sees the world through rose-tinted eyes – they have money, beautiful women falling at their feet – taking everything good in their lives for granted. But when one questionable decision ends in a car crash that leaves their face severely disfigured, they decide to kill themselves and exist in an after-death dream world, which has been manipulated so they can exist in a world with good-looks and their version of the perfect woman.

In a mirrored scene from Open Your Eyes, Vanilla

Sky’s David Ames (Tom Cruise) asks a group of surgeons to use him as an experiment in an attempt discover a new procedure that will return his face to normal, but when the lead doctor explains that they can’t just ‘wing it’ and he should be appreciative of the extensive plastic surgery he has had, Cruise’s Ames tells him ‘This isn’t about vanity, this is about functioning in a world’. In his desperation, it is this lie that spirals out-of-control as he decides to hide behind a white mask, very much like Christiane’s in Eyes Without a Face, and become detached from the outside world. Yes, the demise of Aames is tragic, but self-induced and self-involved as he’s uninterested in adapting to a new life.

An entertaining reversal of this vanity trait is in Walter Hill’s pulpy 1989 noir, Johnny Handsome starring Mickey Rourke, where a deformed criminal is given reconstructive surgery as part of his rehabilitation, and then uses his new face to double-cross the couple who betrayed him and killed his partner. There is a common trend between all these examples I have spoken of, and most of the films that deal with this subject, and that’s when disfigurement is an issue for a main character it is generally what the film is ‘about’.

I was listening to the Bret Easton Ellis Podcast last week, in which he interviewed filmmaker Ira Sachs about his new film Love is Strange. The divisive author spoke

of how he was impressed by how John Lithgow and Alfred Molina’s homosexuality wasn’t necessarily the crux of the drama. They are simply gay men and that’s it. Their sexuality doesn’t define their character or the story; there is no political or sociological metaphor laid on.

And it seems that there is a similar trend within cinema that tackles disfigured characters. A revitalising example of the contrary can be seen in this year’s beguiling release, Under The Skin, where Scarlett Johansson’s predatory extra-terrestrial has an encounter with a disfigured man. She is a character unaware of prejudice, seeing him as simply another man. Actor Adam Pearson, who suffers from a disease called neurofibromatosis, which causes tumours to grow on his face, delivers a graceful humane performance. His delicate, calm reaction to a beautiful woman seducing him is enough context for Jonathan Glazer to demonstrate his personal difficulties.

Stereotypes are society’s crutches; leaned on when people struggle to understand differing ideals and lifestyles. And as we all know, cinema mirrors society, so as long as we see these prejudices implemented in life we will continue to see them on our screens. But a film like Under The Skin offers a new direction in the cinematic treatment of disfigurement that hopefully will provide inspiration for future filmmakers, and viewers.

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King Ink

and the

Movies

20,000 Days On Earth documents a day in the life of musician, author and screenwriter Nick Cave. But what about his earlier onscreen cinematic adventures?

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words by David Hall

hough still predominantly known for his work as a musician (and occasional novelist) Nick Cave has, over the last decade, quietly been building an impressive body of work as screenwriter. Cave’s screenplay for John Hillcoat’s The Proposition (2005) was spare but innovative – an uncompromising, savage Western fable that reinvigorated the genre in the mid-00s; blending Cave’s ‘murder ballad’ preoccupations with his love of Australian history and Gothic US imagery. He’s enjoyed a fruitful relationship with Hillcoat over the years and has collaborated with New Zealand based director Andrew Dominik, scoring (with frequent musical partner Warren Ellis) Dominik’s outstanding western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) and providing the script for the director’s follow up feature Lawless (2012).

As far back as his work with his band of punk upstarts The Birthday Party in the late 70s, it’s been evident Cave has a taste for wild narrative and theatrics. So much of his music has a widescreen intensity suffused with violence and wild poetry. Cave tracks have turned up in some unusual places; on The X-Files, the Batman Forever score – and his track Red Right Hand is practically the anthem of Wes Craven’s’ Scream’ series. Cave has always

been a film fan, favouring understandably darker fare (he once maintained that his move to Brazil in the 80s was inspired by Hector Babenco’s punishing 1981 film Pixote – the kind of film that would send most potential tourists dispensing with the idea of travelling there altogether) and over the years has occasionally ventured in front of the camera, usually for close friends and collaborators such as Hillcoat and Wim Wenders.

A new documentary -- 20,000 Days On Earth – directed by Jane Pollard and Iain Forsyth and best described as a mixture of docu-fiction and fact, is both a tribute to Cave and his band the Bad Seed’s richly creative musical legacy, as well as a portrait of a man who at 56 is quite possibly only just hitting his creative peak and seems busier than at any point during his 40 year career. It’s an innovative and hugely enjoyable meditation on the creative process too; dispensing with the usual talking heads meets pick and mix archive footage style of music documentary in favour of a more eccentric and highly personal approach that befits its subject.

It’s the first time that Cave himself has been the focus of a film, but over the decades he’s made a number of appearances in a variety of movies.

If you’re a fan of the man and his work, you really should investigate the following:

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DOGS IN SPACE Cave’s first appearance on film is a fleeting one, and kind of a cheat to include here, as it’s essentially footage of him performing with pre-Birthday Party incarnation The Boys Next Door projected onto a wall of a dingy club in Richard Lowenstein’s 1986 tale of 70s punk and junkie dreamers. But it’s that song, ‘Shivers’ (“I’ve been contemplating suicide but it really doesn’t suit my style.”) which runs through the spine of Lowenstein’s film (performed twice; by Cave and also Marie Hoy) and provides its emotive core. Lowenstein’s movie, which focuses on a bunch of middle-class dropouts squatting in a terrace street in Melbourne at the tail end of the 70s, is funny, brilliant on period detail, has a killer soundtrack and a charismatic (though largely mute) performance from Michael Hutchence as the enigmatic leader of the band of the title.

This grungy semi-autobiographical tale, tinged with tragedy, crashed and burned at the Australian box office (being the summer of Crocodile Dundee) but it’s a genuine Aussie cult classic. History would provide a further tragic footnote a decade later when Hutchence took his own life in life in a Sydney hotel room. Increasing the Cave connection is the fact that Cave, a good friend of the INXS frontman, is in fact godfather to Hutchence’s daughter Tiger Lily.

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WINGS OF DESIRE Ahh Der Himmel Über Berlin; Wim Wenders much-loved meditative fantasy starring Bruno Ganz and Otto Sander as the curious angels Damiel and Cassiel remains a touchstone art-house movie for any film students who came of age in the late 80s. It’s still a delicate thing of poetic beauty and cherished for its luminous black and white Henri Alekan photography. But there are moments when the solemn monochrome flashes into colour, when Damiel sees what it would be like, or could be like, to be a human. One of these is when Damiel follows Marion, the lonely trapeze artist he has fallen in love with, to a club where, yes, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds are playing. The band see out the movie with two numbers from the album From Her To Eternity.

Cave would go on to provide an original song for Wender’s 1991 film Until the End of the World - (I’ll Love You) Till the End of the World. It’s a lovely track in itself– but this is the ultimate Cave/Wenders collab; a beguiling moment of musical/cinematic symmetry.

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GHOSTS... OF THE CIVIL DEAD The first of Cave’s collaborations with John Hillcoat and one of the most pessimistic Australian films ever made, Ghosts… provides a nihilistic vision of man-made hell; a maximum security prison filled with utterly marginalised psychopathic criminals and run by sadistic wardens - a justice system stuck in a corrosive cycle of doom, violence and mayhem.

Ghosts ‘atmosphere of dread is magnificently sustained; this is a film seething with palpable menace and dread. Non-exploitative and rooted in true events, work-shopped for several months prior to filming and peopled with non-actors, this may well be the most savage and uncompromising prison film ever.

Cave’s role in this film is pivotal; he wrote the screenplay (which apparently contained further barbarism that never made it to screen) he plays ‘Maynard’ – an irredeemable psychotic and deranged self-mutilating lunatic whose actions prove the lynchpin to disintegration – and his remarkable dronelike score heightens what is already a claustrophobic, deeply unsettling experience.

A very difficult film to access in the UK, it was once shown on Channel 4’s “Down Under” season and has never been aired since. A collector’s edition DVD from Australia is truly a must-buy.

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JOHNNY SUEDE Tom DeCilo was a frequent collaborator with Jim Jarmusch (he shot the great man’s debut Stranger Than Paradise) and the Indie Godfather’s imprint is all over this admittedly pretty shonky 1992 Indie, which stars a fresh from Thelma and Louise Brad Pitt as the misunderstood Ricky Nelson-obsessed wannabe crooner of the title – a preposterously coiffed dope in 50s suit and suede shoes who wants to get a rockabilly band together but can barely sort his life out.

There are cameos galore in Johnny Suede (including Samuel L Jackson) but the standout is Cave’s short but memorable turn as ‘Freak Storm’ – the songwriter/Svengali (and crook) who sells Johnny a song for $20 that he somehow manages to turn into a hit against the odds.

Cave’s deadpan delivery and awesome threads (surely DiCilo’s choice of skinny white suit and bleached hair was a direct visual tribute to his mentor?) ensure the four or so minutes of screen time Cave actually has prove hard to forget – even if his dialogue isn’t quite so memorable.

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20,000 DAYS ON EARTH The ultimate ‘Day In The Life’ music doc – very smartly executed – as we spend 24 hours in the company of Cave; hanging out with his band, writing songs and driving friends around in his jaguar. ‘20,000 Days on Earth’ nicely subverts some of the tired old tropes of the music doc; most of the archive footage is taken care of at lightning speed in an blistering opening montage and rather than rely on a bewildering array of talking heads, Cave instead invites a handful of pals to join him on car journeys through his home town of Brighton Cave as ‘Cave’ is as much a performance itself – as the man himself admits at one point. But some of the loveliest moments are when the normally brusque musician is at his most disarming – including a sweet anecdote about how he met his wife, which evokes childhood crushes and cinematic infatuations. A compelling, often funny and occasionally pretentious work that that touches on memory, ‘truth’ and the creative mask of an artist who, after four decades, is still creating – along with his astonishing band – some truly remarkable music.

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Vérité’s Top 5 Union Men

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5.

James Conway O’Donnell Once Upon A Time in America (1984) The American cinema has a complicated relationship with the labour movement which is reflected in its representation in film. In general the portrayal of characters identified as ‘union men’ is negative or ambivalent at best.

Once Upon A Time in America was Sergio Leone’s final film, as sprawling epic set in New York City and set over decades (but especially concerned with the prohibition era) the film is unusual in its genre as it features Jewish rather than Italian-American gangsters.

The gang led by Maximilian ‘Max’ Bercovicz ( James Woods) and David ‘Noodles’ Aaronson (Robert De Niro) are if anything more ruthless than their mafia rivals.

The mobster’s paths cross with firebrand socialist union leader O’Donnell played with conviction by Treat Williams. Most union men in gangster narratives are purely corrupt, but O’Donnell is smart and principled, but becomes unwittingly embroiled with the mob when his political allies hire them as protection.

Leone is one of the most consistently cynical filmmakers and his gangsters are in no way romantic, O’Donnell is a character seen struggling to remain uncorrupted but unable to resist in a country slowly being colonised by corporate interests. In the end as doomed as the outlaws he despises. Stuart Barr

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4.

Carl Fox Wall Street (1987) Arch-liberal Oliver Stone’s eighties version of the parable of Faust makes the classic Miltonian error of falling in love with what it claims to despise, in this case scorched earth capitalist Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas). Gekko seduces, uses and casts to the wolves an ambitious young stockbroker named Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) but the moral centre of the film comes in the form of Bud’s father Carl, an aviation industry union rep who is completely immune to Gekko’s flashy BS. Sheen is quietly dignified in the role, heartbreaking as he realises his son is rejecting values passed down through generations and Gekko, a man who represents everything he despises, has usurped his paternal role. For all his bombast, Stone is a far less cynical filmmaker than Leone and Carl Fox is the sort of character the James Conway O’Donnell could become in a less brutally Darwinian world than that of Once Upon A Time in America.

Sheen is a necessary presence in a film and the balance his character brought to this film is sorely missed in Stone’s belated (and quite dreadful) 2010 sequel. It’s okay though, ultimately both Martin Sheen and Michael Douglas would go on to run America as impossibly idealised liberal presidents (in The West Wing and The American President). Stuart Barr

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3.

Eddie Johnson Blue Collar (1978) If the common cliché of a union leader in US film is of a corrupt official in bed with organised crime, union leader Eddie Johnson (Harry Bellaver) in Paul Schrader’s Blue Collar is something worse, incompetent and putting the interests of his own clique above the rights of the workers he represents.

Set in Detroit at a time when the US auto industry had begun to implode, Blue Collar sees three friends, all struggling with poverty, hatch a desperate plan to rob their own union office. The robbery is successful but nets them a paltry $600 and a safe they can’t open. When men discover they have also taken some politically sensitive material and decide to blackmail the union, spurred on by vastly exaggerated union claims of the amount stolen, the situation spirals into violence and recrimination.

Coming at the wrong end of the seventies commercially, Blue Collar is an incredibly downbeat film that failed to connect with audiences who had simply had enough of despair in the wake of Watergate and the Vietnam war. Several decades on, it is ripe for rediscovery. Featuring great performances (Harvey Kietel, Yaphet Kotto, and especially Richard Pryor who is electrifying in the film) and a typically gritty Schrader screenplay, this joins Cimino’s The Deer Hunter as among the best examinations of a working class community in seventies US film. Stuart Barr

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2.

Harry Black Last Exit to Brooklyn (1989) Less celebrated an adaptation of incendiary novelist Hubert Selby Jr’s work than Requiem for a Dream, German director Uli Edel’s (Christiane F) adaptation of the author’s best known novel is still well worth seeking out. The book is essentially a collection of discrete novellas set in a 1950’s Brooklyn neighbourhood that makes Walk On the Wild Side sound like a lullaby for children.

Stephen Lang plays Harry Black, a minor union official who is given the task of running the office during a strike. Harry is a brutish and petty little man who uses his strike budget to buy kegs of beer and cosy up to the local hoodlums. When factory owners try and break through a picket line (in a stunning visual set-piece) he attains local celebrity status for attacking a scab.

The root of Black’s violence is his homosexuality, but he is so far back in the closet he has no self-awareness of this. When he begins to discover his sexual identity he enters a steep downward spiral falling in love with a street hustler who he buys extravagant gifts using union funds.

This sounds like a retrograde possibly homophobic storyline, but one of the things that distinguishes Selby’s work is that he finds sympathy for the most wretched and unsympathetic of people. Udel’s film is perhaps too glossy to truly capture the novel, but the performances are exceptional. Stuart Barr

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1.

Joe Kenehan Matewan (1987) There are few US filmmakers working (mostly) in the English language who have successfully managed to make films that are consistently humane, politically astute, and come from the left-wing. But John Sayles has managed this, through a long and distinguished career.

Set in Virginia in the 1920s a group of coal miners in the town of Matewan are trying to form a union to protect not just their rights but their lives from the brutal practices of the local mine operator.

Matewan is a perfectly formed picture, and demonstrates Sayles gift for expressing radical ideas within a framework of genre. Based on a true story, the film is essentially a classic High Noon style western.

Joe Kenehan (Chris Cooper) is a union organiser who arrives in the town like a lone gunslinger (only he’s a pacifist). When the mining company brings in black miners as ‘scabs’ Kenehan brings the groups together in unity against the bosses who quite literally plan to kill them by hiring a Pinkerton style detective agency. The stage is set for a climatic showdown.

While not as well-known as other Sayles films like Lone Star, City of Hope, or Return of the Secaucus Seven, Matewan is right up there with his best work.

Stuart Barr

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Deep in my Heart

I do not Weep How Matthew Warchus’s new film, Pride trumps cynicism

words by Stuart Barr

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arly in Pride - a film about organised LBGT support of a Welsh community during the long industrial action called by the National Union of Mineworkers in 1984 - Mark Ashton (Ben Schnetzer) the de-facto leader of a gay activist group is questioned as to why they would want to support working-class miners, commonly seen as rigidly normative in sexuality and gender roles by their sub-culture. Ashton responds “Who hates the miners?

Thatcher, the police, and the tabloid press. Does that sound familiar?” concluding that about the only enemy they don’t share is Mary Whitehouse - and that’s probably only a matter of time. The dialogue is snappy and comic, fitting the breezy tone of Pride’s early scenes, but it also gets to the heart of film’s real theme, how apparently disparate communities find common ground, build relationships, and create unity.

Beginning from a macroscopic viewpoint focused on the activists and set in and around their HQ, the LGBT bookshop Gay’s the Word, the audience enters the world

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of 1984 through the character of Joe (George MacKay) a 20-year-old ingénue on the fringes of the gay scene (and thus not legal under the laws of the day) nicknamed ‘Bromley’ due to his outward appearance of suburban conformity.

Gradually other characters are introduced and there is a clearly conscious artistic decision to keep the mining community remote. Initially the strike is seen only as background details, on television and in newspaper headlines. Despite raising funds (the old-fashioned way, on the street with a slogan and a bucket for change) attempts to make contact with the union are rebuffed.

Frustrated by the red-tape and disinterest coming from official channels Ashton decides to go straight to the source and begins calling local miner’s groups directly, due to a dodgy telephone connection (which obscures the full meaning of the group’s name LGSM - Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners) and contact is finally made. Keeping the characters and action restricted to the (mostly) young and urban gay characters sets up a classic culture clash comedy.

With the unexpected arrival in London of local miner’s leader Dai Donovan (Paddy Considine) to accept their

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collection money, the vista of the film widens dramatically. Director Matthew Warchus and screenwriter Stephen Beresford have set up the illusion of a binary opposition between the apparent vibrancy of gay cultural life and the urban environs in which it thrives, and a grey and unforgiving rural and ‘straight’ mining community.

The beauty of Warchus and Beresfords’ film is in the move from this macroscopic point of view to a microscopic one. Under scrutiny what appear to be two culturally and ideologically monolithic groups, one sexually and socially progressive and one regressive, is opened up to a multitude of individuals, each deftly characterised by a combination of smart writing and a very talented cast of actors all of whom are given their moment to shine, and all of whom seize the opportunity.

Despite the environment they have settled in, many of the core gay characters have regional voices. Ashton is Northern Irish, LGSM co-founder Mike Jackson ( Joseph Gilgun) is from the Midlands; brash lesbian Steph (Faye Marsey) hails from the North of England. Perhaps most affecting is the character of Gilgin (Andrew Scott).

The manager of Gay’s the Word, Gilgin is a native of Ryhl in North Wales, but has entered a self-imposed

exile due to unresolved personal issues. His story presents a personal narrative that will be familiar to many LGBT people from a rural background and was famously expressed in the song ‘Smalltown Boy’ by Bronski Beat (which features on the film’s excellent collection of contemporary music).

While not entirely comprised of regional immigrants to London - Joe is suburban, and Gilgin’s lover Jonathan (Dominic West) and Jeff (Freddie Fox playing a variation on his performance as Marilyn from Boy George biopic Worried About The Boy) have RP accents. These characters are grouped by the way the mainstream of eighties British political culture defines their sexualities as ‘other’ and by their own choice to create or join a community in reaction.

In contrast the Welsh miners and their families are a community bound together by geography and class. The lack of social mobility among the working class community is striking. A moving speech on the miners relationship with the coal seam is given by town elder Cliff (Bill Nighy, excellent in quite an uncharacteristic role). This soliloquy acknowledges that the fuel is what binds the people together, but also that the pit takes as much as it

gives (Cliff lost a brother in an industrial accident).

You may object that the experience of an LGBT person in a rural community in this period would be quite different to the urban experience. As has been noted in 1984 the age of consent for homosexual men was still unequal with that for heterosexuals. When homosexuality was decriminalised in 1967, the age of consent for gay men was set at 21, as opposed to 16 for heterosexuals.

An equal age of consent did not become law until 2001 (2009 in Northern Ireland). This is just one of the reasons that many LGBT people would feel unable or unwilling to be open regarding their sexuality. Something acknowledged in the film when Donovan remarks upon meeting Ashton and his group for the first time “you’re the first gays I’ve ever met.” “That you know of ” is his reply.

Pride is not embarrassed to go for big crowd-pleasing moments and emotions; among a copious collection of highlights, Considine rips your heart out early with an unexpectedly moving and gracious address to an at best ambivalent audience in a gay nightclub. The scene is later mirrored when the gay activists arrive in Wales and Ashton nervously gives a rather less considered speech involving a Judy Garland joke. Initial hostilities thaw

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during a barnstorming set-piece in which Dominic West brings disco to the valleys. Imelda Staunton has a ball in a gay BDSM club (“Sorry girls, this is men only”, ‘Don’t be silly love, we’ve come all the way from Powys“). This bold approach is also exemplified by Christopher Nightingale’s big brassy score which begins small but builds and builds towards the film’s triumphant finale. Perhaps the most affecting moment involves the resolution of personal issues that caused Gilgin to flee his homeland.

Among a uniformly strong cast, Andrew Scott turns his relatively small amount of screen time into an acting master class.

Clearly a continuation of a lineage comic dramas finding rich material among the social and cultural groups marginalised by the economic and social policies of Thatcherism (Letter to Brezhnev, My Beautiful Launderette, Brassed Off, The Full Monty, and Billy Elliot among them) Pride may be the most ambitious. An incredible amount is packed into its two hours, but it never feels overstuffed.

Recognising that equality does not mean conformity ‘Queer’ politics are represented as a spectrum, rather than a homogenous clump. While this aspect of the film,

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and the title Pride itself foreground a gay rights story, the struggle of the mining village as just as central to the plot. A variety of gender, cultural and class issues are threaded through the plot but all are deftly sketched rather than laboured. In one quietly impactful scene as the strike continues into winter, the severity of the miners’ plight is demonstrated by a round of bingo where the prize is a can of corned beef.

Amongst the enjoyable bombast of this film, it would be a great shame if its subtleties were missed. While the film is very funny indeed, and there are many big comic set-pieces to enjoy, dark shadows lurk throughout. Chief among these is its presentation of the AIDS crisis which in 1984 was about to break into the public consciousness in a big way. The film seems to acknowledge and play with the reduced impact and concern around HIV and AIDS in 2014 (at least in the affluent west). HIV and AIDS are barely mentioned for the film’s first hour.

When it suddenly surfaces as an issue, it is chilling and is acknowledged in a very powerful way.

Pride refuses to be a victim narrative. Despite AIDS, despite homophobia, despite the unavoidable fact that the miners’ strike was lost and the sort of rural com-

munity depicted in the film was devastated by the economics of Thatcherism, the film builds and swells into an absolute fanfare of celebration and triumph. In the accompanying press notes Warchus describes coming to the realisation during editing that he had made ‘a classic romantic comedy… but the relationship isn’t between individuals, but between two groups, or communities. And they are driven not by romantic love, but by compassion.

I think it reminds us of the idea of society - that there is of course such a thing after all.’

In compressing a complicated and unfamiliar story featuring a large ensemble cast (there are 75 speaking parts), there are a few areas open to criticism. The comic characterisation of some lesbian characters as rigidly politically correct is a disappointingly conventional gag.

While Beresford’s characterisations are almost all exemplars of quality screenwriting, he does feel the need to provide a villain in the form of a duplicitous village committee member who cannot overcome her own prejudices. Although the character is allowed some depth it comes rather too late in events and she is too much a curtain-twitching plot device. These are very minor concerns and the quality of the screenplay is particularly

impressive given it is the writer’s first screen credit.

Director Warchus has an extensive and impressive career in the theatre (including the musical Matilda) but only one previous film directing credit (a largely forgotten 1999 thriller Sympactico), however he and cinematographer Tat Radcliffe make great efforts to ensure this feels like a movie and avoids the televisual feel that can afflict British mainstream films. Even in the lower key of the early scenes the camera is moving and reframing, and the editing is dynamic. As the action moves to Wales the film opens up with sweeping aerial vistas worthy of a western.

A British film that contains speeches discussing the labour movement and LGBT rights, is politically engaged and with an heart-on-sleeve activist agenda but is genuinely unashamed to be ‘fun for all the family’ (granted with the restriction of a BBFC 15 certificate ‘strong language, sex references’) feels radical. And it is.

But Pride is also nakedly and unashamedly commercial, aiming for the largest possible audience. Let’s hope it finds just that.

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Pleasure and Pain James Marsh braves eleven days of South Korea’s endurance-testing festival and encounters some of the year’s best genre films

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hen discussing South Korea and film festivals, most people will automatically defer to the celebrated Pusan International Film Festival arguably the most important Asian film event on the calendar.

However, a few months earlier, in the rather less glamorous neighbourhoods of Bucheon, is an electrifying, 11-day endurance test, where arguably the most unwieldy programme of new genre films from around the world bye for acclaim and attention. PiFan - the Pucheon International Fantastic Film Festival - claims to be the world’s largest celebration of its kind, and we’re in no position to argue.

Now in its 18th year, PiFan has successfully positioned itself as the Far Eastern cousin of that other great genre film festival, Fantasia, which takes place during the exact same fortnight in late July, at the polar opposite end of the Earth, Montreal. Rather than compete directly with each other, it feels as though the two festivals have an unspoken synergy. There is a substantial overlap in the programming and both festivals invite many of the same

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guests, which means a noticeable rotation of revellers around the festival’s half-way point as the talent do their best to keep jet lag at bay and circumnavigate the planet to promote their latest works.

For those of us stationed in Bucheon (as the town itself prefers to spell its name) for the entire duration, the festival proves an almost life-threatening ordeal, as our bodily fluids are steadily replaced with soju, beer, and the infamous milky rice-based liquid known as makgeolli.

Within a few hours of arriving in this oddball satellite town just outside Seoul, attendees will have already eaten their bodyweight in grilled beef and pork - and proceed to consume precious little else for the duration of their stay.

A regular day at PiFan begins around noon with a trio or so of screenings, followed by your first Korean BBQ of the evening. After a couple of hours of flesh consumption, guests, filmmakers, press and other assorted patrons will likely disappear into The Golden Mic, or another of the myriad karaoke joints lining the bustling streets, where they belt out spirited, yet indecipherable renditions of their favourite hits before staggering outside to see

dawn break over another serving of charred pig, cow or other miscellaneous meat.

Somehow, in the midst of all this, the festival manages to screen hundreds of new genre films, harking from the furthest-flung corners of the globe, together with top notch retrospectives and revival programmes that never cease to impress. This year, PiFan showcased a fantastic selection of Tinto Brass classics, including Salon Kitty, the full uncut version of Caligula, as well as his little-seen The Howl, to name just a few. Marking the 60th anniversary of Godzilla’s big screen debut, seven of the King of the Monsters’ cinematic outings were featured, including Invasion of Astro Monster, Destroy All Monsters and Terror of Mechagodzilla, in addition to Ishiro Honda’s 1954 classic.

As someone based in Asia, I have relatively good yearround access to some of the region’s best new releases.

However, independent film from the rest of the world, in particular the US, can struggle to find distribution in my neck of the woods. PiFan plays an important role in filling those gaps, as the programming team does a fantastic job of plundering the buzz titles from festivals like Sundance and SXSW, to bring the best new horror, sci-fi and thriller offerings to South Korea. 2014 would prove no exception, and by the end of the festival, my personal top three picks all transpired to be English language horror films, albeit hailing from different countries.

Probably the most well-travelled of the three was Jennifer Kent’s Australian bed-time nightmare, The

Babadook, in which Essie Davis gives an incredible performance as a struggling widow and single mother saddled with an infuriatingly troubled young son (Noah Wiseman). As Samuel’s behaviour worsens, driving friends away and keeping him out of school, he and his mother become increasingly cut off from the rest of the world. At that point a strange children’s book about a sinister dark figure known as the Babadook, appears in their house, and as they read it, soon invades their imaginations and nightmares. Kent’s use of imagery, sound and shadow produces an incredibly effective atmosphere, and The Babadook is relentlessly terrifying in the most delightfully original way. Davis was rightly awarded PiFan’s Best Actress award for her emotionally shredded performance.

Starry Eyes, from American writer-directors Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer tells a very different horror story and one that will cut close to the bone of the Hollywood community. The incredible Alexandra Essoe plays the beautiful, insecure yet determined actress Sarah, who has moved to Tinseltown in the hope of becoming a star. She has surrounded herself with other like-minded dreamers, all of whom spend their time partying and talking about the great ideas, stories and films they want to make, rather than putting themselves out there and fighting for that break-out role. When Sarah lands an audition for a mysterious low budget project, we soon discover just how terrifying, violating and vindictive the process can be, especially to someone as passionate and

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vulnerable as Sarah. Starry Eyes is a classic Faustian horror story that captures the spirit of Polanski’s early psychological works brilliantly, while simultaneously dissecting the Hollywood machine, and tossing its guts into the air for all to see.

Rounding out this triumvirate of creepy delights is Gerard Johnstone’s riotously entertaining Housebound, from New Zealand. A film with so many twists and turns, effortlessly jumping from one plot thread to another as it morphs from social drama to ghost story, to slasher film and beyond, Housebound is perhaps the most quick-witted and shamelessly entertaining horror comedy since Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead. After attempting to rob an ATM, drug-addicted wastrel Kylie (Morgana O’Reilly) narrowly escapes a jail sentence by acquiescing to nine months under house arrest, in the custody of her bothersome busybody mother, Miriam (Rima Te Wiata). Their bristly relationship is further strained by Miriam’s insistence that the creaky old family home is haunted, and when Kylie’s frustrated boredom inevitably turns to snooping of her own, so begins a roller coaster ride of scares, laughs and thrills that delivered the ultimate late-night crowd pleaser.

Asian Cinema is of course incredibly well represented at PiFan, although this year’s line-up of South Korean titles was a mostly underwhelming selection. Probably the best of the bunch was Oh In-chun’s high-school horror comedy Mourning Grave, which follows its teenage hero as he returns to his hometown to face his unnerving ability of seeing dead people, only to fall in love with the spirit of a recently departed schoolgirl. South Korea has a

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long tradition of high-school related horror flicks, while also attempting to jump on Twilght’s romantic fantasy band wagon with the likes of Jo Sung-hee’s A Werewolf Boy. While Mourning Grave certainly plays for laughs more often than screams, it proves successful in its modest endeavours. The film was rightly rewarded by bagging the Best Asian Film award from the European Federation of Fantastic Film Festivals, of which PiFan is the sole honorary Asian member.

The biggest surprise of the home-grown selection was the official closing film, My Ordinary Love Story from writer-director Lee Gwon. on its surface it’s the story of 30-something single woman Eun-jin (Gang Ye-won), whose dating history has been a string of tragic failures and heartbreaks. She starts dating the timid, easy-going Hyeon-suk after meeting him at a bus stop, and for a while he seems like the perfect catch. However, soon enough, Eun-jin begins to suspect all is not what it appears, and what happens next sees the film take a remarkable shift in tone and pacing. Too often this kind of volte face has been the undoing of many an ambitious outing, but here it works brilliantly. Bolstered by a pair of strong performers, particularly from Gang, whose knockout turn here was the cherry on top of a festival packed full of impressive female protagonists, My Ordinary Love Story proved anything but an ordinary finale to a festival ripe with cinematic treats and greased with stamina-challenging quantities of drinking, singing and chronic sleep deprivation. It’s pretty much the perfect festival experience.

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Seeing Double Elisa Armstrong reports on a Melbourne International Festival packed with indie surprises and homegrown talent

words by Elisa Armstrong

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f the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) had a theme this year, it would be The Double. Not that Richard Ayoade’s film was playing in competition, rather the line-up included many actors in two films (from Elisabeth Moss and Mark Duplass to Marion Cotillard and Brit Marling), two Xavier Dolan films (the exquisite, potential break-out Mommy and Tom at the Farm), two Frederick Wisemans (At Berkeley and National Gallery) and Richard Linklater as filmmaker (festival favourite Boyhood) and star of documentary Double Play. Plus, more than one film contained doubles (and triples) of characters within the same film. Phew.

This was my first MIFF since 2008 and, my, oh my, how it has grown. With over 340 films screening over 18 days, MIFF was epic and I loved it. Having experienced Cannes, the London Film Festival, Berlinale and others, I can honestly say MIFF is my favourite. From the ease of pre-booking and selection of films to the central locations and a “you’re all invited” lounge (bursting at the seams with ping pong tournaments and free magazines), MIFF was quintessentially Australian: relaxed and without pretence.

MIFF doesn’t shy away from Australian cinema (22% of films at MIFF were from the home country) and the opening night film, Predestination (directed by the Spierig brothers), and the Centrepiece Gala, Cut Snake (Tony Ayres’ first film in seven years), were undeniably Australian works – shot in Melbourne with Australian filmmakers, even if the former film stars Ethan Hawke.

Australian short films played frequently at the festival and there were some astonishing shorts that should hopefully increase generosity with Arts Council funding and potentially be the seed of future Gala screenings.

Two other notable Australian films that screened at MIFF were Fell and The Infinite Man and both certainly have international appeal with young directors at the helm (Kasimir Burgess and Hugh Sullivan) although the two could not be more different. The former is an evocative take on a masculine relationship, with the best cinematography since Top of the Lake, compared with a time-travelling three-hander punctuated by absurd comedy.

A definite focus was on American indie cinema (92 films came from the USA), with the festival opening six months after Sundance and managing to screen break-

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out films from Salt Lake City, including Appropriate Behavior, The Skeleton Twins, Ping Pong Summer, The One I Love and Listen Up Philip. Desiree Akhavan’s Appropriate Behavior was a delightful surprise and the filmmaker herself charmed the cramped audience at The Capitol. Unfairly dubbed the “lesbian ‘Girls’”, Appropriate Behavior displayed a strong voice and an unflinching look at the breakdown of a relationship without resorting to cheap jokes or stereotypes. Similarly Obvious Child,

by Gillian Robespierre, tackles abortion in a way that is the most realistic and undocumented I have seen.

Donna ( Jenny Slate, late of Saturday Night Live and an incredibly capable actor) is a stand-up comedian whose one-night stand finds her pregnant. The comedy club sequences feel raw and real as does Slate’s relationships, whether they be to her one-night stand/potential boyfriend, mother or best friend (the always welcome Gaby Hoffmann).

The Skeleton Twins and Mommy were my two favourites. Dolan is a sui generis filmmaker and with his fifth film he has the potential for a breakout hit. Shot in a 1:1 aspect ratio (which is broken in a delightful sequence), Dolan delivers an Almodovar-esque understanding of women and a haunting portrait of delinquency. Set in 2015, Steve (Antoine-Olivier Pilon) is discharged from care to live with his widowed mother (Anne Dorval, from some angles the spitting image of Annette Bening).

He befriends a neighbour, a former teacher who had a breakdown and is suffering from a stutter (Suzanne Clément), and the three make a strong bond. Dolan is going from strength-to-strength and appears to be able to tack-

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le anything. Having won the Prix du Jury in Cannes this year, all eyes will be on whatever he does next.

The Skeleton Twins stars two hilarious actors, Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig, and while there are certainly comic moments, the film delivers with an emotional potency and ability to accurately convey a sibling bond that doesn’t delve into incest or hatred. Formerly estranged, a suicide attempt brings together Milo and Maggie in the latter’s upstate New York home. Craig Johnson proves a major talent, particularly with a shocking moment late in the second act that is revealed so brilliantly and realistically, I was in tears. Wiig has demonstrated a dramatic ability with other films recently (The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Hateship, Loveship) and Hader matches her in finding layers within Milo’s character.

MIFF had many late night screenings of films with a horror or thriller bent, including Creep, Life After Beth, Among the Living and What We Do In The Shadows.

The one horror film I saw, It Follows, delivered actual thrills and a central performance by Maika Monroe that promises great things to come. Relatively bloodless, the film manages to unsettle me even thinking about certain images now. The filmmaker David Robert Mitchell is obviously aware of the power of suggestion without needing a big budget and also some great mood music.

In the documentary section I was privileged to see Jodorowsky’s Dune by Frank Pavlich and Time is Illmatic by One9 and Erik Parker, which are thematically tied together as both depict the rise of the artist and the struggle for creativity despite the lack of support, whether it be their environment (Nas’ upbringing in the NYC

projects) or the people around them. Jodorowsky and Nas are both charismatic, passionate subjects and both documentaries are convincing portrayals of almost geniuses.

Yet both also depict how important it is to have people support you long term and believe in your vision (and the two outcomes of the documentaries are completely different). It takes a village to raise an artist.

I was most looking forward to The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby, two films made by Ned Benson. I saw Her first, followed immediately by Him and cannot understand how they could be seen in any other way (and certainly not in the inevitable “no one wants to sit for 3 hours” cut Them). While Him is more accessible and potentially works better as a standalone film (Benson wrote Him and after prodding from star Jessica Chastain, wrote Her), I preferred the constant bleakness of Her and the inferred supposition that, to quote Adam Rapp’s brilliant play Nocturne, “grief does not expire like a candle or the beacon on a lighthouse. It simply changes temperature”.

The film had my stomach in a permanent knot. With regards to the performances, of course Chastain and James McAvoy are brilliant but are ably supported by Chastain’s real-life best friend, Jess Weixler, Ciarán Hinds and Isabelle Huppert in key roles. I have no doubt that the films will have strong detractors, but I am anxiously awaiting whatever Benson does next, as his interest in emotionally complex relationships is rare and fascinating.

Quite possibly my MVP of MIFF was Elisabeth Moss who continues to choose challenging projects. The One I Love allows her to demonstrate a wide range and an ability to convey love and horror concurrently with the

flick of an eye. Similarly in Listen Up Philip, Moss is completely convincing as a successful photographer (think Cass Bird) in a hopeless relationship with Jason Schwartzman. Shot on the grainiest 16mm I would think possible, with its 1970s style lettering, the film might have starred Dustin Hoffman back in the day. Schwartzman plays a novelist whose unapologetic misogyny and general misanthropy seems to poison everyone around him.

MIFF awards prizes every year for short films and two Audience Awards (feature and documentary) and every audience member is strongly encouraged to vote for every film they see. Boyhood won the feature prize, narrowly followed by Obvious Child and the Kiwi comedy-horror Housebound by Gerard Johnstone, and the documentary prize was won by Jalanan. Made by Daniel Ziv the film documents the lives of three street musicians in Jakarta.

The runners up were Alan Hicks’ Keep on Keepin’ On about a musical mentor relationship and Virunga by Orlando von Einsiedel about endangered mountain gorillas in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

There were many extra screenings scheduled during the festival which points to MIFF’s popularity, but a late programme addition was Good Morning Vietnam, after the death of Robin Williams. Not much can be said that hasn’t already but, fittingly, I had seen Jodorowsky’s Dune the night before. The documentary opened with the quote from psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, “what is to give light must endure burning”. Yes and yes and what a light it was.

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Masters of Cinema

The Gang’s All Here Cleaver Patterson rejoices at the manic, boundless energy of Busby Berkley’s wartime era musical words by Cleaver Patterson

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orld War II was a buoyant time for the cinema industry, particularly in America. In order to forget the horrors ripping the world apart audiences flocked in their thousands each week to see the latest film releases which, before the 1950s and dawn of the television era, were one of the western world’s main forms of escapism. If, before the advent of modern mass media, radio was considered the best way - in relative terms - to receive the most up-to-the-minute news and information, then cinema was the pre-eminent mode of entertainment and diversion from the harsh reality of everyday life.

Never ones to miss an opportunity, the governments of both the USA and UK also saw the medium of film as an ideal tool for propaganda, and a way to boost morale amongst those at home as well as the troops abroad.

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During the early years of the 1940s, with their government’s encouragement, Hollywood and Britain produced an endless stream of upbeat fantasies, humorous dramas and over-the-top musicals to meet public demand. Films like 1940s magical Thief of Bagdad, Noel Coward’s 1944 comedy / drama This Happy Breed and the 1944 Judy Garland vehicle Meet Me in St. Louis, kept audience’s spirits high when all around them was, quite literally, crumbling.

Among such films from this period however, one stands out even today as the prime example of what these movies stood for and the way in which they accomplished their aims. What the zippy, 1943 Technicolor extravaganza The Gang’s All Here may lack in subtlety, it more than makes up for with its head-on attack on the senses and sheer unbridled fun and optimism. From the earliest days of the Hollywood musical - particularly those which featured the dance arrangements of the legendary Busby Berkeley - what

there was of a story-line was usually only there as a means of connecting one mesmerising dance sequence with the next. The plot of The Gang’s All Here - which proved to be one of the last films Berkeley would direct - is basic in the extreme, revolving around a love triangle between Sgt. Andrew J. Mason, Jr. ( James Ellison), his childhood sweetheart Vivian Potter (Sheila Ryan) and New York showgirl Eadie Allen (Alice Faye). Things become complicated when Andrew is called up to serve in the South Pacific, with both girls believing that he’s in love with them, only to be settled amicably for all concerned after he returns from the war as a decorated hero. As said however what plot there is, is only there to introduce the musical numbers; most of which highlighted the wit and pure joie-de-vivre of Berkeley as a director and choreographer.

During its early years, Berkeley was one of the most groundbreaking filmmakers working in Hollywood, probably doing more than anyone to bring fun and escapism to the masses by promoting dance through the medium of film. Though not a dancer himself, Berkeley knew what looked good on screen and how to bring extravagant dance numbers to life in a way which had never been seen before, or since. As far back as 1931s racy pre-code comedy Palmy Days - which was one of the earliest films on which he worked as a choreographer and which highlighted many of the stylistic elements which would later become his trademarks - Berkeley was staging innovative dance sequences and montages to spice up otherwise formulaic and often prosaic comedy’s and light dramas.

Born in Los Angeles in November 1895, Berkeley served as a field artillery lieutenant in World War I during which time he was involved in the organisation of parades, which would later become evident in his work on film. Many aspects with which he would become intrinsically linked rows of dancing girls, moving in geometric patterns with military precision - can be linked back to his years in the army and conducting of soldiers on the parade ground.

However it was probably the endless streams of healthy, smiling, young women - all seemingly the same with their bobbed hair and rosebud pouts – that became synonymous with Berkeley. His famous chorus lines in films such as 1934s Dames and the following year’s Gold Diggers of 1935 became the stuff of Hollywood legend and provided an early platform for many who would go on to become major stars – including Joan Blondell and Gloria Stuart.

The Gangs All Here was the ideal showcase for Berkeley’s prodigious talent, his bevies of beautiful girls and Hollywood favourite Alice Faye, whose melodious tones and glamorous looks were tailor-made for the role of the film’s leading lady Eadie Allen. It was also the perfect vehicle for the big band leader and composer Benny Goodman and his band who provided various numbers for the swinging, upbeat soundtrack, as well as several of Hollywood’s best loved comedians. The rotund character player Eugene Pallette made an appearance, as did the ubiquitous Edward Everett Horton - in the role of highly strung businessman Peyton Potter - an actor who had frequently appeared as the uptight stooge to Fred Astaire in several of RKO’s famous musicals of the 1930s. The gangly, rubber legged actress Charlotte Greenwood - known for her show stopping high

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kicks, and who had worked with Berkeley over a decade previously in the aforementioned Palmy Days - played the perfect foil for Horton’s character as his kind hearted wife with a mischievous twinkle in her eye.

These factors aside, the film will go down in cinema history for the appearance of one person - the marvel who was Carmen Miranda. Though only featuring in a supporting role, the woman affectionately known as ‘The Brazilian Bombshell’ steals every scene she is in. A singer, dancer and actress who, due to her phenomenal public popularity, would become the highest paid entertainer in Hollywood and top female tax-payer in America in 1945, is something of an acquired taste when viewed today.

The overt ‘campness’ of her trademark broken English and gaudy, over-the-top style of dress may appear blatant to today’s audiences, but in the more innocent era of the war torn 1940s, this uninhibited exuberance was welcomed, and even encouraged.

Maria do Carmo Miranda da Cunha was born on the 9th February 1909, in Marco de Canaveses, Portugal.

When little more than a year old her parents emigrated to Brazil, where the young Miranda’s talent for song and dance led to her being discovered by composer Josué de Barros, who later helped record and promote Miranda’s first album with the German recording label Brunswick

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in 1929. Fame followed in her adoptive country of Brazil where, throughout the 1930s, she would become the country’s most popular singing star. It was this success which led to her starring in several films for the countries flourishing film industry, and in turn brought her to the attention of Hollywood. The early 1940s saw an explosion in the film capital of exuberant feature films, with lush musical numbers perfectly suited to the larger-thanlife Miranda.

Having, after her initial arrival in America, starred in various shows on Broadway, Miranda was went to Hollywood where she signed a contract with MGM in 1940.

Over the following five years she would feature in eight films alongside such major players as Betty Grable, Kay Francis, Don Ameche and Cesar Romero. Though an accomplished performer, it was as her colourful costumes and flamboyant headwear which made her stand out from the crowd in many of her films. While still in Brazil she had worked in a shop where she learned to make hats, a passion which would later become one of her most recognisable traits. Capitalising on her exotic looks and adopted South American roots, her most lavish head-ware often consisted of little more than baskets of ripe fruit piled high upon her head. With this in mind it seems only appropriate that one of the song and dance

numbers with which she would become most closely associated, played heavily on this feature, and gave rise to the name by which she would become best known, ‘The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat’.

Despite featuring a number of prominent musical numbers - including the wistful and sentimental songs ‘A Journey to a Star’ and ‘No love, No Nothin’ sung by Faye, The Gang’s All Here will be best remembered for the sheer madness and theatricality that is ‘The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat’.

The showpiece, which runs for over seven minutes - an extended period for a musical number in a film, even

by Hollywood’s standards - encompasses everything for which Berkeley had become well known. Seemingly taking place in a New York club, once the music starts it’s clear to the viewer that the scope of what’s now playing out in front of them could never take place within the confines of a theatre or nightclub stage. Situated on an imaginary tropical island peopled with multitudinous scantily clad chorus girls and with the effervescent Miranda at the centre, it’s the copious bananas of all shapes and sizes which caused most stir amongst audiences and critics, and controversy amongst the censors. The not so subtle erotic double meaning of these ‘phallic’ objects was pounced upon by The Hayes Office - the arbiters

of moral decency - who forced Berkeley to make major changes in the way the dancers held the objects, before they allowed the scene to be passed. That said the massive props, as well as the oversized personality of Miranda, made this segment in particular, and the film as a whole, one of the most memorable and enjoyably carefree musical productions to ever hit cinema screens.

Filmmakers (both in-front of and behind the camera) are often so intrinsically representative of the period in which they practiced, that it’s hard to think of their resultant work being made at any other time. Berkeley summed up his belief in this, saying, ‘In an era of breadlines, depression and wars, I tried to help people get away from all the misery...to turn their minds to something else. I wanted to make people happy, if only for an hour’.

With The Gang’s All Here, he and his co-workers archived this with an effortless style which would live on after them, and the war which raged around them, had long been confined to the annals of history.

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The Gang’s All Here is available on September 22nd courtesy of Eureka Entertainment. www.eurekavideo.co.uk

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In Defence...

The Stylistic Dynamism of Snake Eyes

words by Sam Moore

T

here is no better place to start with Brian De Palma’s ignored, bashed and forgotten Snake Eyes than right at the beginning with the opening Steadicam shot that lasts over twelve whole minutes, though there are three cuts sneakily snuck in there. To the untrained eye, the scene is an unbroken take that rolls around an Atlantic City arena surged with intensity and tension just moments before a huge heavyweight boxing bout.

De Palma’s camera is focussed on Rick Santoro, a corrupt Atlantic City detective played by Nicolas Cage with the kind of wild-eyed frenzy that he has come to be mocked for. Along the way we meet hustlers, bookies and even a glimpse of the champ himself as he makes his way to the ring. In the background, we have twenty-thousand screaming extras and De Palma constructs the

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melodramatic plot through a series of paranoid nods and sly winks before climaxing the shot with a political assassination that jolts the movie out of its freewheeling form into something a little more structured. The scene is an enrapturing tour de force of cinema, utterly absorbing with a flair and sense of daring that mainstream American movies just don’t seem to have anymore.

The anachronistic virtuosity of Snake Eyes reminds me of the single take in Touch of Evil from Orson Welles, a man De Palma owes a great debt to, though by this point in the late nineties, it had been a debt long ago repaid in full as he had developed his own singular aesthetic of visceral voyeurism and clinical amorality, expressed through an elegantly mobile camera and unusual angles. In the past, De Palma’s technical nuance has led him to fall victim to that old cliché ‘style over substance’, but Snake

“De Palma’s mastery of style, mood and atmosphere is so refreshing to watch again in an age of American cinema that seems so bland and grounded that it’s easy to become bewitched by Snake Eyes.”

Eyes is more measured. There’s meaning behind every shot as the film flirts between potboiler genre thriller not a million miles away from Tom Clancy and a character tale about morality and how to not cross that line.

Nicolas Cage, never being one to back down from a challenge or supress an emotion, wears his brown velvet suit and a garishly yellow open collared shirt straight out of Miami Vice with pride. He swirls and rages around the screen at an electric pace, speaking in a tone that can only be described as hysterical. It’s one of his most enjoyable performances. It would be the maverick cop territory he would later explore again in Werner Herzog’s The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans to a more comic measure, but seeing Nicolas Cage wide-eyed and completely unhinged is one of the simple pleasures in life.

Despite De Palma being at the helm, that famed opening shot and a Nic Cage performance that has to be seen to be believed, nobody took to the movie. On a ridiculous budget of 70+ million, it made little profit if any at all and was brushed aside by critics and most of the paying

audience. Even De Palma diehards remained unimpressed and most retrospectives of his work leave out Snake Eyes. That’s not to say Snake Eyes is ever going to be mistaken for Dressed to Kill, Blow Out or Body Double, but it has been levelled with a curious amount of disrespect. It does borderline on the preposterous and occasionally linger on the wrong side of plausibility, but film is fundamentally a visual experience and De Palma understands that better than most. Snake Eyes is, first and foremost, a visual film. Its dialogue, plot, character are all secondary to De Palma’s stylish wizardry. The atmosphere and aesthetic created from the ensemble of split-screens, long takes and emphatic sweeps is where the joy in this film comes from.

Snake Eyes also does not follow the typical framework for a mystery thriller. The reveal of the mastermind of the plot happens very early on and many critics cited this as a flaw thus misunderstanding the focus of the movie. Most thrillers of this ilk have the reveal as the destination but David Koepp’s screenplay has it as part of the journey. De

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Palma’s movie is focussed on friendship and how it can be completely destroyed by an act of betrayal. The film dramatically switches up once the betrayal is announced to the audience as Santoro turns from a brutish and bullying abuser of power into a lone wolf crusader against lifelong friend and Navy Commander Kevin Dunne played by Gary Sinise (in the most Gary Sinise role ever). Their friendship was formed as children but Dunne breaks their strong bond and it destroys Santoro, who up to this point had been seen as incredibly amoral with no distinct sense of feeling or righteousness. Santoro is devastated by his friend and is hesitant to confront him and you get the sense that Dunne is the only true friend Santoro has ever had. This reluctance and internal battle between friendship and morality very nearly becomes fatal for the maverick cop but he is rescued by the news media (who are ironically satirised throughout the film).

The sole female presence in the movie comes in the form of Carla Gugino’s Julie Costello, who for reasons only known to those involved, kind of becomes Santoro’s love interest. The defence secretary has just been shot, you’d think people would have more pressing thoughts

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than planning to exchange bodily fluids, but that’s Hollywood, and a very insidious and dark part of it and its treatment of women. The major flaw within the screenplay and thus the film is the treatment of Costello, who starts off as a mysterious and ambiguous character, but in the end is nothing more than a poorly written idealist who doesn’t really fit into De Palma’s cynical and grim worldview. For all my steadfast defences of this movie over the years, it is impossible to defend the poor and loose development of her character.

The success of Snake Eyes hinges on the evolution and breakdown in the relationship between Santoro and Dunne as chaos ensues around them. The audience has to feel as if the implosion of their friendship is something to invest him and clearly nobody in 1998 did.

This is, in essence, a very simple story, bolstered an invigorating look and some typically enchanting camera work. But De Palma’s mastery of style, mood and atmosphere is so refreshing to watch again in an age of American cinema that seems so bland and grounded that it’s easy to become bewitched by Snake Eyes.

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A Most Wanted Man release date 12th September

cert (15)

writer Andrew Bovell starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Rachel McAdams, Daniel Brühl

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Review by Tom Gore

director Anton Corbijn

Anton Corbijn’s latest; a subtle, slow-burning adaptation of John Le Carre’s 2008 novel concerning the contentious topic of extraordinary rendition and the War on Terror, is also notable for having the mournful, dubious distinction of showcasing the great Philip Seymour Hoffman’s last major screen role prior to his untimely death earlier this year. As such it serves as both a final reminder of a great actor’s myriad gifts and a fitting bow to a storied career. Refreshingly set in the affluent, culturally diverse and slightly seedy Northern German Port City of Hamburg (familiar-with its labyrinthine streets and waterways- from such films as Wenders’ The American Friend), rather than Berlin, the usual base for German Spy thrillers (during the Cold War years at least). We are reminded of the relevance of the City as a European front of the War on Terror by means of an introductory inter title recalling its central role as a planning base for the 9/11 attacks.

Some years later and Hamburg remains on high alert. We find Hoffman’s character: Günther Bachmann (a kind of hard-living Teutonic counterpart to George Smiley); a slovenly, jaded yet moral and diligent intelligence operative haunted by the failure of a previous mission in Lebanon, heading a small counterterrorism unit (including Daniel Brühl and Nina Hoss) charged with monitoring perceived terror threats within the City. In particular they are concerned with Dr Faisal Abdullah (Homayoun Ershadi) a respected and seemingly moderate Islamic philanthropist who they fear may be diverting funds towards Jihadist causes. Into this mix comes the wanted man in question, another suspected extremist: Issa Karpov: an elusive, fragile (he has suffered torture), ambivalent asylum-seeking Chechen in the City (illegally) to redeem a substantial inheritance left to him in a Hamburg bank by his corrupt Russian General Father. Karpov (Grigoriy Dobrygin), his presence weaving an increasingly tangled web, unwittingly leads Bachmann and his team to his sympathetic, naïve human rights lawyer: Annabel Richter (Rachel McAdams) and shady, world-weary banker: Tommy Brue (a perfectly cast Willem Dafoe), all three of whom become pawns in Bachmann’s ultimate plan to ensnare Abdullah (and keep him and Karpov out of the clutches of the Americans). A task made infinitely more complicated by the unhelpful interference of a duplicitous CIA agent (Robin Wright) and a more belligerent rival within German Intelligence (Rainer Bock).

A topical, timely reflection on the moral ambiguity inherent in modern espionage and critique of some of the more heavy-handed practices of contemporary intelligence/security agencies (particularly the CIA), Corbijn’s film succeeds as a well-crafted if routine spy-genre offering with a towering central performance at its heart. For though the entire cast acquit themselves well (thankfully avoiding comedy “German” accents) it is, appropriately, Hoffman who stands out in his final leading turn; huskily enunciating his lines and shuffling across the screen with the air of some plump, dishevelled hybrid of Rutger Hauer and Bruno Ganz, elevating every scene he is in and ultimately, holding the film together.

Grand Piano release date 19th September

Review by Clarisse Loughrey

Grand Piano! It’s that movie where the piano can’t go slower than fifty miles per hour otherwise it’ll explode, right? Grand Piano! “I can tell you I don’t have any money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills, piano-playing skills”. Grand Piano! Basically, right, it’s Phonebooth except of instead of a phonebooth, it’s a piano. Grand Piano!

I don’t see your money yet, have you lost your wallet or something? Do you need a second to rummage through your pockets? Maybe I can just give you my Paypal details instead? Grand Piano!

OK, enough of that. I think you got the point; we’re born and bred into a cinematic system which sustains itself solely through the power of the elevator pitch. Film lives or dies on its ability to translate to a tidy Netflix summary. So listen to this: a pianist returning to the stage he was driven from under crippling stage fright discovers a red dot hovering on his chest and a message hidden in his sheet music: “Play one wrong note and you die”. Styled after the greatest masters of thriller, of Hitchcock, Argento, and De Palma; starring an actor (Elijah Wood) breaking free from the curse of his own iconic role and into the open arms of B-movie cult status. Oh, and plus Bill from Bill & Ted’s in it! Excellent!

Yes, Grand Piano looks so very good on paper.

And while I would never be as cruelly presumptive as to guess the motivations of both filmmaker (Eugenio Mira) and screenwriter (Damien Chazelle), it doesn’t strike me as much of a surprise to learn that this movie was developed from a spec script.

Sent blind onto the desks of Hollywood executives, hoping to be the face in the crowd whose image burns into memory. Whatever may lie at its heart, everything about this movie just screams of the concept-driven picture, conspicuously hitting every note of what’s expected of a thriller to justify its own existence, like a buzzword-ridden exam essay of an A+ student with all the skills but none of the ingenuity. It’s almost overly competent, in a way that robs it of its own inspiration.

Mira goes for gold in trying to emulate his heroes: dolly zooms, blood-red lighting emerging from a smoky mist, lightning crashes paired with screeching violins, and shots from literally every angle imaginable (upside down, why not). Yet the tricks come at such unrelenting speed they feel less like a personal vision and more what I’d imagine The Simpsons would do in a pastiche of classic thrillers. It’s stylistic reference overload. And that winning concept? There’s enough momentum to get this thrill-o-coaster going in its punchy opening; but as it slowly gets stretched and stretched and stretched, you end up with the thrilling climax of a man trying to transcribe a piece of music he Googled on a tablet. Some things are just better left to paper, maybe.

cert (15)

director Eugenio Mira writer Damien Chazelle starring Elijah Wood, John Cusack, Kerry Bishé

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Review by Christina Newland

Ida

release date 26th September

cert (12a)

director Pawel Pawlikowski writers Pawel Pawlikowski, Rebecca Lenkiewicz starring Agata Kulesza, Agata Trzebuchowska, Dawid Ogrodnik

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Ida takes place in Poland circa 1961, but the lonely world it depicts seems remote - even alien - from any explanatory historical context. A work of steady, quiet beauty in high contrast black and white, director Pawel Pawlikowski borrows from the visual vocabulary of Robert Bresson and Carl Theodor Dreyer. Ida Lebenstein (Agata Trzebuchowska) is an eighteen-year-old nun-to-be, raised in a convent after being orphaned at a very young age. Just before she is set to take her vows, her Mother Superior informs her that she has an aunt, by the name of Wanda that would like to meet her.

Ida is an inexperienced, almost expressionless young woman; an image of timid piety. Yet she seems unfazed when she finds herself in Wanda’s city apartment, amorous men slipping out the front door. In fact, she hardly reacts when her aunt - a sophisticated single woman with a miasma of deep melancholy about her - informs her that she is, in fact, a “Jewish nun”.

Ida’s parents were killed during the war, their bodies dumped in unmarked graves. The questions that remain concern the details of their deaths, and the anonymous location of their burial. For Wanda, with Ida’s company, these are mysteries that she must set out to solve. A Stalinist ex-prosecutor, “Red Wanda” represents a foil to everything young Ida stands for - an aggressively atheist revolutionary in a cocktail dress. Actress Agata Kulesza carries the role with mournful elegance; she needles her niece about her devotion to God. But Ida remains drawn in by the earthly mystery of Wanda’s sophistication and loneliness.

The two women are united in a desire for the truth, and set out on a journey to question the last known individuals who saw Ida’s parents alive. They meet with many slammed doors and unfriendly faces - fifteen years after the Nazis have decimated Poland, survivors are not keen to dig up the past.

Pawlikowski films the women’s grim search with a stark, almost otherworldly modernism; all jagged lines, spiral staircases, and extreme angles. Figures move in and out of shot mid-speech; faces sink to the bottom of the frame so that we are only privy to their eyes. There are touches of Vermeer, at times. The film is hauntingly beautiful - so why does it feel so much like window dressing?

Some of the trouble lies in Trzebuchowska’s lack of interiority. She is unblinking and impenetrable.

Ida’s blankness may or may not be of the Bressonian tradition, but the actress doesn’t quite pull it off here. A series of tumultuous events befall Ida, but her responses to them seem pre-determined; almost without motivation. Her flight from Catholicism should have been life-altering, but it feels strangely anti-climactic. For all of Pawlikowski’s aesthetic austerity and tonal coherence, the film never reaches the emotional heights or cerebral insight of Bresson or Dreyer. Ida’s visuals will linger, but its closing moments do not leave one with much once the credits have rolled.

Review by Ben Nicholson

The sins of previous generations collude with the grotesqueries of fame to form the unpleasant governing forces behind David Cronenberg’s latest film, the cutting Maps to the Stars. A heady blend of nostalgia and narcissism, Tinseltown is the perfect venue for such an examination and this is a Hollywood satire of surgical precision - exposing horrors galore beneath the famous, ostentatious veneer. Both the place and its inhabitants are here presented as Dorian Gray, where the soul and the psyche can fester and decay so long as the surface remains blemish-free. This is a world in which incestuous marriage is not so much an unnatural aberration as a lucrative opportunity for a redemptive confessional book tour. Here the role model for salvation is not a saint on a cross but a doping cyclist sat opposite Oprah.

The Canadian director built a career on body horror but has, over the past few years, shifted his attention away from the visceral to the concentrate on the cerebral. On this occasion he once again resists what may be considered his natural inclinations - not least with the character of Agatha (played by Mia Wasikowska) who has borne the marks of a house fire on her face and body since childhood. Audiences may fear the worst when she finally removes her previously ever-present elbow length gloves and reveals her scars. But their subtlety is key - even the faintest imperfections are horrifying in the stratosphere of the pristine image.

Agatha is introduced to L.A. from the back of a limousine steered by Robert Pattinson’s Jerome; he takes her past Beverly Hills mansions old and new before she somehow snags a job as the personal assistant to fading star, Havana Segrand ( Julianne Moore). Whether haunted more by past trauma or her waning beauty, the spectre of Havana’s deceased mother (Sarah Gadon) looms ominously large. Her legacy is deeply etched in the growing desperation of Moore’s fantastic - and, with delicious irony - award-winning performance. Alternatively, Agatha’s estranged parents Stafford and Christina Weiss ( John Cusack and Olivia Williams, respectively) spend their lives attempting to bury prior indiscretions. It would seem that both Agatha, and her teen superstar younger brother, Benji (newcomer Evan Bird), are destined to suffer for their crimes.

Nobody can escape their past, but neither are they likely to with their gaze so starkly fixed on themselves; Cronenberg’s eye is also exacting. He and regular cinematographer Peter Suschitzky create a cold and impeccable visual style that is captivating while holding the audience at arm’s length.

It replicates the characters’ desire for perfection and the cool modern lines of their expansive homes, but equally it accentuates the vast emptiness that is ensconced beneath the surface. As the narrative advances, that void takes on a deeper, almost supernatural significance whilst retaining a darkly comic edge. After all, not often will you expect Cronenberg to resort to a - literal - toilet gag, but then, given the subject matter, it seems laceratingly appropriate.

Maps to the Stars release date 26th September

cert (15)

director David Cronenberg writer Bruce Wagner starring Julianne Moore, Mia Wasikowska Robert Pattinson, Sarah Gadon

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release date 12th September

cert (15)

director Matthew Warchus writer Stephen Beresford starring Bill Nighy, Andrew Scott, Dominic West

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Review by Cleaver Patterson

Pride

Pride, the new film from director Matthew Warchus and writer Stephen Beresford, could equally well have been called Courage. Its convictions - like the story at its heart - are what give this factually based British comedy/drama true grit as well as humour. It may at times be hard to view, but then so is much of cinema which is truly worthy of attention.

In 1980s Britain the communities of the miners and gay activists were each fighting bitter battles against the ruling classes in what they saw as a struggle for justice. Only after two of their factions - one from a Welsh mining town and the other from an inner London borough - came together in a common cause, did they find pride in themselves and the courage to stand up for what was right in the face of seemingly insurmountable opposition from all around them.

Who said humour had to be an easy experience.

Pride is typical of what British comedy films have come to be known for, particularly in recent years: the ability for ordinary people to find humour in hardship and frequently unpalatable and taboo subjects. 2003s Calendar Girls, 2010s Made in Dagenham, and the following year’s hit The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel all had that uniquely British ability to find dry and acidic amusement in situations like death, feminism and old age which, to others, would appear downbeat and even depressing. And so it is with Pride.

The 1980s were remembered as a grim period by those who lived outside the affluent regions of England’s Home Counties. During the long dark months of the miner’s strike between 1984 and 85, countless men in pit towns throughout Britain lost their jobs, putting them and their families through persecution at, as they saw it, the hands of Margaret Thatcher and her Conservative government. It was also a period of struggle for the equally despised gay and lesbian minority, many of whom were still forced to hide their sexuality in an apparently otherwise liberal and open-minded Britain. Out of this came an unlikely bond between the members of two outwardly alien worlds - a group of idealistic gays and lesbians from inner-city London who saw their own plight reflected in that of the miners, and the habitants of a small colliery town in South Wales whose initial fear of the young strangers grew into a lasting friendship built on a respect and acceptance they had failed to find elsewhere. To the world around them they may have had little in common, but in each-other they found a connection through a shared struggle against a hostile and hardened establishment.

Pride’s cast are perfectly suited with stalwarts Bill Nighy and Imelda Staunton injecting the principle characters of the mining community with warmth and humanity, while Andrew Scott and George MacKay stand out as two of the angst-ridden gay mens caught up, and frequently blinded by, their youthful enthusiasm for, and the romanticism of, their worthy cause.

On a purely superficial level the subjects at the heart of Pride may at first appear to have limited appeal to anyone beyond the borders of mainland Britain, or those who remember first-hand the struggles which lie at the film’s core. On closer inspection however, it captures perfectly the unique ability of the British to fight adversity through camaraderie and use humour as an antidote during the seemingly bleakest of periods of their nation’s history.

Rob the Mob release date 22nd September

Review by Adam Marshall

The films of Raymond De Felitta have a habit of sitting on the fence that divides humour and thriller. His work in the 00s tended to sway to the humorous side of the rubicon, taking a largely bright and breezy approach to would-be complex family dramas. For Rob the Mob - his first outing for five years - he takes the alternative path; a based-ona-true-story heist thriller with a smattering of his easy sense of humour.

Tommy (Michael Pitt) and Rosie (a splendidly mouthy Nina Arianda) are an in-and-out of prison kind of a couple; volatile yet likeable (despite their predilection to carry out armed robberies on local businesses). Skiving from his job while on probation, Tommy wanders into the public gallery of the early-90s trial of infamous Brooklyn hit man Sammy “The Bull” Gravano. As addresses of New York mafia social clubs are disclosed to the court, Tommy strikes upon a genius idea - in his eyes at least.

He and Rosie begin sticking up the local mob watering holes, apparently safe in the knowledge that no Mafioso in his right mind would call the police to report the crimes. The national press soon gets hold of the story and, dubbed ‘Bonnie and Clyde’, they become cult celebrities. But things soon become complicated by some unexpected swag they lay their hands on in one robbery - the bona fide family tree of the Gambino crime family; an artefact that has the potential to bring down the entire east coast mafia.

Unfortunately, Rob the Mob puts the ‘ex-con’ firmly into extremely conventional. It is beleaguered by a plot and characters that bring little to an already saturated genre, jam-packed with bags of booty being emptied over living room floors, cops who will play dirty to bring down the mafia and low-level lieutenants with names like Joey D and Vinny Gorgeous. Indeed, the portrayal of the mob as a cosy old group of avuncular simpletons isn’t altogether comfortable. Nor is Andy Garcia’s hirsute Big Al; an organised crime kingpin presented as a loveable grandpa who just wants to spend his days making arancini and never even wanted any part of ‘the family’ in the first place. De Felitta’s nostalgic fondness for the Cosa Nostra is jarring, bordering on the distasteful.

Tommy’s motivations do at least prevent him from being an entirely one-dimensional down-onhis-luck chancer. His underlying embitterment against the mafia for killing his father leaves us questioning Tommy’s reasons for humiliating his victims. Is it simply for the money, or by way of some primordial vengeance?

And with the occasional brief shot of Manhattan’s still standing World Trade Centre, there is a nod to universal parallels such as the tensions between the West and the Middle East - violence begets violence, an unbreakable loop that will proliferate generations to come. But while inter-generational brutality inevitably causes irresistible ripples through history, the same can’t be said for this forgettable nuts and bolts crime caper.

cert (15)

director Raymond De Felitta writer Jonathan Fernandez starring Michael Pitt, Nina Arianda, Andy Garcia, Ray Romano

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Review by Shelagh M. Rowan-Legg

Salomé

release date 21st September

cert (15)

director Al Pacino writer Oscar Wilde starring Kevin Anderson, Jessica Chastain, Ralph Guzzo, Al Pacino

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While Oscar Wilde’s comedies have always enjoyed popularity and numerous stage and screen productions, his controversial drama Salomé is not as well known, at least to American audiences. A raw and intense adaptation of the Biblical story of King Herod’s obsession with his stepdaughter Salomé, her obsession with imprisoned John the Baptist, and the subsequent erotic dance that leads to the Baptist’s beheading, it’s no wonder an actor such as Al Pacino would be attracted not only to the role of King Herod, but putting the stage version in which he appeared on the big screen.

A film such as this comes down to two things: how it is filmed and the strength of the performances. On the former point, rather than make a traditional cinematic adaptation of the play, Pacino recreates the stage space and has the camera move in on and around the performers. This might seem a little awkward at first and likely asks the most adjustment from the audience (although there are precedents, for example Dogville). But once the tone is set, this leaves room for the camera to focus on the actors. The camera must become the audience in the empty theatre, and while the most frequent shot is the close-up, these are as often as not given at askew angles reminiscent of German expressionism. When there is a wide shot, is does not necessarily come from the theatre seating, but sometimes the back of the stage, or slightly above, as if to keep the audience aware that this is both a theatrical event and yet perhaps some odd carnival performance, best viewed almost in the round.

And this is truly an actor’s film. Europeans, Brits especially, might get a bit haughty around American actors performing material by writers such as Wilde or Shakespeare, but US actors often are willing to get far more emotionally raw. The focal supporting parts, Roxanne Hart as Herodias and Kevin Anderson as John, are interesting counterparts. Hart plays Herod’s wife with calm conviction, as a shrewd, calculating woman, aware of her husband’s lusting after her daughter, yet fully able to cut him down should he act upon his desires.

Anderson’s John is full of prophetic bombast and righteous anger, taking the part well over the top as is necessary, and yet never without dignity.

Pacino shows his devotion to the craft through an impeccably timed performance as Herod, taking each line as a further step towards inevitable rage and cursed acceptance of fate. But the real star is Jessica Chastain; the role of Salomé is arguably the most difficult, as she must go from hate to love of John in a few lines and make it believable.

Chastain’s Salomé is sexual without appearing as a slut; cunning yet still somewhat naïve; knows how to play Herod at his own game yet remains true to her convictions. Chastain is luminous, not only in her beauty, but her ability to play to the camera these conflicting states without losing focus.

Review by Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy

Yann Gonzalez’ feature-length debut You & the Night announces itself with plenty of surface bawdiness and hipster raunch: an orgy setting, a score from French electro-indie heavyweights M83 (leader Anthony is Gonzalez’ brother), a wink-wink cameo from paragon of Gallic erotica Béatrice Dalle, ex-footballer Eric Cantona unveiling an already-infamous prosthetic penis. Gonzalez has gained comparisons to Almodovar off the back of his film’s sexual content, but fails to grasp either the Spanish auteur’s grace or his lust.

In the confines of a quasi-futuristic apartment similar to a Star Trek set, the young couple Ali and Matthias (Kate Moran and Nils Schneider) await guests to join them in an orgy. Welcomed in by their cross-dressing maid (Nicolas Maury) are a group of character constructs, each with their own tales to share. There’s The Stud (Cantona), an earthly-seeming gent dealing with life as a sex object; The Star (the amazingly-named Fabienne Babe), an actress crippled by her apparent notoriety and failed transgressions; The Slut ( Julie Brémond), whose sexed-up comic relief shelters her grief; The Teen (Alain-Fabien Delon, son of Alain), whose presence is mysteriously alluring to Ali. After their stories filter out slowly, their hosts reveal an odd history, pushing the film into odder waters. The orgy eventually arrives, but it is more mental than physical: imagine a deconstruction of Demolition Man’s virtual sex scene and you’re on the right route.

Gonzalez’ film may or may not be making reference to Marco Brambilla’s only feature film with this plot thread – it would be one of many winks towards cinematic transgressions. The time-hopping story of Ali and Matthias is presented in a way that recalls Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio; the interstitial score by M83 sounds like an elaborate tribute to Tangerine Dream’s film music. Elsewhere, there’s a touch of Eighties chic to the costumes and opening titles. Schneider’s presence nods to his homme fatale of Xavier Dolan’s Heartbeats, another filmmaker frank about his neon-tinged influences. As a debuting feature filmmaker, these stylistic and aesthetic references are understandable – Gonzalez is yet to find a distinctive voice, hence these mashup creations. Yet when he shuns his inspirations and is left to his own devices, Gonzalez’s film floats adrift. The apartment where much of the film is set aims for a theatrical minimalism, but feels airless, claustrophobic to a fault. The dialogue between the characters feels like an arid mix of over-written loucheness (“kiss like a she-wolf, a fury!”) and bargain-basement philosophy, creating endless scenes of undeveloped monologues.

Most alarmingly for a film revolving around sex, You & The Night contains little erotic charge, kitschy or otherwise. You can see the game cast trying their hardest to elevate the material, bending over backwards to create the transgressive environment Gonzalez dearly desires. However, there is no spark to these scenes, little personality for the film to build beyond, no graceful periods for Gonzales to deflower. For all its excited reference points, You & The Night reflects nothing more than its own porn parody – albeit with less self-awareness.

You & the Night release date 3rd October

cert (18)

director Yann Gonzalez writer Yann Gonzalez starring Guy Pearce, Robert Pattinson, Scoot McNairy

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Palo Alto

release date 17th October

cert (15)

writers Gia Coppola starring Emma Roberts, James Franco, Jack Kilmer

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Review by David Hall

director Gia Coppola

The painful earnestness of Gia Coppola’s debut picture is at least simpatico with its drifting, youthful protagonists. Coppola takes the recent collection of short stories by James Franco (themselves a bunch of Bret Easton Ellis-ish vignettes, mostly shorn of Ellis’ wit, mordancy and creeping dread) and filters them through a somnambulistic universe populated by utterly disenchanted high schoolers.

Of the crowd, Coppola focuses in on shy girl April (Emma Roberts) who likes Teddy ( Jack Kilmer) but is attracted to her much older football coach ( James Franco), Teddy’s best friend Fred (Nat Wolff ) a monumental asshole who is cruel, possibly sociopathic and Emily (Zoe Levin) a good-time girl and the object of Fred’s occasional affection.

Coppola returns to this core group throughout the film, in a series of vignettes, as the characters navigate the emotionally haphazard path into adulthood.

Palo Alto works best in its small moments of dreadful, deadly accuracy. And it must be said that Nat Wolff, in an extremely wired performance, is at the centre of most of them, especially those he shares with Levin. His Fred is a reminder that, in order to survive High School, often the best tactic is to deploy naked aggression and an air of total snottiness at all times. Wolff is a livewire and utterly unpredictable; a major plus in a film that too often has an air of woozy familiarity that can occasionally feel suffocating.

Aesthetically, Coppola plays things very close to Aunt Sofia’s playbook of woozy visuals and hip soundtrack selections but whereas Sofia has, admittedly over the course of five highly distinctive films, developed an almost supernatural ability to convey ennui without making the actual films dull, Palo Alto on the other hand frequently feels draining. The adult characters too, are disaffected and distracted to the point of being practically comedic; April’s stepdad is an overgrown stoner academic who still plays videogames, Fred’s sexually confused father makes awkward overtures toward Teddy.

Oddly for such a diffuse work, Palo Alto actually flickers into life right at the end of the film, when the emotional stakes are raised and the simmeringly creepy behaviour of Nat starts to unravel. It should be said that the performances all round are really nuanced and believable, with Roberts and Kilmer doing fine work throughout; nailing the emotional inarticulacy that strikes at a particular age. But therein lies the ultimate frustration of Palo Alto. It’s a severely narcotized account of teenage life; all the characters are constantly smoking, high wasted. Not uncommon for the teen experience of course but often this zoned-out vibe extends to the experience of watching the film itself. There’s no question that Palo Alto indicates the arrival of a promising young director. And one with that uncanny Coppola trait of casting to perfection.

But the downside of Coppola’s success in capturing dead-eyed solipsism and emotional disconnect means that for long stretches of Palo Alto we have to spend time with characters who simply aren’t that interesting to be around.

In the The Texas Chainsaw Frame: Massacre (1974)

words by David Hall

H

ow is it that, 40 years on, the greatest American nightmare still retains the power to disturb? The bare bones of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre have been picked apart and devoured over four decades of sequels, remakes, re-imaginings and rip-offs. It is one of the most discussed and analysed horror films of all time. Tobe Hooper, the film’s director, has never matched it – never even came close.

Is there an American horror film before or since with such a relentless, tangible sense of dread? And one that achieves this deranged state with such sparseness of blood and gore – whose acts of hideous atrocity are implied, unseen, off screen. One can point to Daniel Pearl’s grainy, yet elegant DoP work and that remarkable, dissonant score by Hooper and Wayne Bell? Standout moments , indelibly burned into the mind’s eye that induce a relentless visual symphony of dread; a girl on a meat hook, human bones and skin as interior decoration, that extraordinary introduction of the film’s monstrous, pitiable villain Leatherface.

And yet the ultimate answer may lie in the incredible performance (and onscreen reactions) of the film’s ‘Final Girl’; Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns). Burns sadly passed away this August, aged just 65, but her onscreen immortality was secured in 1974 when audiences first saw her give what must be one of the mostly fiercely committed and sustained performances of primal fear in cinema history.

While the intense humming of Leatherface’s infamous ‘saw is a near-constant source of unease, surely the most distressing aural element is the constant, piercing and all-too-believable screams of Sally as she endures an almost unending cycle of trauma at the hands of her captors. The image above is of Sally in the film’s dying moments, in the back of a truck she has managed to bundle herself onto, crying, screaming and – yes – laughing as she pulls away from the apoplectic Leatherface. It is a picture of pure terror. (During the chase scene through the undergrowth, Burns actually cut herself, fairly badly, on the branches in the woods therefore much of the blood on her torn clothes is real). The film ends with Sally ostensibly safe, the ordeal finally over. But that

last, lingering look at her tells us she will be reliving this nightmare for years to come (Sidenote: In Brian De Palma’s Blow Out (1981), a sound engineer played by John Travolta is trying to find the perfect scream, something he only achieves after the film’s cruel, ironic and tragic dénouement. In that film it’s provided by another character called Sally. But even her real ones can’t match the ones Burns manages throughout this picture).

Depending on your aesthetic bent or critical perspective, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is *really* about family, patriarchy, Vietnam, carnivores. Whatever. When you’re watching the film, for the first time, what it is really about can be located in Marilyn Burn’s reaction(s). Beyond theorising or metaphor this is a film that understands and communicates fear. Surprisingly hard to replicate on film but immortalised here – in that manic last shot of Sally – in all its unbridled, gory glory.

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Jordan McGrath

David Hall

Founder / Editor-in-Chief / Designer

Managing Editor

jordanmcgrath@veritefilmmag.com

davidhall@veritefilmmag.com

thanks: Contributors Joseph Fahim Ben Nicholson Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy Cleaver Patterson Sam Moore Kelsey Eichhorn Christina Newland Clarisse Loughrey Timothy E. Raw Elisa Armstrong Tom Gore Shelagh M Rowan-Legg Adam Marshall Sam Moore

Proofing David Hall, Dan Auty & Jessica Chamberlain

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Image credits: Artificial Eye - 1,8,10,11,12,13,14 / FrightFest - 22,24,25,26,27 / Altitude Film Distribution - 28, 31 / eOne Entertainment - 32,34,35,61 / Universal - 44,46,47 / Eureka Entertainment - 50,51,52,53 / Lionsgate UK - 58 / StudioCanal UK - 59 / Metrodome - 60,64 / Koch Media - 63 / Peccadillo Pictures - 65

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