I'm Giving You A Spade. A Spade.

Man, Taste of Cherry has been on my radar for so long now, and I can't believe I've never watched it. I'm entirely ashamed of myself, in fact.

In the three Kiarostami films I have watched over these last nine months or so (we had this one and we have 10 coming up also) there is a very, very distinct style, and even setting. They are all digital video, they all feel like documentaries (though I'm never going to label any but Close-Up as even approaching mockumentary) and they all have a lot to do with cars. Well, they are all set for a large part (or, in the case of 10, for the whole part) in or around cars. I am therefore intrigued to the max with Kiarostami's first non-Iranian film, Certified Copy, which from the trailer seems bright, glossy, and features Juliette Binoche. We shall see.

Taste of Cherry centres on Mr Badii (Homayoun Ershadi), a man with a suitcase of money driving through Tehran trying to find someone to help him die. That's not entirely accurate, actually. He is not looking for someone to help him die, merely for someone to bury him once he has died. He confronts a few people, from a boy in the military to a seminarist from Afghanistan before coming upon a taxidermist, who says that he will help though he tries to talk Badii out of it beforehand, revealing that he had tried to commit suicide earlier in his life and was now glad that he hadn't.


It is a very simple conceit for a film, but with Kiarostami's deft touch (something which, according to the cover notes for 10, saw him voted the most important director of the 1990s by a collection of leading international critics - I'm not going to argue, despite the fact that this was unreferenced...) it becomes something incredibly beautiful and complex. After seeing the film, the title itself brings emotion bubbling to the surface, coming as it does from a beautiful little monologue during the film:


If you look at the four seasons, each season brings fruit. In summer there's fruit, in autumn too. Winter brings different fruit, and spring too. No mother can fill her fridge with such a variety of fruit for her children. No mother can do as much for her children as God does for His creatures. You want to refuse all that? You want to give it all up? You want to give up the taste of cherries? 


And all this while Badii is being given directions by his passenger! Coming as it does within the mundanity of 'turn right', 'turn right', and the pauses between these directions, gives such beautiful words added poignancy and beauty. 


It is hard to truly do justice to something so beautiful, yet so simple, by talking about it. Taste of Cherry won the Palme d'Or in 1997 (tied with Unagi) and picked up a couple of critics awards for foreign language film in the States that year as well. It is soft and subtle but touching in many ways. It's probably one of the best films I've seen over the last year as well, and considering I just counted that I've seen 223 since I started this on November 9, that must be saying something. Kiarostami is, and shall be forever more, very high on my list of directors whose work I must absorb as much of as possible. 5 stars.


(Did I really say 'intrigued to the max' up there? I am so, so sorry.)

Haneke Love?

I haven't made much of a secret about the fact that I quite like Michael Haneke (see here and here), and it was with a great deal of expectation that I chugged myself off to see his latest The White Ribbon, thrilled to find that it was still playing in cinemas after I somehow managed to completely miss the fact that it released, oh, four months or so ago, despite the fact that I've been hanging out for it since it won the Palme d'Or back in May last year, beating A Prophet down to the Grand Prix (which has got to be one of my favourite films of my hundred odd so far in this marathon.)

The White Ribbon takes place in a small German town in the lead up to the outbreak of WWI. It's quite a difficult film to describe the plot of without either giving too much away, or becoming incredibly verbose. It is effectively a microcosm of society and humanity - there are powerful beings who show heart, innocent beings who (perhaps) show malice, death, love, destruction, hope and sorrow. A pastor is cruel to his children. A baron show sympathy for someone who destroys his crop. A doctor molests his daughter and abuses his mistress. But, in true Haneke style, they all have opposing forces of good or evil playing out within them. And the narrative is plagued by strange, dangerous things happening - a wire strung between trees tripping the doctor's horse as he rides home; the baron's son being strung up and tortured; the pastor's pet bird being impaled. Is it the children?


The film is black and white, shot by Christian Berger, who also lensed Hidden and The Piano Teacher and picked up an Oscar nomination and just took home the ACS award for his work. While much of the work is great, I thought the fact that it was shot colour and then monochromed in post detrimentally affected the quality of the visual tone - the blacks seemed a little brown, the shadows not as sharp as I really think they should have been. I've done this before myself, and I have never thought it looks as good as when you shoot it black and white, so I'm actually a little puzzled as to all the notice... and I should note that I only found out that it was shot colour after making this opinion of the look, so it's not a situation where I went into the film with my opinion coloured (boom boom.)


The acting was fairly fantastic from all of the cast, especially the children, many of whom were quite young. Haneke kept them all in check, reigning them in to fit the familial and social sensibility of the day - emotional externalisation wasn't really the norm in the early 1910s. 


But still... I actually thought when I emerged from the darkened theatre that something might have gone over my head, maybe I don't know enough about European history at the time and there was some important subtext that I didn't understand. This may be the case, or I might not have been paying enough attention to the subtleties, or I might actually just be stupid. But I'm familiar with Haneke's work - maybe that was it. I know I was waiting for something confronting, a shocking scene, that never quite came, and this may have tempered my ability to be overly confronted by what was going on bit by bit, which in retrospect is quite full on.


Actually, writing this now, I really want to see the film again. I'm going to give it 3.5 stars for now, because that's where I'm hovering, but when it hits DVD I'll check it out and maybe my opinion will change. Today, though, I'm hoping for an Audiard win for The Prophet on Sunday, though apparently the smart money is on Argentinean entry The Secret In Their Eyes, which I have not yet seen.

You Got Me Hotter Than Georgia Asphalt.

I'm a big David Lynch fan. Mulholland Drive is one of my favourite films. Twin Peaks is one of my favourite television shows. Blue Velvet, The Elephant Man - love 'em.


So it was with a great deal of expectation that I approached his Wild At Heart, his 1990 picture that brought him home the Palme d'Or. And... maybe my expectation did bad things. It just didn't really do it for me.

Sure, it was filled with Lynchian moments, but even they seemed a bit dulled down. Yes, it was over the top, the performances were extreme and caricatured in his distinctively twisted way. But it didn't have the through-line I wanted, it didn't leave me gasping with want for clarity, it didn't seem to have everything and anything going on below the surface. It seemed, in a way, to almost be a straight story told in a kooky way. And David, you're better than that.


Nicholas Cage plays Sailor, a con released back into the arms of his lover Lula (Laura Dern.) Very much against the wishes of Lula's nymphomaniac alcoholic mother Marietta (Diane Ladd) the two run off to California, trailed by private investigator Johnnie (Harry Dean Stanton), who has been in love with Lula for a long time, and gangster Marcelles Santos (J.E. Freeman), both hired independently by Marietta. En route, Sailor and Lula come across the aftermath of a car accident, with the lone survivor dying in front of them, which Lula sees as a bad omen and begs to stop at a town called Big Tuna in Texas to rest up for a bit - she's also become quite ill, strangely mostly in the morning...


While there, Sailor drops in on an old friend Perdita (Isabella Rossellini), as he's strapped for cash and hoping to make some more. He also meets Bobby Peru (Willem Dafoe), an intriguing character working with Perdita who asks him to go in on a simple feed store job for some quick cash. After Bobby blows away the two clerks unnecessarily, he announces that he's been hired to kill Sailor before being shot by sheriff officers who have turned up at the scene, then accidentally (and quite graphically) blowing his own head off. Sailor is arrested and spends another five years in jail whilst his young son with Lula grows up. Lula and child meet Sailor at the train station on his release, and Sailor quickly realises that he is not what they need now, before being beaten up by a street gang, discovering with a Wizard Of Oz hallucination that he is wrong, and runs over car roofs back to Lula, singing to her as the credits roll.


You see? It just doesn't quite sound crazy enough. And it plays so straight as well. Cage is fine as Sailor, playing an early installment of the same character he will riff off for a long time, while Dern is similarly acceptable as Lula, though somewhat over the top to the extent where any semblance of truth in her character kind of drowns (except for the late scene at the train station, which I found strangely moving.) The real highlights were Ladd as the mother (netting an Oscar nomination) and Dafoe as Bobby, beautifully chilling, seedy, sleazy and memorable.


Other than that, though, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot to say about the film. It's just not particularly memorable, really. Muddles its way through without a great deal of remarkability. 2.5 stars.

We Do Not Make B Pictures Here At Capitol.

I try. I try and I try and I try. I really do. I try to like the Coen Brothers' films. I recall liking Fargo, though I saw that a long time ago - I do recall liking it a lot, though, so hopefully time hasn't dampened it for me. Maybe I'll check it out again soon, actually. I've seen an awful lot of their films as well. In fact, I mostly like them, and then somewhere towards the end I turn and end up getting angry with them. I remember that in The Man Who Wasn't There. I remember it in No Country For Old Men. The Big Lebowski we've already discussed. And now Barton Fink, a film that has been on my radar since it came up for some class I did back in uni. All I remember was that some lines from the screenplay were involved (making me think it was one of my writing classes, though who can be sure) and that I liked them, always intended to check out the bigger picture, as it were.

W.T.F.

Barton Fink (John Turturro) is a Jewish New York playwright who has just had a critical smash in his home town. He is lured to LA to make some quick, easy money working on contract at Capitol, under Jack Lipnick (Michael Lerner), the reasoning from his agent being that he makes a couple of thousand a week in Hollywood, and then he can afford to devote himself to making socially serious plays for a lot longer in the Big Apple. (Keep in mind this is the early 1940s and that money means a fortune, whereas now it is a pretty decent living.)


He checks himself into a cheap hotel and is set the task of writing a boxing picture, only he has never seen a boxing picture (he doesn't really watch movies at all), doesn't like boxing, and has no inspiration, or even really an idea of where to start. And he's under pressure to perform. Cue his neighbour, Charlie Meadows (John Goodman.) Meadows sells insurance, and is a drunk, a friendly fellow, prone to barging in and making Fink feel decidedly uncomfortable. The two, in the end, strike up quite a friendship.


Meanwhile, Fink has called upon W.P. Mayhew (John Maloney), his writing hero also selling himself in the movies. He strikes up a friendship with Mayhew's partner Audrey Taylor (Judy Davis), but that all ends badly in his hotel room. Meadows heads in to help him clean up the mess, and then things start to go strange.


This is what I mean. Things start to go strange. There's just no such thing as a straight story in the Coen universe. Not that I necessarily want a straight story, but I don't want one where I feel the filmmakers are smugly sitting there saying 'ha, we're sooo much smarter and cooler than you.' And that's what I always feel. I sit there waiting for something random to fall from the sky, or for the hallway to suddenly catch fire. I get that we're talking in metaphors. I get it. I really do. But the hallway on fire? Or UFOs? Or whatever? I was mostly enjoying it up to that point!


Actually, I wasn't overly in love with Barton Fink at any point. It was mildly entertaining, and then I just wanted to pelt my television (or, more accurately, my friend's television as I was at his house) with olives. I didn't, obviously, because it was my friend's television. And I didn't have any olives. But still.


Goodman was wildly entertaining. The script was smart enough, harking back a bit to the age of movies it was set in. Turturro inhabited his character quite well. This is probably my least favourite thing I've seen Davis in, and let's remember that I love her to death. But not so much here. Lerner is fabulous. It won the Palme d'Or, and apparently was the first film to win that prize, the Best Director prize and the Best Actor prize in the same year. That's about it. 2 stars. I'm actually getting angry again sitting here writing about it.

The Last Time I Was Really Happy... I Got So Fat.

There you go. Happy = fat.


Ahem.


Back in 1989, a film was playing in West Berlin (the Allied controlled section) when the wall came down. People from East Berlin went into the cinema expecting to see some serious Western porn, but left sorely disappointed. What was that film? Why, Sex, Lies and Videotape of course!


Steven Soderbergh's debut feature won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1989, and announced the appearance on the world stage of someone who would go on to become one of the most recognised directors in the world - though it took until the one-two of Erin Brokovich and Traffic in 2000 and the huge commercial success of Ocean's Eleven the following year to really cement that status.

Sex, Lies and Videotape features four main characters. Ann (Andie MacDowell) is married to John (Peter Gallagher), who is having an affair with Ann's sister Cynthia (Laura San Giacomo in her credited feature debut.) An old school friend of John's comes to town, and the appearance of Graham (James Spader, who won Best Actor at Cannes and then, curiously, only picked up an Independent Spirit nomination elsewhere) throws that curious three-way relationship into turmoil. Ann initially dislikes Graham, but after they go apartment hunting his wily ways win her over and they start a sort of friendship, briefly, which ends once she discovers a pile of video tapes in his home. He quite honestly tells her that they are tapes of women talking about sex, their history, desires, fantasies, anything really, and this freaks her out a little. Cynthia, quite the little hornbag, meanwhile, is fascinated by this new friend of her sister and tracks him down, flirting outrageously (as is her wont) and then making her own tape for him. It is this tape and Graham's honesty that bring the truth of Cynthia and John's relationship out into the open - she confesses it on the tape, knowing that Graham won't let anyone else see it. But when Ann begins to suspect the affair, she mentions it to Graham, and he confirms it.


I won't go any further into the plot for fear of giving away what little remains a secret. All of the performances are reasonably strong, but San Giacomo was by far the standout. Her sultry, slutty sister was perfect. The other three were all fine, nothing overly exemplary, but she was fantastic. I've always loved watching her pop up in films like Pretty Woman, but it's a pity she never got to really show her chops like this again.


The film is an interesting one. I don't really think it's a brilliant film, more of an excellent exercise. That's what it felt like to me. I wasn't particularly riveted by what was going on in the film as much as I was riveted by how it was going on. The form of the film was more interesting than the content, I think, which was really quite stock-standard. Thematically, nothing was pushed, but structurally it was fascinating. I think that's what I'm trying to say. I'm remembering the film more fondly for how it played out than the specifics of what played out.


Gah, I'm not even making sense to myself. It's an interesting film, worth the watch, but I went in expecting fireworks (though not porn!) and got something entirely different. 3.5 stars.

Ok. Thanks.

With this film it means I have seen all of the Palme d'Or winners of the last decade with the exception of The White Ribbon, which I don't believe has been released in the UK yet. If it has, sucks to be me. I really wanna see it.


4 months, 3 weeks, 2 days won the big gold branch in 2007, and was then outrageously and controversially snubbed for even a nomination at the Oscars a few months later. Many think that that, coupled with the Gomorrah snub last year, is why they have tweaked their voting rules. But then, the Academy so rarely pays attention to the Palme d'Or winners anyway (unless they're English-language, and even then...) that I don't think it's so much to go on. The English-speaking world kind of ignores the celebrated French winners in general - it's the way it roles. You're either going to be big at Cannes, or you can hope for American box office or award glory. The two rarely meet.

Cristian Mungiu's breakout was a bit of a big-hitter in its year. The Romanian production took out a bunch of critics awards around the world, was nominated for a bunch more, and even took home the Best Film prize at the European Film Awards. Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) is helping her roommate Gabita (Laura Vasiliu) procure an illegal abortion during the 1980s. Of course, things go wrong. I'm not going to go into it. What goes wrong is what drives the narrative of the film, though I don't think it drives the film itself. 


In true European tradition (and especially the Romanian film tradition of late on the international stage), realism is the key. It's all about showing the place as these characters would find it in real life, in those times: grubby, broken, flawed. It ain't pretty, and Mungiu and his team don't try and show it that way. It's depressing, it's reality. The streets are cold, the hotel is stark, the world is cruel, and there is no easy way out. Money isn't going to make the truth go away, and besides, who has money?


It is arduous, and there are few letups along the way. The characters plow through and hope for the best. Sometimes the best happens, sometimes it doesn't, but their own lack of recognition of the gravity of the situation in which they find themselves doesn't help the matter. It's not that they laugh it off, but it is a serious crime at that time (whether or not is should be is a matter the film doesn't go near - there is no moral judgement here) and some of their actions don't seem to reflect that. People could go to prison, and yet Gabita won't follow the abortionists instructions, which leads to hearbreak all round.


I think the true trauma inherent in the film doesn't come from the abortion at all, but from something that happens just before. That is what the friends have to struggle with, have to come to terms with. Their anger, fear and humiliation is directed both at each other and at themselves, but they don't have an opportunity to truly feel these things whilst Gabita is lying with her legs in the air waiting for a foetus to come out. That's only half their concern. It's what they had to do to get there that propels the drama.


Excellent performances from all, especially from the two girls, and that gritty realism help the cause. And while I think it's a very good film, I'm not entirely sure it's the masterpiece that all are holding it up to be. Though the relentless pursuit of the morose is praiseworthy, especially when it doesn't end up moribund. Grueling but rewarding is the name of this game.


4 stars. That might increase. Just writing this out has made me appreciate it more than I think I did just after I finished it. I guess with time to fester within my soul it could prove to be one of those films that I keep coming back to.

If Only...

Nanni Moretti is a fairly major name in Italian cinema, known as an actor, producer, director and writer, who has starred in many of his own films (something that often frustrates me...) I must confess I only had a passing knowledge of his name prior to a couple of months ago, and The Son's Room (La Stanza Del Figlio) is, I'm pretty sure, the only film I have seen either featuring him or made by him. As such, there is a distinct possibility that my appreciation of his performance in this film is not tempered by having seen him in other films, especially his own, something that I think affects my appreciation of the performances of other actor/directors such as Woody Allen or Clint Eastwood.

The Son's Room is about Giovanni (Moretti), and his reaction to the sudden, unexpected death of his son Andrea (Giuseppe Sanfelice.) Giovanni is a psychiatrist, seemingly well off, with a beautiful wife Paola (Laura Morante) and two children, Andrea and Irene (Jasmine Trinca.) Andrea is in some trouble at school, but it isn't really that bad, while Giovanni has some difficult patients, one of whom calls him out on a Sunday. On his return he is informed that Andrea had died unexpectedly in a diving accident whilst he was with his patient.


Giovanni, naturally, doesn't take it well. Paola is devastated, while Irene seems to be disocciating and trying to hold the family unit together, but Giovanni is blaming himself and the patient who drew him away from his family on that Sunday. He imagines what the day may have entailed should he have said no to this patient, and they are all happy endings - running with his son, enjoying an ice cream, just generally keeping him away from the sea. He quickly goes back to work and proves particularly unable to deal with his patients problems - to him they all seem so trivial and pathetic when he is dealing with the loss of someone so dear to him, and his passion is now gone. With his son gone and his lust for his work gone, his wife a mess and his daughter struggling to hold it all together, he seems destined for a tragic spiral toward the bottom.


A letter appears from a girl called Arianna (Sofia Vigliar), a love letter. Andrea and Arianna had crossed over for a day at a camp a few months earlier, and she does not know about his death. When she arrives at the family door, at the behest of Paola, things begin to come back together for the family as they take a quick trip to the French border to drop hitchhiking Arianna and her friend off.


The Son's Room is a beautiful little portrait of loss and hope, of dreams and reality. It in no way overextends itself, content to dwell on the immediate reactions and responses of the three remaining family members, all to eager to cling to the well of discovery offered reluctantly by Arianna. With the exception of the patients Giovanni is seeing, the characterisations and performances are subtle and underplayed, and in some ways the hysteria of his patients is a soothing antidote to this - they're in a way offering up the illogical thoughts and grief that the family, particularly Giovanni and Irene, aren't as willing, or perhaps aren't able, to show. Yes, the patients are very stereotypical crazies, but as facets of Giovanni there is no other way to portray them.


The film won the Palme d'Or in 2001 over such films as Moulin Rouge!, Mulholland Drive and La Pianiste (and Shrek! Shrek was up for the Palme d'Or!), as well as many other lesser known titles, and I'm not about to come out and say it was more deserving than any one of them - though how often does the Palme d'Or go to a film that seems to have the general opinion behind it? I will say it is a solid character study, a well-crafted film about a moment and how that can affect people within a short space of time. Flashes of unexpected human beauty come through with Giovanni's imaginings of what could have been, and they are truly beautiful. Simple, but, strangely, lovely. 4 stars.

Don't Let's Spoil Everything, We've Only Just Met.

Michaelangelo Antonioni has a Golden Lion (for Il Deserto Rosso) and a Golden Bear (for La Notte), but only one Palme d'Or (from five nominations) for Blow-Up, his first English-language film from 1966. It is also the only film to net him Oscar nominations - two of them, for the screenplay and direction.

The film was quite controversial in its time, especially in the States, where it is purported to be the first film to receive a release despite featuring full-frontal female nudity (I kept my eye out for this nudity, and the only place I could pick it possibly being was so damn brief and improbable that it doesn't surprise me it was not an issue...) Taking place in the drug-fuelled 60s, the film follows a photographer, Thomas (David Hemmings), who, whilst inspecting an antique shop he wants to buy because the gays are moving into the area and he feels he can make a fortune off them, happens up to a park where he takes some photos of a couple cavorting. The female member of this couple, Jane (Vanessa Redgrave), confronts him, trying to get the photos off him, obviously paranoid about what they will reveal.


Jane follows Thomas back to his studio and again confronts him. Thomas is obviously quite successful - his studio is spacious, he has models coming in and out and girls begging to have their photographs taken - and he is not used to being spoken to like this. He hands her a different roll of film and she leaves. He then sets about developing the photos, and as he does he notices that there appears to be a man in the bushes with a gun. Later, with photos he took after the confrontation, he sees what he assumes to be a dead body, lying off in the distance.


Amidst a haze of parties and groupies, he grows more and more paranoid, especially when he returns to his studio to find the prints he had laid out destroyed and the original negatives gone - his whole place has been ransacked. He goes to the park and sees the dead body - he goes to his agent, who is at a party, and tries to bring him along to show him, but the agent is way too fucked to care, and Thomas stays at the party. The next morning, the body is gone - or was it ever there?


It's a hard film to peg down. What exactly is it about? It seems to me to be a riff on the times. Drugs were everywhere, celebrity was everywhere, parties were everywhere. Everyone who did anything and made any money off it was somebody, and that was Thomas. How many drugs had he consumed leading up to the episode of his life that takes place in the film? Who cares. Was there really a dead body? Who cares! What was Jane's motivation? Should it be seen that the burglary of Thomas' home means something untoward did go down in that park? Who cares. Maybe she was just with someone she didn't want to be photographed with. Really, really didn't want to be photographed with. And then maybe Thomas made it all up. But maybe he didn't. What's important is that Antonioni takes us inside this paranoia without resorting to tricks of psychology. He shows it as it is, luring us into a film that may not really mean anything, but by portraying what it portrays, means a hell of a lot.


It bears, I think, resemblance to films like Elephant, in that it doesn't try and explain. What it shows on screen is what it shows on screen. Yes, it tries to delve into what Thomas sees (or thinks he sees), but it never judges, it never tries to come up with reasons. It just is. And it is beautiful for it.


A compelling film, interesting, mesmerising, thought-provoking and intelligent, yet not so intelligent as to be self-indulgent. I'm dead certain it influenced a whole generation of filmmakers in some way, and I'm sure that, provided it is watched, will continue to influence those to come. Like so many of the major works of master filmmakers, the historicism of the film's placement within society is not important, because it is entirely irrelevant. What matters here is what happens between the lights going down and the lights going up, not on screen, but in the viewer. 5 stars.

Some Heavy Shit's Going Down.

I brought up Gus Van Sant's 'Death' trilogy when I wrote about Gerry, and after watching it I couldn't get Elephant out of my head, so I rewatched it. (Actually, in the last week and with another coming up, I've done a bit of rewatching recently. I think it's all these 'Best of the 00s' lists coming in thick and strong at the moment - reminding me of what I've loved over the last decade and getting me craving to check them out again. Hold tight, as I'll more than likely rewatch Requiem For A Dream, Mulholland Drive and Dancer In The Dark shortly. They're all top ten of the noughties for me, I reckon.)

Anyway, Elephant would be right up as one of my favs from the last ten years. I didn't know a great deal about it coming into my first viewing back at the beginning of 2004 when it released in Australia, other than that it had won the Palme d'Or that year. And I was suitably gobsmacked by it. It was, and remains, such an amazingly powerful film, so relevant (and it's sad that it is still relevant today, showing a true ongoing tragedy both in youth, schooling and gun control), so beautiful (something its unofficial and much lesser 'remake' of sorts 2:37 tried to match but just couldn't) and so singularly striking in composition, tone and subject.


Elephant centers around a high school, just your average, run-of-the-mill American high school on an average day with nothing special going on, when suddenly 'some heavy shit' does, in fact, go on. John (John Robinson) is taken to his school late by his drunk father, and gets in trouble with the principal. Eli has been off taking photographs, and goes into the lab to develop them. Michelle has just been blasted by her gym teacher for wearing pants in gym instead of shorts like the rest of them. Nathan and Carrie are checking themselves out of school to, presumably, go for a bit of rumpy-pumpy. Jordan, Nicole and Brittany are stuffing themselves on lettuce before they decide they're too full to continue, and must purge. Eric and Alex and walking up to the school with camo uniforms on and bags full of guns. Just a normal day at school.


The film takes places with tremendously long tracking shots following each character or character set individually, watching as they cross over and move into their days. Harris Savides controls the light perfectly, rendering stunning images as the camera moves from inside to outside, room to room, character to character, slo-mo to real-mo. It's truly astonishing work that I can't begin to describe adequately so I'm going to leave it there. the performances from the primarily amateur cast are astonishing, creating characters that you know and understand (because they do entirely work off stereotypes, something entirely necessary when you're dealing with such tragedy and so many people in such a short space of time) in a very short space of time.


Despite the short space of time, Van Sant manages to explore many themes about and directed at youth, many elements troubling them. Michelle is clearly plagued with body image issues. Ditto Jordan, Nicole and Brittany. John is struggling with personal family problems that he doesn't really seem to be able to talk about. And then Eric and Alex - well, none of what you might think apply. Alex plays classical piano. They read. They joke around. Yes, they watch a documentary on Goebbels and the propaganda movement in Nazi Germany, but they also make out in the shower on the day of the shooting. There are no judgement calls here - nothing they do (short of ordering guns online - how is it that they're able to do that? And how can a delivery man just ask a kid to sign for something obviously not ordered by him? - and then shooting them) is really different to what so many kids their age would be doing in their spare time. Van Sant answers no questions - he just shows it how it is.


I think the most moving part of the story for me is the truncated episode starring Benny. He only appears right at the very end as the massacre is under way. We follow him curiously wandering the halls, apparently ignoring the fleeing students around him. He helps a girl out of a window and then keeps exploring, not a word spoken, before he is finally shot. It simply reinforces the horrific randomness of incidents like this. We hadn't seen him before, and he's shot suddenly and without thought. It is true tragedy.


5 stars all round for this film. It's one of those perfect moments of cinema where everything falls into place to create something to effective, which remains effective time after time and years later. Hats off to Van Sant.

Between The Walls.

The Cannes Film Festival, and its principal prize the Palme d'Or, is one of the most prestigious prizes handed out. Different to the Oscars, it doesn't reward box office, or promotion, or celebrity. Films are selected for the French festival, determined as to whether they will compete for the main prize, and a jury of esteemed filmmakers from around the world convene to decide upon a winner. Sometimes these winners match up with major critical and commercial hits (generally when it comes to English-language titles such as Pulp Fiction and The Piano), but more often than not they are small films, sometimes by recognised auteurs, but often not (think 4 months, 3 weeks, 2 days or even Gus Van Sant's Elephant.)


Interestingly, for a festival set in France, they don't often award the Palme d'Or to French films. In 1987 it was won by Sous le soleil de Satan, by Maurice Pialat, who had been in contention for the prize twice before and was up for it one time after. That was the last time a French film (though not a French-language film) won the award until 2008 when Laurent Cantet picked it up for his The Class (Entre les murs.)

Like the Dardenne Brothers' The Child three years earlier (a French-language Belgian production), the film is a naturalistic look at a segment of society that might be deemed 'less fortunate' than others. The Child was an examination of a relatively unsympathetic homeless couple, while The Class looks at an inner-city Parisian school populated by those from a lower socio-economic bracket, many of them immigrants or children of immigrants, and their teachers, particularly their French teacher François Marin (François Bégaudeau.) Marin is passionate about trying to help these children achieve, but he is constantly confronted by their own lack of drive, their lack of discipline, their self-destructive self-importance, by the fact that they are growing up far too quickly and he has no way to stop that. His frustration with their lack of discipline creates in him his own lack of discipline - he finds himself engaging in arguments that, in my mind at least, should not be engaged in by a teacher with his students. His language is inappropriate, his hostility and often his comments are inappropriate, but at no point do you judge him for it - he is forced to the juvenile level they are inhabiting in order that he might have some hope of identifying and communicating with them. Sadly, as mentioned the children have all grown up too fast, and are not going to accept this, leaving him out on a limb that it is fairly well impossible to climb back from.


Bégaudeau is a teacher in real life. In fact, all of the teachers featured are teachers, and the story is built from their own experiences. I did, in fact, think it was a documentary for a while (going back a ways - my understanding of the film around the time of its Cannes win was that it was a documentary, quickly corrected) as the elements (right down to naming the characters after the actors - also employed to a large extent in the aforementioned Palme d'Or winning Elephant) combined to give the strong impression not of being naturalistic, but of being real. This reality on the part of the performers imbues the film with a stark reality. No one is a hero. No one is an antagonist. Everyone features parts of these archetypes within themselves. When you think all hope is lost, a student shows promise, and then just as quickly discards said promise to return to their comfort zone. When you think Marin is making some headway, is possibly going to win over his students to inspire greatness, he loses it, gone as easily as it was gifted. 


This film is not Dangerous Minds. There is no happy ending here, not for anyone. Despite all of the in-class drama, the closing scene of the teachers playing the students in a football match at the end of the term shows us that this is all par for the course. Another year over, and the teachers are no closer to realising that grandiose dream of reclaiming their pupils from the heady lost world around them, but that isn't any different from the year before. As a student tells Marin that she has learnt nothing over the last nine months, upset and fearful that this shows her somehow deficient, his response is not overly sympathetic - presumably, he has heard it all before.


The problems that plagued The Child with its naturalism are to a lesser extent still visible with The Class, as far as engagement with an audience are concerned. There is a lot more to dig your teeth into with this later film, but without any truly sympathetic characters it does once again become a study of failure, or a look at the notion of failure and one's own definition of it. As such it is a very valiant effort, and a step in the right direction, but still not as compelling as one might hope. Perhaps hype also has something to do with it, though it does fare better than The Child. 3.5 stars.

Innit Sweethearts?

Mike Leigh is a love or hate director. Truly. I think he is that polarising. I remember when Happy-Go-Lucky opened the Sydney Film Festival last year, I knew people who tried to watch it, knowing they hated his films, and got through fifteen minutes before leaving. Then, I know people who love his films, who will gladly watch anything he puts out. I fall into the latter camp, but I can totally see why people would hate him. His films are very demanding on the viewer.

I won’t go too much into how Leigh makes his films, as it’s pretty well documented. He favours a heavily rehearsed and improvised approach, where secrets and plot points are revealed to the actors as they go along. I guess this is why his performers are often so incredible - they really have to inhabit the characters in order that they can maintain the continuity over months of development and shooting, without knowing what is really happening around them. Much like life, really. But yes, he’s sent Brenda Blethyn to an Oscar nom for Secrets and Lies, Imelda Staunton to one for Vera Drake and Sally Hawkins to one for Happy-Go-Lucky. Oh, wait, that last one isn’t true. AND WHAT A SCANDAL THAT IS.

But moving on.

Leigh’s major breakout film across the pond was Secrets and Lies, his '96 film launching Brenda Blethyn onto the world with her turn as Cynthia, along the way receiving five Oscar noms and that pretty leaf from Cannes, the Palme d’Or, among many others including the Best British Film BAFTA. An aging single mother to Roxanne, Cynthia has a strained relationship with her sister-in-law Monica (Phyllis Logan), meaning she doesn’t get to see her brother Maurice (Timothy Spall), a successful photographer, anywhere near as often as she’s like. Roxanne has recently started to see a new man, leaving Cynthia virtually alone.

All of this changes with a phone call from Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste in another Oscar nominated turn), bringing an unsettling revelation and reminder of the past. Hortense fills the lonely void in Cynthia’s life, bringing her much happiness, but it’s a dangerous lying game they’re playing, one certain to come dramatically to an end at Roxanne’s 21st birthday party, held at Maurice’s house.

I’ve heard criticism of Blethyn as too hysterical. I can see where that’s coming from, but, really, no one does hysterical like she does it, and here, she does it perfectly. She carries such loneliness and emotional baggage on her shoulders for the entire film (and it’s not a short one) flawlessly. You truly feel for her every time she sheds a tear. Here she is, she has tried to do everything to help her daughter and create a family, and it’s all coming to nought. The one shot at happiness that she has, that brought by Hortense, is not only fringed with danger, it is positively plated in it. This happiness can only last so long - but while it does last, you feel so, so good for Cynthia. The difference is remarkable.

The supporting cast are similarly excellent. Spall plays the younger brother very well. He tries to be supportive, though as the younger and more successful sibling this is always difficult, but is nevertheless somewhat curtailed by his wife’s lack of enthusiasm for a relationship with his family - from her posh heights, they must seem like an appalling bunch of deadbeats. But she also has her secrets, and its exposure, amongst the rest of the revelations in the climactic scene, is equally explosive. Jean-Baptiste is wonderfully stoic in the face of this family meltdown of which she isn’t really a part, but is there for and forced to experience - and a lot of it is seen to be her fault, an unfair laying of blame, but in the circumstances, who else are they going to blame?

I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed this film. That’s three hits from three for me and Mike Leigh. It’s an excellent socio-realist study of family, backed up by astonishingly real performances and a terrific, oft-improvised script. 4.5 stars, and I can’t wait for the next offering from this master of British cinema.

I've Never Really Liked Children Anyway

Look, I get naturalism. It's fine. I quite like it sometimes. But this, this just didn't do it for me. I'm sorry.

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (or the Dardenne Brothers, as they are often referred to) are one of only six filmmakers to have twice won the Palme d'Or at Cannes - the others being Alf Sjöberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Shohei Imamura, Ermir Kusturica and Billie August. Their two wins are also the only two wins for Belgium, ever, at the festival. The Child (or L'enfant) was their most recent win, in 2005.

It's the story of Bruno, a petty criminal, who has a baby with his girlfriend Sonia. He seems to have no qualms, no shame, and no real sense of morality, but for all intents and purposes he seems likable enough. The couple seem very young (at a few points they seem to act as little more than children themselves), but they seem very happy until Bruno does something rash, selfish, greedy and incredibly stupid regarding their new baby, Jimmy. One thing leads to another, but still nothing much seems to happen - naturalism, remember.

That, I think, is what doesn't quite work for me here. What is the film trying to say? Crime doesn't pay? Never heard that one before. Naturalism works for me when it is emblematic of a bigger picture, when by saying little it is actually saying volumes, and I don't get that from L'enfant. I really don't. It just seems to happily muddle its way through a nice little story without really drawing you in or putting you off, and ends up with something kind of meh. Yes, Bruno grows in the film, but in a very cliched way, and still, I feel, in a selfish way. I ultimately just don't care about him, and I don't know Sonia enough to care that much about her either.

The elements of the film were all fine. The actors did a fine job with their characters, I suppose. It looked how a naturalistic film should look. It sounded how a naturalistic film should sound (there was absolutely no non-diegetic music in the film.) But it just. Didn't. Do it for me. I'm not sorry I watched it, but I'm leaving it with 2 stars, and putting the Dardenne's Rosetta on my list of films to watch.