Now I Shall Have To Recover From That Disgusting Sight.

After so long in the wilderness (has it really been that long?) I thought I would start with something light.

Firstly, some history. After living it up in Berlin for a few months at the end of last year, I returned to London for a couple of weeks and then flew back here to my homeland, just in time for summer to really kick in. Summer was mostly spent hanging around on beaches and catching up with friends before I started work in late January. Since I got home, I've probably managed twenty or thirty films, but I haven't kept a record, and I don't really want to go back to all of those that I never got around to writing about last year because they are now so far in the past. Maybe I'll just list them. Yes, that's what I'll do.

The Road 4*

8 1/2 4*

Unforgiven 3*

Dancer in The Dark 5*

Bobby 3*

Thirst 3.5*

Repulsion 3*

Flesh 3*

Wall-E 4.5*

The Thin Red Line 5*

I'm Not There 4.5*

The Marriage Of Maria Braun 4*

Eastern Promises 3.5*

I Love You Phillip Morris 2.5*

An Inconvenient Truth 4.5*

Bent 2.5*

Lost In Translation 5*

Donnie Darko 5*

Dogville 5*

Life As A House 3.5*

Totally Fucked Up 3*

Boy A 5*

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? 4.5*

Apocalypse Now 5*

The Doom Generation 3*

Mary & Max -unrated

Nowhere 3*

Eraserhead 3.5*

That's not even all of them. I didn't write all those I watched in Berlin down. And then there are those I watched here. Oh well. Those star ratings are things I've just come up with now. Preseumably they're at least partially accurate.

And on to today's film.

Thursday, I was at home and my housemates were out. One of them was staying in the city, the other I wasn't expecting home until about ten, so I put Saló, or the 120 days of Sodom on in the main room (I normally watch them in my little space out the back) figuring that it would be pretty much done before he got home. 45 minutes in he came home right as a whole bunch of naked boys are running down the stairs - I had to convince him I wasn't watching kiddie porn. He then said 'oh, that's the one that was banned, right? The one with the shit-eating and skull-fucking.' I then thought it wasn't something I necessarily wanted to put myself to sleep with that night and put it on hold.

Last night I braved it. Yes, there is shit-eating. No, from what I saw, there isn't skull-fucking.

It's an interesting film, that's for sure. Based in part on the writings of Dante and the Marquis de Sade, it centres around four men of power, who, in the final days of Mussolini's fascist Italy, take nine boys and nine girls to a mansion in the country, accompanied by a number of male collaborators with guns and a few older female prostitutes. The prostitutes recount stories from their lives, incidents that happened to them generally at a young age, and then the men of power with the help of the collaborators act out ever more obscene, grotesque, demeaning and violent acts for their sexual gratification.

It's all about power. A not-so-subtle metaphor for fascism. Writer/director Pier Paolo Pasolini has said that the shit-eating relates to his hatred of mass-produced food. These things are not hard to see, if you're so inclined, between the lines of attractive young men and women being beaten, whipped, sodomised and walked on leads.

But the film is horrifying. In the 'scary' sense, not the 'terrible' sense. Some parts are almost erotic, towards the beginning, when you can still hold out a little hope of salvation, but as the film goes on it becomes more and more debauched, leading to the finale where each of the men of power take it in turns to play voyeur as the boys and girls are killed in horrible and brutal ways.

I appreciate the metaphor, I really do. I truly appreciate the bravery of Pasolini in crafting a film such as this, a film that has been broadly denounced as pornography over the years, but is anything but. (Similar, in that sense, to Shortbus, though definitely with the latter's overall upbeat feeling...) But I do wonder whether it began to be shock for shock's sake. Whether these themes and ideas couldn't have been expressed with a little more delicacy.

Though, I'm in two minds about that. Part of me thinks it wouldn't have been so shocking and controversial, and wonders if that wasn't part of the point. Another part of me thinks 'to hell with it!' Why shouldn't it be shocking and confrontational? I mean, the fetishes so brutally portrayed do exist, and there are people out there who willingly subject themselves to such degradation in the name of pleasure. (And by calling it degradation, am I selling short their own consent?) It's not exploitative if all were of age, and there's no way the themes and ultimate outcome of the film could have been hidden from any of the cast members. The notoriety attached to the film guarantees that all going into it know what they have coming. (Family First be damned! The warnings are there, let the consenting adults choose for themselves. This doesn't inspire me to go out, kidnap some teenagers and make them eat my shit!)

As a whole, I'm more inclined to think of the film as an intriguing exercise in delving into sexual mores and how they can represent a sick society, in this case those pesky fascists of the second world war. And as a trailblazer for anti-censorship and pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable, and what consenting adults have the right to choose between. As a whole, maybe if I were a little more familiar with the source material, or had I been better connected to a similar regime, then maybe the ideas would have resonated with me. But as it stands, I'm just going to go with it being ok. Interesting? Yes. Confronting? Hells yeah. Brilliant? Possibly, but I'm not entirely sold. (And why does it not surprise me that it is Haneke's fourth favourite film?)

2.5 stars.

Pianos & Porn.

Have I mentioned today how much I love Isabelle Huppert? No? Well there is no time like the present. And combine Huppert with Michael Haneke - glory.


The Piano Teacher (or La Pianiste) obviously clicked, with the Cannes jury at least - Huppert won Best Actress (her second such recognition from the festival), her costar Benoît Magimel won Best Actor and Haneke won the Grand Jury Prize. Based on Elfriede Jelinek's novel, the film centres around the horrifyingly sexually repressed piano teacher Erika (Huppert) and her relationship... well, with the world around her, manifested in a gifted pupil Walter (Magimel.) Erika, in her forties, lives at home with her mother, even sharing a room. She frequents video rooms in sex shops, even sniffing discarded cum-soaked tissues as she watches. She cuts her genitals while sitting on the edge of the bath, right before dinner. And she is cruel and hard with her students.


She meets Walter, who falls for her cold distance due to her talent with the piano, and some glimmer of humanity and weakness he is able to discern within her. What he doesn't realise, however, is the twisted sadomasochism that takes the form of that weakness. Despite her attempts to distance him, Erika finds herself drawn into some sort of relationship, of sorts, with him, which sees her make public her desires for the first time, much to the horror of Walter. It is only later, when her dreams come true, that she realises how unpleasant they really are.


Huppert is extraordinary. She is always extraordinary, but here... here she is something else. She is so incredibly there, within this horrid creature that she plays, but managing to imbue Erika with the frailty of her own fear and shame. Rather than hating her tormenting ways, from the get-go you feel sorry for whatever has driven our protagonist to this point in her life.


Magimel does a fine job opposite Huppert as the young, beautiful, precocious but ultimately arrogant and unaware student of music. He was good, though whether I'd plant him as the best of the fest I don't know. Having said that, I can't actually be bothered looking up who else was in contention, so we'll let him have it, shall we?


Haneke does his twisted thing so well, and he does it again beautifully here. Erika is a tough cookie, very mean and dark and often shocking, but Haneke, of course, doesn't ever flinch away from showing her, from emoting with her and discovering empathy for her. He's not afraid to open the door to each of our hearts and remind us that, somewhere inside, we are all as desperate as she is. Cinematographer Cristian Berger shoots the film coldly and clinically to match the leading character, the first collaboration between Haneke and Berger before Hidden and The White Ribbon.


Riveting, striking and quite shocking, The Piano Teacher is high on my list of favs of the last decade. Haneke is pretty damn good, and Huppert is pretty damn amazing. 5 stars.

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.

Prophetic.

It appears to be neck and neck this year for the Best Foreign Language Oscar between France's Un Prophète (A Prophet) and Germany's Das Weisse Band (The White Ribbon), from Michael Haneke - I'm hoping to catch the latter over the next week as I only just realised it released here last November and somehow managed to slip by my radar, which has been hanging for it since it took out the Palme d'Or. This two-horse race of course means that something completely different will pull through for the win, though sadly not Samson And Delilah, which didn't follow through on its shortlisting to the nomination stage.


I caught director Jacques Audiard's previous picture The Beat That My Heart Skipped (I'm dead certain that it was released as The Beat My Heart Skipped in Australia, which I think sounds soooo much better) back when it was out and about in 2005 and thoroughly enjoyed it. It was responsible for my infatuation with Romain Duris, in fact. I recall taking issue with a few points, but I think I gave it four stars at the time. His follow up, which took the Grand Prix at Cannes last year, I can't fault.

Un Prophète is the story of petty criminal Malik (Tahar Rahim), sentenced to a half dozen years in prison. French-born but an Arab by heritage, he falls in with the Corsican gang who run the Parisian prison he finds himself in. The Corsicans, led by César Luciani (Niels Arestrup), need someone to take out an informer in prison briefly, and call upon Malik, who has absolutely no desire to take part but is told in no uncertain terms that he has no option - now that he knows of the plan, either he does Ryad or the Corsicans do him. Once the job is done, however, he finds himself part of the Corsican gang, initially just doing their dirty work (literally - he makes them coffee and cleans up after them), but eventually, as the majority of the Corsicans are transferred to another prison, becoming right hand man and confidante to Luciani. 


Meanwhile, the Arab contingent is building itself up, not willing to take more shit from the weakened Corsican faction in the prison. Yes, the Corsicans did once own the guards, but as they become fewer it starts to be the Arabs who are wielding more power. Malik, not one to be left out in the cold, is consorting with a few select inmates to run a small drug trade, which, on day leave as his sentence nears completion, whilst still running errands for Luciani, he converts into a powerful cartel using old Corsican contacts and another ex-inmate Reyeb, released on compassionate grounds after becoming quite ill.


As his parole date gets nearer and nearer, Malik realises he holds the power and takes over the Arab gang, leaving Luciani virtually on his own and utterly powerless, with no friends either inside the prison or on the outside, entirely unable to exact revenge for the traitorous actions of his once-protege. 

Un Prophète is an intricate study of the economics of corruption. Malik says all along that he doesn't work for the Corsicans, he works for himself - when it is in his interests that work will cross over with the Corsicans, but when his interests change, he will quite happily double-cross to ensure his safety with the other side. In the process, he becomes incredibly powerful considering his young, innocent (for want of a better word) and naive roots.


Rahim as Malik is a true revelation. Virtually unknown previously, he is now up for a BAFTA Rising Star award for his portrayal, carrying this fairly long film almost entirely on his own back. His transformation from pitiful to powerful is subtle but definite, played out slowly but carefully so that by the end you are in no doubt of his strength. Arestrup as the prison kingpin is dominating but vulnerable. His downfall is not a surprise, as his reliance on other people fearing him (coupled with the fact that, outside of the opening, Malik really isn't) is so entrenched that, when his structure falls away, it is really just inevitable, a matter of time before he falls back to the bottom of the heap.


Cinematography by Stéphane Fontaine perfectly captures both the prison, the outside, and the fantasy world that Malik so often escapes to. Alexandre Desplat, who somehow managed to score only, oh, five other 2009 releases (including: Chéri; Coco Avant Chanel; Twilight: New Moon; Julie & Julia; L'armée du crime, and; The Fantastic Mr Fox - lazy bastard), does an extraordinary job with the soundtrack, aided by some ripping choices by the music supervisor - I'm always happy to hear Sigur Rós turn up, as I'm sure you can imagine.


And through all of this, Audiard keeps a very firm grip on things. Very firm. The film is spectacularly strong, riveting in every moment. It moves through relentlessly, not letting up, but without overbearing you. Worthy of every award going, it just remains to be seen whether Haneke will get his due from the Academy or whether Audiard can keep him waiting a few more years. 5 stars.

We're Not Up To Feature Film Length Yet.

Violence for the sake of violence. Fear for the sake of fear. Unexplained happenings causing tumult in the lives of otherwise normal people. It's like this is the mandate for the work of director Michael Haneke, or at least the two I've written up on here (Hidden being the other one.) Funny Games (the original, Austrian one, not the 2007 American reboot) precedes Hidden by a good eight years, and it does, visually at least, look rougher around the edges. What they have in common, however, is that desire to unsettle the audience, and to do it by simply not giving them any answers, any motivation.

Couple Anna (Susanne Lothar) and Georg (Ulrich Mühe) escape the city for a holiday at their lakeside home with their young son Schorschi (Stefan Clapczynski.) Shortly after arriving their neighbour appears with a friend, Paul (Arno Frisch), described as a friend, and they help to put out their boat. After they have left, Peter (Frank Giering), another friend of the neighbours, arrives, asking to borrow eggs. After breaking a few eggs and accidentally knocking Anna's phone into a sink full of water, tensions start to rise before Peter and Anna, and she asks him to leave. Paul arrives, trying to calm the situation whilst still getting the required eggs, and shortly Georg and Schorschi return.


The confrontation escalates, with Paul attacking Georg with a golf club before Paul and Peter take the family hostage, making a bet that the three family members won't survive until 9am the following morning. They torture the family, mostly psychologically but also physically, and manage to recover both Schorschi and Anna after they escape their clutches. When Schorschi escapes, before he is brought back to the family home, he tries to get help from the neighbours whom introduced them to Paul and Peter, but he finds that family dead also - and we begin to realise what's going on.


Paul and Peter don't seem to have any motivation for what they are doing, outside of the thrill and fun of simply doing it. Paul often breaks the fourth wall and speaks directly to the audience, something which is quite disconcerting but unbelievably chilling. Initially it was quite jarring, but I actually think it provides the audience with a bit of a relief from the grueling trauma that they are otherwise put through - it reminds you that the film is not, actually, real, and that this level of unadulterated evil is a fiction. Here at least. These motivationless psychopathic murderers aren't actually underneath your bed, but far away on the other side of a film camera, spawned from the curious yet creative mind of a German auteur.


Yes, Haneke is probably deranged. I think this movie confirms it. But he is brilliantly deranged, at least. Like the Marquis de Sade. The way he manages to keep you on the edge of your seat without ever really showing you anything... it's all word play and palpable tension. He doesn't even use music for it - from memory, the only music in the film is diegetic, except for a track over the opening and closing credits. It's silence, light and exceptional performances from all involved.


I'm kind of curious to see the US version now, which he also directed, just to see what it's like. The original is so damned good, I don't know why you'd want to redo it, but hey. This one is another 4.5 star Haneke work.

The Best?

Hidden (or Caché) has been popping up on Best Of the '00s lists since they first started appearing a couple of months back - it topped the UK Times list, as you may remember.

Do I think it's the best film of the last ten years? No. Don't get me wrong, it is a damn good film. But I don't even think it's Michael Haneke's best film of the '00s (that would be The Piano Teacher, or La Pianiste - and how obstreperous can I be? That's three posts in a row where I've disagreed with a widely held view as to a director's best film. Geez, get a grip. All this railing against the mainstream mould ain't gonna get you nowhere.)

Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche star (and much love is sent from me to both their fabulous souls) in another very grown-up thriller, each of them offering up riveting portrayals of their own half of a couple beset by fear of... what, exactly, we're not entirely sure. Auteuil plays Georges Laurent, a television presenter, with Binoche playing his wife Anne. They begin to receive strange videos, left on their doorstep, showing simply them. The first, for example, is a shot of the outside of their house, filmed for a couple of hours, showing nothing much more than the activity on the street, and the Laurent's leaving the house to go to work. That's it.

Gradually, however, the videos start probing in Georges' life. Into his past. They go to the police, but the police say they can't do anything until this person actually tries to do something to them, physically. So the two (and their grumpy teenage son) are left struggling to come to terms with a stalker who may or may not be dangerous, with no idea how to make it stop. Georges ends up stumbling on a theory after one of the videos, but his explorations of the possibility ends in tragedy, in one of the most powerful scenes I've seen in a while. The films ends, but leaves you wondering if it really has.

Hidden is a truly gripping film. It holds you in its beautiful framing and perfect tension without issue. The two magnetic and very talented stars keep you fearful and caring. Nary a foot is put wrong. And I don't really want to talk much more about it, because I don't want to start giving things away - I already fear I have let on too much. 4.5 stars.