The amount of copy being lavished pro and con Baz Luhrmann's over-reaching adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is enough to make you forget that it's just a film we're talking about here, not the be-all and end-all of modern cinematic art. It's true that the novel's status as a classic of American (and, indeed, world) literature is such that any attempt at filming it - and there have been enough attempts that fell short - is conjuring sacrilege merely by existing. And, obviously, the Australian director's baroque, excessive, kinetic style, seen as a charmingly irreverent dinner mint when he started out scrappily with Strictly Ballroom, became too much to critics and observers as he grew in ambition and budgets.
Deep down, of course, Mr. Luhrmann is a showman extraordinaire, a Ziegfeld-type magician who wants to be taken seriously as a filmmaker, reconciling art and commerce, public and press, while running the gantlet of flippant, mordant putdowns from "serious" writers. That is exactly what makes The Great Gatsby perfect material for the director: just as Mr. Luhrmann's giddy overdoses of pop-culture-makeovers can seem gaudy show-offs, nouveau-riche grandstanding appropriating high culture in flamboyantly low ways, so does Jay Gatsby's reputation. The mysterious millionaire of pre-Great Depression New York builds an oversized monument to his secret love in the demonstrating mansion and the grand parties he gives there, all as a means to win back the girl he lost because he didn't come from "old money" or "old blood".
In many ways, the director has forced his way into the "big boys club" by sheer force of will and grandiose displays of budget just as Gatsby does - and there is in The Great Gatsby something of the make-or-break film, especially Mr. Luhrmann is playing here again the trump card of theatrical, over-signified tragedy he refined throughout his "red carpet trilogy" and especially in the masterful Moulin Rouge!, with the help of DP Simon Duggan's glossy, misty cinematography and the luxurious designs of wife and creative partner Catherine Martin. Yet, much in keeping with the source novel and, in fact, a whole pan of period literature and cinema (especially the British heritage film), his version of Gatsby is a tragedy of love intertwined with class and money. Gatsby (a lovely performance from a confident, subtle Leonardo di Caprio), the epitome of the smooth operator if there ever was one, finds his life unraveling through his yearning for true love to bring light into his existence.
The basic flaw in Mr. Luhrmann's approach, however, is that, though it's all about love, love itself hardly factors in the film. Or rather, it is shifted from the romantic and sexual roundelays orbiting Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan, wan and distracted) and her boorish husband Tom (Joel Edgerton, pitch-perfect), towards the fascination that narrator Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire, endearing) has for Gatsby. Nick recognises in Gatsby the man who has it all and synthesizes within himself all the virtues of the early 20th century man, and ends up being the millionaire's truest friend, thus filing The Great Gatsby into the recent category of the "bromance", that uneasy combination of friendship, brotherhood, admiration and fragility that has risen in modern film.
Of course, the tale was always called The Great Gatsby, and that was always an element, yet it is incredibly clear just how much Daisy - and indeed every other female character - are mere sketched, background figures here, to make way for a masculine battle of wills between Gatsby and Tom, with Nick as the observer who takes the true measure of both men. Both of them will stoop as low as they can in the name of the love they seem to hold in such high esteem but actually is no more than another trophy to range alongside polo awards or fine silk shirts. It's a masculine, almost primal fight, perfectly choreographed by Messrs. Di Caprio and Edgerton, underlining even more Mr. Luhrmann's approach of slowing down the film's tempo as the plot grows ever more dramatic.
Starting out as a carefree, frantic jazz-age/hip-hop mash-up revelry that comes on like a rehash of the Moulin Rouge! concept, The Great Gatsby decelerates into a series of ravishingly filmed, if occasionally stilted, chamber set pieces, some of which (the central revelatory group scene at the hotel, where the truth comes out) are perfectly judged and excellently performed. For all that, though, there is certainly a sense that Mr. Luhrmann's theatrical tendencies may occasionally drown the human story at its heart, even if the book itself traded in the same dissonance between facade and interior. Yet the director has taken the bull by the horns in his very own way and come out bloody but unbowed, and by no means undiminished. This may not be the definitive Gatsby, but it's a solid, tantalizing take on it.
Cast: Leonardo di Caprio, Tobey Maguire, Carey Mulligan, Joel Edgerton, Isla Fisher, Jason Clarke, Elizabeth Debicki, Jack Thompson, Amitabh Bachchan
Director: Baz Luhrmann
Screenplay: Mr. Luhrmann, Craig Pearce, from the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Cinematography: Simon Duggan (colour, widescreen, 3D)
Music: Craig Armstrong
Production and costume designer: Catherine Martin
Editors: Matt Villa, Jason Ballantine, Jonathan Redmond
Visual effects: Chris Godfrey
Producers: Mr. Luhrmann, Ms. Martin, Douglas Wick, Lucy Fisher, Catherine Knapman (Warner Bros. Pictures, Bazmark Film and Red Wagon Entertainment in association with Village Roadshow Pictures and A&E Television)
Australia/USA, 2013, 142 minutes
Screened: distributor advance press screening, UCI El Corte Inglés 12 (Lisbon), May 13th 2013
Saturday, May 18, 2013
Friday, May 17, 2013
RABBIT HOLE
It's somewhat unexpected to see John Cameron Mitchell, director of the very NSFW Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Shortbus, helming such tony material as the film adaptation of David Lindsay-Abaire's 2007 Pulitzer-winning stage play, with a bona fide film star in the lead (Nicole Kidman, who also backs the project through her Blossom Films company). Then again, maybe it shouldn't be so unexpected; Mr. Mitchell has always prided himself on uncovering the raw, relatable human emotions at the heart of unexpected, troubled situations. Rabbit Hole fits that like a glove, as it is a film haunted by what was lost and can no longer be.
Becca (Ms. Kidman), the distraught, steely woman at the heart of the film, is desperately trying to leave behind what can't be overcome - the tragic death in an accident of her young son Danny is the tragedy that hovers above the story and touches everything and everyone in it. Adapted by Mr. Lindsay-Abaire himself, the film sees Becca and her husband Howie (Aaron Eckhart) reaching a point of no return in their marriage, struggling to cope with the pain but no longer finding solace in each other or in the routines they've set up. Ms. Kidman makes sure Becca's ruthless attempt at keeping her pain in check is a facade that cracks far too often, like a slow-motion car crash you can't take your eyes off of: a black hole that sucks all attention and forces everything else to orbit around her, whether in the weekly therapy sessions she attends without much faith, or smarting around her family from her mother's (Dianne Wiest) attempts to draw her out by evoking the memory of a dead brother.
In fact, though, more than a black hole, it's the title that best represents what these people are going through: a "rabbit hole" that is painful to cross and difficult to apprehend, an unavoidable and uncomfortable passage through time and space. The metaphor is made plain in a comic-book about parallel alternate universes being written by Jason (Miles Teller), the high school senior who can't overcome his own role in the child's death. Jason is one of Mr. Lindsay-Abaire and Mr. Mitchell's smartest coups in the film: the character's artwork and presence are slowly interspersed during the first act, but the real reason why Becca is orbiting the young man and the true nature of their connection is withheld until the last possible moment, thus allowing the viewer to make up his own story before the halfway revelation.
It's also one of the key reasons for Mr. Mitchell's success in stepping up to the plate here: besides showing a dab hand as an actor's director, extracting excellent performances from the ensemble cast, the cozily diffuse, somewhat numb atmosphere he creates with the help of DP Frank de Marco and composer Anton Sanko, though a little overly understated, proves perfectly balanced. It steers Rabbit Hole away from what could have easily become a predictable three-handkerchief melodrama and towards a delicate yet no-nonsense tone that builds up its emotional impact slowly, by accretion, until, by the end, it hits you like a ton of bricks. That's a compliment, by the way.
Cast: Nicole Kidman, Aaron Eckhart, Dianne Wiest, Tammy Blanchard, Miles Teller, Giancarlo Esposito, Jon Tenney, Sandra Oh
Director: John Cameron Mitchell
Screenplay: David Lindsay-Abaire, from his stage play Rabbit Hole
Cinematography: Frank G. de Marco (colour)
Music: Anton Sanko
Designer: Kalina Ivanov
Costumes: Ann Roth
Editor: Joe Klotz
Producers: Gigi Pritzker, Ms. Kidman, Per Saari, Leslie Urdang, Dean Vanech (Olympus Pictures, Blossom Films, Oddlot Entertainment)
USA, 2010, 91 minutes
Screened: DVD, Lisbon, May 11th 2013
Becca (Ms. Kidman), the distraught, steely woman at the heart of the film, is desperately trying to leave behind what can't be overcome - the tragic death in an accident of her young son Danny is the tragedy that hovers above the story and touches everything and everyone in it. Adapted by Mr. Lindsay-Abaire himself, the film sees Becca and her husband Howie (Aaron Eckhart) reaching a point of no return in their marriage, struggling to cope with the pain but no longer finding solace in each other or in the routines they've set up. Ms. Kidman makes sure Becca's ruthless attempt at keeping her pain in check is a facade that cracks far too often, like a slow-motion car crash you can't take your eyes off of: a black hole that sucks all attention and forces everything else to orbit around her, whether in the weekly therapy sessions she attends without much faith, or smarting around her family from her mother's (Dianne Wiest) attempts to draw her out by evoking the memory of a dead brother.
In fact, though, more than a black hole, it's the title that best represents what these people are going through: a "rabbit hole" that is painful to cross and difficult to apprehend, an unavoidable and uncomfortable passage through time and space. The metaphor is made plain in a comic-book about parallel alternate universes being written by Jason (Miles Teller), the high school senior who can't overcome his own role in the child's death. Jason is one of Mr. Lindsay-Abaire and Mr. Mitchell's smartest coups in the film: the character's artwork and presence are slowly interspersed during the first act, but the real reason why Becca is orbiting the young man and the true nature of their connection is withheld until the last possible moment, thus allowing the viewer to make up his own story before the halfway revelation.
It's also one of the key reasons for Mr. Mitchell's success in stepping up to the plate here: besides showing a dab hand as an actor's director, extracting excellent performances from the ensemble cast, the cozily diffuse, somewhat numb atmosphere he creates with the help of DP Frank de Marco and composer Anton Sanko, though a little overly understated, proves perfectly balanced. It steers Rabbit Hole away from what could have easily become a predictable three-handkerchief melodrama and towards a delicate yet no-nonsense tone that builds up its emotional impact slowly, by accretion, until, by the end, it hits you like a ton of bricks. That's a compliment, by the way.
Cast: Nicole Kidman, Aaron Eckhart, Dianne Wiest, Tammy Blanchard, Miles Teller, Giancarlo Esposito, Jon Tenney, Sandra Oh
Director: John Cameron Mitchell
Screenplay: David Lindsay-Abaire, from his stage play Rabbit Hole
Cinematography: Frank G. de Marco (colour)
Music: Anton Sanko
Designer: Kalina Ivanov
Costumes: Ann Roth
Editor: Joe Klotz
Producers: Gigi Pritzker, Ms. Kidman, Per Saari, Leslie Urdang, Dean Vanech (Olympus Pictures, Blossom Films, Oddlot Entertainment)
USA, 2010, 91 minutes
Screened: DVD, Lisbon, May 11th 2013
Thursday, May 16, 2013
A REPÚBLICA DI MININUS
Whether you like it or not, most contemporary African cinema requires money from the "first world" to come to fruition and, nevertheless, still struggles to attract interest, gain visibility and deliver on its promise. In a 30-year career as director, Guinea-Bissau native Flora Gomes has only managed to direct five fiction features, all of which financed with European monies on shoe-string budgets; despite having secured American actor Danny Glover to play a key role in A República di Mininus, the film has attracted little interest since its completion in 2011.
It's fair to say this is simply because it isn't a very good film, though it is an amiable, well-meaning one, spinning an interesting premise into an awkward, jumbled film; the initial scenes suggest we're in for a child-soldier tale, with a small band of armed teenage boys attacking a village, killing some of the adults and taking with them the survivors, but after this clumsy, tasteless opening the film switches to the big city and sets sail on its course of becoming a thoughtful children's fantasy. Basically, Mr. Gomes' film is set on a "land of make-believe", the title's "children's republic" - the big city where, after a military attack, all adults fled leaving only behind the kids, all of which realise they've stopped growing up, and one elder, former government adviser Dubem (Mr. Glover). The city becomes in effect a huge sandbox where the children "learn by doing", hopefully realising the promise that adults failed to deliver on.
The arrival of a small party of survivors from the initial village attack - two girls, two boys and the subdued boy soldier Iron Hand (Hedviges Mamudo) - forces a confrontation: the rules are that they either are accepted by the others or leave the city, suggesting that this republic is a practical application of a tribal village finding a way to live together day by day. Mr. Gomes is painting the idea of democracy as something intrinsic to African traditions, and a bridge between past and present being understood in practice by the kids who will be the future, and the idea of kids playing at grown-ups is mirrored in the film's easy-going presentation. The cast of children is actively playing at being actors, taking the game as seriously as their characters play at being grown-ups, and often all the director does is partake of the kids' energy and commitment, remaining attentive to their physical presence, with Mr. Glover's kindly gaze that of a grandfather enjoying the children's games.
All fine and dandy, but the problems lie elsewhere: in the shapeless scripting that leaves a number of plot points either unexplained or unresolved (though the film's short length may also suggest some of it could have been left on the cutting floor), in Mr. Gomes' rather non-descript and often amateurish handling, part of which may come from the need to hide the obviously low-budget production values; in DP João Ribeiro's unequal cinematography, going from flat TV movie lighting to some lovely landscape and location work; above all, in the decision to have the film entirely spoken in English, which may have been necessary for practical reasons but ends up having all the kids speak in an urban-American inflected English that undermines the Afrocentric attitude. But, for all those flaws, it's very hard to bear any ill will against A República di Mininus; it isn't a very good film, true, but the sincerity and naïveté with which it presents itself, the simplicity of its message, the general good cheer of the entire project making do with what little it's got, end up assuaging any qualms and sweeping away any condescendence. It is what it is, and it asks to not be taken for more than what it is.
Cast: Danny Glover, Hedviges Mamudo, Melanie de Vales Rafael, Joyce Simbine Saiete, Bruno Mauro Armindo Nhavene, Anaïs Adrianopoulos, Stephen Carew, Maurice Ngwakum
Director: Flora Gomes
Screenplay: Franck Moisnard, Mr. Gomes
Cinematography: João Ribeiro (colour)
Music: Youssou n'Dour, Papa Ouma Ngour
Designer: Tim Pannen
Costumes: Oumou Sy
Editor: Dominique Pâris
Producers: Maria João Mayer, François d'Artemare (Filmes do Tejo and Films de l'Après-Midi in co-production with Neue Metropolis Filmproduktion, Saga Film, RTP and Telecine Bissau Produções)
Portugal/France/Germany/Belgium/Guinea-Bissau, 2011, 78 minutes
Screened: producer advance DVD screener, Lisbon, May 8th 2013
It's fair to say this is simply because it isn't a very good film, though it is an amiable, well-meaning one, spinning an interesting premise into an awkward, jumbled film; the initial scenes suggest we're in for a child-soldier tale, with a small band of armed teenage boys attacking a village, killing some of the adults and taking with them the survivors, but after this clumsy, tasteless opening the film switches to the big city and sets sail on its course of becoming a thoughtful children's fantasy. Basically, Mr. Gomes' film is set on a "land of make-believe", the title's "children's republic" - the big city where, after a military attack, all adults fled leaving only behind the kids, all of which realise they've stopped growing up, and one elder, former government adviser Dubem (Mr. Glover). The city becomes in effect a huge sandbox where the children "learn by doing", hopefully realising the promise that adults failed to deliver on.
The arrival of a small party of survivors from the initial village attack - two girls, two boys and the subdued boy soldier Iron Hand (Hedviges Mamudo) - forces a confrontation: the rules are that they either are accepted by the others or leave the city, suggesting that this republic is a practical application of a tribal village finding a way to live together day by day. Mr. Gomes is painting the idea of democracy as something intrinsic to African traditions, and a bridge between past and present being understood in practice by the kids who will be the future, and the idea of kids playing at grown-ups is mirrored in the film's easy-going presentation. The cast of children is actively playing at being actors, taking the game as seriously as their characters play at being grown-ups, and often all the director does is partake of the kids' energy and commitment, remaining attentive to their physical presence, with Mr. Glover's kindly gaze that of a grandfather enjoying the children's games.
All fine and dandy, but the problems lie elsewhere: in the shapeless scripting that leaves a number of plot points either unexplained or unresolved (though the film's short length may also suggest some of it could have been left on the cutting floor), in Mr. Gomes' rather non-descript and often amateurish handling, part of which may come from the need to hide the obviously low-budget production values; in DP João Ribeiro's unequal cinematography, going from flat TV movie lighting to some lovely landscape and location work; above all, in the decision to have the film entirely spoken in English, which may have been necessary for practical reasons but ends up having all the kids speak in an urban-American inflected English that undermines the Afrocentric attitude. But, for all those flaws, it's very hard to bear any ill will against A República di Mininus; it isn't a very good film, true, but the sincerity and naïveté with which it presents itself, the simplicity of its message, the general good cheer of the entire project making do with what little it's got, end up assuaging any qualms and sweeping away any condescendence. It is what it is, and it asks to not be taken for more than what it is.
Cast: Danny Glover, Hedviges Mamudo, Melanie de Vales Rafael, Joyce Simbine Saiete, Bruno Mauro Armindo Nhavene, Anaïs Adrianopoulos, Stephen Carew, Maurice Ngwakum
Director: Flora Gomes
Screenplay: Franck Moisnard, Mr. Gomes
Cinematography: João Ribeiro (colour)
Music: Youssou n'Dour, Papa Ouma Ngour
Designer: Tim Pannen
Costumes: Oumou Sy
Editor: Dominique Pâris
Producers: Maria João Mayer, François d'Artemare (Filmes do Tejo and Films de l'Après-Midi in co-production with Neue Metropolis Filmproduktion, Saga Film, RTP and Telecine Bissau Produções)
Portugal/France/Germany/Belgium/Guinea-Bissau, 2011, 78 minutes
Screened: producer advance DVD screener, Lisbon, May 8th 2013
Wednesday, May 15, 2013
LACRAU
Warmly received upon its premiere at the 2013 IndieLisboa festival, where it took home the prize for best Portuguese feature, João Vladimiro's sophomore feature Lacrau is a radical object meant to divide opinions and start off heated arguments. Little wonder: a labour of love shot over a number of years, this defiantly non-narrative project, juxtaposing the warmth and conviviality or community-based rural living and the ugly, industrial, artificially-lighted modern urbanism, belongs to a lineage of austere, quasi-experimental filmmaking, where documentary footage is transformed by its contextual editing and soundtracking. It's film intended as art, as meditation and process at the same time, striving for higher, deeper meanings, for an experience that is not merely passive but seeks to engage the viewer.
More power to it, but the problem with Lacrau is not that it belongs to that lineage alongside directors such as Sergei Paradjanov, Michelangelo Frammartino or James Benning; it's that there's a chasm between ambition and realisation. The film's devotion to the countryside seems to have been learnt at the altar of the forgotten master António Reis; its construction through wordless, non-linear blocks of images intercut with quotes from Edmund Spenser and Stig Dagerman and soundtracked by a selection of contemporary and classical music suggests an experiment in pure sensorialism, an attempt at audiovisual transcendence. But in the process it becomes clear Mr. Vladimiro may have bitten off more than he could chew; Lacrau feels like a puzzle whose key may be far too personal or too well hidden for viewers to find. Luxuriating in a rigorous but occasionally hermetic juxtaposition of images and sounds, it becomes a quasi-abstract essay-film whose point is either obscure or lost in the process, pushing at times the limits of the viewer's availability in search of something it never quite reaches.
It's very much a young man's film, one that wishes at the same time to show how far its director has grown and to encompass the entire universe, but hasn't yet been able to make sense of the map. For all that, there is an evident talent at work here and a worthy ambition of doing more than just "business as usual"; Lacrau is just a halfway point in that journey, but hardly an unanimous one.
Director and writer: João Vladimiro
Cinematography: Mr. Vladimiro, Pedro Pinho (colour)
Editors: Mr. Vladimiro, Luísa Homem
Sound: Mr. Vladimiro, Frederico Lobo, Miguel Martins
Producers: Mr. Vladimiro, João Matos (Terratreme Filmes in association with RTP)
Portugal, 2013, 102 minutes
Screened: IndieLisboa Film Festival 2013 official competition advance press screening, Culturgest, Lisbon, April 17th 2013
LACRAU, de JOÃO VLADIMIRO from TERRATREME FILMES on Vimeo.
More power to it, but the problem with Lacrau is not that it belongs to that lineage alongside directors such as Sergei Paradjanov, Michelangelo Frammartino or James Benning; it's that there's a chasm between ambition and realisation. The film's devotion to the countryside seems to have been learnt at the altar of the forgotten master António Reis; its construction through wordless, non-linear blocks of images intercut with quotes from Edmund Spenser and Stig Dagerman and soundtracked by a selection of contemporary and classical music suggests an experiment in pure sensorialism, an attempt at audiovisual transcendence. But in the process it becomes clear Mr. Vladimiro may have bitten off more than he could chew; Lacrau feels like a puzzle whose key may be far too personal or too well hidden for viewers to find. Luxuriating in a rigorous but occasionally hermetic juxtaposition of images and sounds, it becomes a quasi-abstract essay-film whose point is either obscure or lost in the process, pushing at times the limits of the viewer's availability in search of something it never quite reaches.
It's very much a young man's film, one that wishes at the same time to show how far its director has grown and to encompass the entire universe, but hasn't yet been able to make sense of the map. For all that, there is an evident talent at work here and a worthy ambition of doing more than just "business as usual"; Lacrau is just a halfway point in that journey, but hardly an unanimous one.
Director and writer: João Vladimiro
Cinematography: Mr. Vladimiro, Pedro Pinho (colour)
Editors: Mr. Vladimiro, Luísa Homem
Sound: Mr. Vladimiro, Frederico Lobo, Miguel Martins
Producers: Mr. Vladimiro, João Matos (Terratreme Filmes in association with RTP)
Portugal, 2013, 102 minutes
Screened: IndieLisboa Film Festival 2013 official competition advance press screening, Culturgest, Lisbon, April 17th 2013
LACRAU, de JOÃO VLADIMIRO from TERRATREME FILMES on Vimeo.
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
MA BELLE GOSSE (MY BLUE-EYED KID)
The fact that, early on in Franco-Canadian director Shalimar Preuss's debut feature, there's a handheld camera following behind a young girl makes you want to scream: enough already with the Dardenne brothers' playbook! Nevertheless, it's a shame that stylistic trope overshadows the good things in this amiable yet ultimately slight tale about coming of age. Ms. Preuss starts us off in media res, in the middle of a Summer family vacation in the isle of Ré off the French coast, where a boatload of kids, from tweens to teenagers, seem to exist in a perpetual, laughing limbo of leisurely, playful days alongside their parents. All but one: the surly 17-year old Maden (Lou Aziosmanoff), who keeps apart from the others, often alone in her room, keeping a secret only one of the others knows of. Maden is corresponding in secret with an inmate in the local prison, exchanging love letters.
It's a startling choice - she is not yet "of age" and is too young to be a lonely woman who fantasizes about a love story with a jailbird. Ms. Preuss slowly reveals just enough to explain the reasons - through the slightly off family dynamics between her and her father François (Jocelyn Lagarrigue), who left the family years back and returns only for vacations, as well as with her twin cousins Judith and Céline (Manon Aziosmanoff and Nine Aziosmanoff), who learn of the secret but keep it to themselves at first. There's a sense that Maden is setting herself partly by choice rather than through any bullying at the hands of the other kids, but Ms. Preuss makes very clear that she is fundamentally looked at judgmentally by everyone else, only truly revealing herself in the letters she sends and receives.
It's in the well-judged push-and-pull of family relationships doubled as a slow-burn drama of teenage angst that the director succeeds in holding the viewer's interest in Ma Belle Gosse, with a strong contribution from the easy performances of the ensemble cast and the warm, Mediterranean glare of Virginie Surdej's lensing. It's a shame, though, that the narrative never really "catches fire", preferring to flow moodily in an oblique, diffuse pattern that leaves too many things unexplained; that might have been the whole idea but pins on the film a sense of an uncoloured, unfilled sketch. Still, it's a thoughtful, sensitive work; judging by it, it's worth keeping an eye on Ms. Preuss.
Cast: Lou Aziosmanoff, Jocelyn Lagarrigue, Manon Aziosmanoff, Nine Aziosmanoff, Hélène Cinque, Victor Laforge, Rebecca Convenant, Sédrenn Lebrousse, Jean-Luc Mimault, Raphaël Lagarrigue, Georges Guéneau
Director: Shalimar Preuss
Screenplay: Ms. Preuss, Émilie Guilhen
Cinematography: Virginie Surdej (colour)
Music: Vincent Ségal
Designer: Aurélie Descoins
Editor: Gustavo Vasco
Producer: Emmanuel Chaumet (Ecce Films in co-production with Le Fresnoy Studio National des Arts Contemporains)
France, 2012, 83 minutes
Screened: IndieLisboa Film Festival 2013 official competition advance streaming screener, Lisbon, April 14th 2013
It's a startling choice - she is not yet "of age" and is too young to be a lonely woman who fantasizes about a love story with a jailbird. Ms. Preuss slowly reveals just enough to explain the reasons - through the slightly off family dynamics between her and her father François (Jocelyn Lagarrigue), who left the family years back and returns only for vacations, as well as with her twin cousins Judith and Céline (Manon Aziosmanoff and Nine Aziosmanoff), who learn of the secret but keep it to themselves at first. There's a sense that Maden is setting herself partly by choice rather than through any bullying at the hands of the other kids, but Ms. Preuss makes very clear that she is fundamentally looked at judgmentally by everyone else, only truly revealing herself in the letters she sends and receives.
It's in the well-judged push-and-pull of family relationships doubled as a slow-burn drama of teenage angst that the director succeeds in holding the viewer's interest in Ma Belle Gosse, with a strong contribution from the easy performances of the ensemble cast and the warm, Mediterranean glare of Virginie Surdej's lensing. It's a shame, though, that the narrative never really "catches fire", preferring to flow moodily in an oblique, diffuse pattern that leaves too many things unexplained; that might have been the whole idea but pins on the film a sense of an uncoloured, unfilled sketch. Still, it's a thoughtful, sensitive work; judging by it, it's worth keeping an eye on Ms. Preuss.
Cast: Lou Aziosmanoff, Jocelyn Lagarrigue, Manon Aziosmanoff, Nine Aziosmanoff, Hélène Cinque, Victor Laforge, Rebecca Convenant, Sédrenn Lebrousse, Jean-Luc Mimault, Raphaël Lagarrigue, Georges Guéneau
Director: Shalimar Preuss
Screenplay: Ms. Preuss, Émilie Guilhen
Cinematography: Virginie Surdej (colour)
Music: Vincent Ségal
Designer: Aurélie Descoins
Editor: Gustavo Vasco
Producer: Emmanuel Chaumet (Ecce Films in co-production with Le Fresnoy Studio National des Arts Contemporains)
France, 2012, 83 minutes
Screened: IndieLisboa Film Festival 2013 official competition advance streaming screener, Lisbon, April 14th 2013
Monday, May 13, 2013
ÄTA SOVA DÖ (EAT SLEEP DIE)
For her debut feature, Swedish director Gabriela Pichler spins a number of autobiographical elements - and even her own family members - into the fictional tale of a young girl caught in the wave of contemporary youth unemployment. While Ms. Pichler didn't quite suffer the same fate as her plucky heroine, she is herself born in Sweden from Bosnian and Austrian immigrant parents, and was a factory worker who gave up her job to study film.
Coming from documentary studies and a background, she draws upon common immigrant experiences to depict the no-future cycle open to Raša, the hard-working daughter of a Montenegrin immigrant who is laid off from her factory job and realises she has little to no chance of finding a new one in her provincial area. Eat Sleep Die's title is pretty much the lot of the modern-day working poor, immigrant or not; while Raša (forcefully portrayed by the powerful Nermina Lukač) is young enough to go out and try to fend for herself, many of her fellow laid-off workers are older but have educational or social advantages she doesn't (like a driver's license). And her father (Milan Dragišić), who isn't as fluent in Swedish, is ailing and unable to keep up his odd jobs, making the household's well-being depend entirely on her.
Yet, despite Ms. Lukač's performance and the total absence of sentiment in Ms. Pichler's approach to the story, there's little to make this well-made, assured debut feature stand apart from the many social problem pictures being produced since the Dardenne brothers' Rosetta. The strong sense of community present in the small town where Raša lives is a nice touch - she is perfectly integrated and nobody looks at her as an interloper or makes her feel unwelcome, in a change from the usual way immigrants are treated once things start going wrong in the community. And there is always a sense that Ms. Pichler is anchoring her fiction in a strong documented reality, one that never feels fake and shows another side of Sweden that doesn't usually come to the fore, with grayish-toned cinematography from Johan Lundborg. None of that, however, is enough to make Eat Sleep Die rise above its status as a debut effort that is solid and honest but has little distinguishing features.
Cast: Nermina Lukač, Milan Dragišić, Jonathan Lampinen, Peter Fält, Ružica Pichler
Director and writer: Gabriela Pichler
Cinematography: Johan Lundborg
Music: Andreas Svensson, Jonas Isaksson
Art directors: Jessika Jankert, Tobias Äkersson, Jessica Tarland
Costumes: Sandra Wollersdorf
Editors: Ms. Pichler, Mr. Lundborg
Producer: China Åhlund (Anagram Film in co-production with Film i Skåne, Swedish Television and Film i Väst)
Sweden, 2012, 104 minutes
Screened: IndieLisboa Film Festival 2013 official competition advance streaming screener, Lisbon, April 13th 2013
Coming from documentary studies and a background, she draws upon common immigrant experiences to depict the no-future cycle open to Raša, the hard-working daughter of a Montenegrin immigrant who is laid off from her factory job and realises she has little to no chance of finding a new one in her provincial area. Eat Sleep Die's title is pretty much the lot of the modern-day working poor, immigrant or not; while Raša (forcefully portrayed by the powerful Nermina Lukač) is young enough to go out and try to fend for herself, many of her fellow laid-off workers are older but have educational or social advantages she doesn't (like a driver's license). And her father (Milan Dragišić), who isn't as fluent in Swedish, is ailing and unable to keep up his odd jobs, making the household's well-being depend entirely on her.
Yet, despite Ms. Lukač's performance and the total absence of sentiment in Ms. Pichler's approach to the story, there's little to make this well-made, assured debut feature stand apart from the many social problem pictures being produced since the Dardenne brothers' Rosetta. The strong sense of community present in the small town where Raša lives is a nice touch - she is perfectly integrated and nobody looks at her as an interloper or makes her feel unwelcome, in a change from the usual way immigrants are treated once things start going wrong in the community. And there is always a sense that Ms. Pichler is anchoring her fiction in a strong documented reality, one that never feels fake and shows another side of Sweden that doesn't usually come to the fore, with grayish-toned cinematography from Johan Lundborg. None of that, however, is enough to make Eat Sleep Die rise above its status as a debut effort that is solid and honest but has little distinguishing features.
Cast: Nermina Lukač, Milan Dragišić, Jonathan Lampinen, Peter Fält, Ružica Pichler
Director and writer: Gabriela Pichler
Cinematography: Johan Lundborg
Music: Andreas Svensson, Jonas Isaksson
Art directors: Jessika Jankert, Tobias Äkersson, Jessica Tarland
Costumes: Sandra Wollersdorf
Editors: Ms. Pichler, Mr. Lundborg
Producer: China Åhlund (Anagram Film in co-production with Film i Skåne, Swedish Television and Film i Väst)
Sweden, 2012, 104 minutes
Screened: IndieLisboa Film Festival 2013 official competition advance streaming screener, Lisbon, April 13th 2013
Saturday, May 11, 2013
LAWRENCE OF ARABIA
In between some of the most beloved films of English cinema of the 1940s and 1950s and the tendencies towards gigantism of 1960s big-budget filmmaking, British director David Lean found a sweet spot with Lawrence of Arabia - the sweepingly enveloping romanticised biography of soldier/scholar T. E. Lawrence and of his adventures in the Middle East during World War I. A sweet spot between not only that very British, stiff-upper-lip quality and a more grandiose sense of spectacle, but also between the past and the present, between naïveté and disillusion.
Mr. Lean's apparently stolid, middlebrow handling is in fact wholly aware of its own classical (some would say academic) limitations and willing to transcend them: just like Lawrence's trial by fire in the desert demands that he travels its length and comes out the other side, so does Lawrence of Arabia travel the expansive trappings of the period epic to find its own core of a character study gaudily wrapped in Freddie Young's sumptuous 70mm cinematography and Maurice Jarre's heroic score. It's all the more appropriate, as the film is essentially the tale of a man who found himself attempting to bridge two worlds but in some ways an outcast of either - a nearly four-hour character study under the guise of a Boy's Own imperial adventure, but one where the hero himself seems to believe his own PR a bit too much.
In Peter O'Toole's star-making, all-consuming portrayal of Lawrence you see a man who believed all the things the British Empire fed him, and who seizes his moment as he rallies the Arab tribes to strike at the Turks in the name of an united Arabia, but who also finds himself confronted with the venal truth of politics and power games as he realises the consequences of his acts. In between the desert and the civilisation, the dream of absolute freedom and the reality of compromises, Lawrence tastes his own humanity; Mr. Lean's exacting framing and ponderous pacing is designed to bring us with him on that journey, by forcing the viewer to adjust to the slower rhythm of the desert, to focus on what matters. And what matters, here, are the characters, simultaneously lost and found under the harsh glare of the desert sun that is almost like a revelatory, interrogating light.
Admittedly, Lawrence of Arabia is a film of two minds, one that manages to make its apparent contradictions work on its behalf: the all-star cast working in shorthand on what are essentially supporting roles, while the more detailed strokes are painted by Mr. O'Toole as Lawrence and Omar Sharif as his trusted friend Ali Ibn el Kharish; the striking desert landscapes ravishingly but harshly photographed by Freddie Young simultaneously hiding and suggesting the inner turmoil of Lawrence, a hero caught in a trap of his own making. His tragedy is that he can no longer renege on his heroics, born of a well-meaning yet foolishly naïf worldview, convinced his achievements freed him from the terrible practicality of politics.
Illusions can be powerful things, and just as the dutiful rhetoric of colonel Nicholson in The Bridge on the River Kwai was denounced as something belonging to an earlier era, so does Lawrence realise the length of the chasm between his dream of Arab independence and the reality of colonial and military politics. Lawrence of Arabia is a film that is surprisingly more modern than its reputation would suggest it to be - but one done at a scale that no cost-conscious major studio, with its test-screened filmmaking-by-committee, would allow to happen nowadays. The loss is ours.
Cast: Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, Jack Hawkins, José Ferrer, Anthony Quayle, Claude Rains, Arthur Kennedy, I. S. Johar, Donald Wolfit, Omar Sharif, Peter O'Toole
Director: David Lean
Screenplay: Robert Bolt, Michael Wilson
Cinematography: F. A. Young (Technicolor, Super Panavision 70 widescreen)
Music: Maurice Jarre
Designer: John Box
Costumes: Phyllis Dalton
Editor: Anne V. Coates
Producer: Sam Spiegel (Horizon Pictures)
United Kingdom, 1962, 227 minutes (including overture and intermission music)
Screened: 4K restoration distributor advance press screening, UCI El Corte Inglés 12, Lisbon, May 3rd 2013
Mr. Lean's apparently stolid, middlebrow handling is in fact wholly aware of its own classical (some would say academic) limitations and willing to transcend them: just like Lawrence's trial by fire in the desert demands that he travels its length and comes out the other side, so does Lawrence of Arabia travel the expansive trappings of the period epic to find its own core of a character study gaudily wrapped in Freddie Young's sumptuous 70mm cinematography and Maurice Jarre's heroic score. It's all the more appropriate, as the film is essentially the tale of a man who found himself attempting to bridge two worlds but in some ways an outcast of either - a nearly four-hour character study under the guise of a Boy's Own imperial adventure, but one where the hero himself seems to believe his own PR a bit too much.
In Peter O'Toole's star-making, all-consuming portrayal of Lawrence you see a man who believed all the things the British Empire fed him, and who seizes his moment as he rallies the Arab tribes to strike at the Turks in the name of an united Arabia, but who also finds himself confronted with the venal truth of politics and power games as he realises the consequences of his acts. In between the desert and the civilisation, the dream of absolute freedom and the reality of compromises, Lawrence tastes his own humanity; Mr. Lean's exacting framing and ponderous pacing is designed to bring us with him on that journey, by forcing the viewer to adjust to the slower rhythm of the desert, to focus on what matters. And what matters, here, are the characters, simultaneously lost and found under the harsh glare of the desert sun that is almost like a revelatory, interrogating light.
Admittedly, Lawrence of Arabia is a film of two minds, one that manages to make its apparent contradictions work on its behalf: the all-star cast working in shorthand on what are essentially supporting roles, while the more detailed strokes are painted by Mr. O'Toole as Lawrence and Omar Sharif as his trusted friend Ali Ibn el Kharish; the striking desert landscapes ravishingly but harshly photographed by Freddie Young simultaneously hiding and suggesting the inner turmoil of Lawrence, a hero caught in a trap of his own making. His tragedy is that he can no longer renege on his heroics, born of a well-meaning yet foolishly naïf worldview, convinced his achievements freed him from the terrible practicality of politics.
Illusions can be powerful things, and just as the dutiful rhetoric of colonel Nicholson in The Bridge on the River Kwai was denounced as something belonging to an earlier era, so does Lawrence realise the length of the chasm between his dream of Arab independence and the reality of colonial and military politics. Lawrence of Arabia is a film that is surprisingly more modern than its reputation would suggest it to be - but one done at a scale that no cost-conscious major studio, with its test-screened filmmaking-by-committee, would allow to happen nowadays. The loss is ours.
Cast: Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, Jack Hawkins, José Ferrer, Anthony Quayle, Claude Rains, Arthur Kennedy, I. S. Johar, Donald Wolfit, Omar Sharif, Peter O'Toole
Director: David Lean
Screenplay: Robert Bolt, Michael Wilson
Cinematography: F. A. Young (Technicolor, Super Panavision 70 widescreen)
Music: Maurice Jarre
Designer: John Box
Costumes: Phyllis Dalton
Editor: Anne V. Coates
Producer: Sam Spiegel (Horizon Pictures)
United Kingdom, 1962, 227 minutes (including overture and intermission music)
Screened: 4K restoration distributor advance press screening, UCI El Corte Inglés 12, Lisbon, May 3rd 2013