TIFF ’15: Black; We Monsters; Keeper

Posted in2015, Authors: Bill Chambers, Belgium, Coming of Age, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Romance, Switzerland, Teen, Thriller, TIFF

Tiff15keeper

BLACK
*/****
directed by Adil El Arbi & Bilall Fallah

Wir Monster, a.k.a. Cold Days
**/****
directed by Sebastian Ko

KEEPER (pictured)
***/****
directed by Guillaume Senez

by Bill Chambers My random sampling of #TIFF15’s Discovery programme yielded a loose trilogy of bildungsromane. The most ‘problematic’ of these, as the kids say, is Black, a West Side Story redux set on the surprisingly mean streets of Brussels, where rival gangs of Moroccan and (I think) Congolese immigrants antagonize the locals and each other. Marwan (charming Aboubakr Bensaihi) and Mavela (gorgeous Martha Canga Antonio) meet-cute in police custody. He’s Moroccan, she hangs with “the Black Bronx,” whose name very purposely evokes American ghettos for that soupçon of danger. When he hits on her, she asks him how he’d feel if his sister brought a black man home; Marwan admits there’s a double standard, then reassuringly points out they’re both African. Within days they’re a couple on the DL, whispering dreams of an honest future together. Alas, Mavela becomes inextricably tethered to the Black Bronx when she baits a female member of Marwan’s posse to their clubhouse to be gang-raped, then endures the same torment herself after they find out about her affair with Marwan. Note that the first rape happens offscreen while Mavela’s does not, and though I don’t condone any rape scene, there is something ultra-nauseating about graphically violating the Maria/Juliet figure, like when Edith Bunker endured a rape attempt: It breaks some socio-artistic contract we have with our most wholesome archetypes. It didn’t make me hate her attackers so much as it made me hate the filmmakers.

The Gunman (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

Posted in2015, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, DVD, France, Mystery, Spain, Thriller, UK

Gunman1

*½/**** Image A Sound A
starring Sean Penn, Idris Elba, Ray Winstone, Javier Bardem
screenplay by Don McPherson, Pete Travis, Sean Penn, based on the novel The Prone Gunman by Jean-Patrick Manchette
directed by Pierre Morel

by Bill Chambers Sean Penn seems like the last guy who would walk into his agent’s office and say, “Give me the Liam Neeson™,” because his work doesn’t operate on that kind of cynicism. Even I Am Sam, in which he courts an Oscar by playing mentally-challenged, fits neatly into a career whose primary auteurist concern has been the sanctity and fragility of daughters’ lives (see also: The Crossing Guard, The Pledge, 21 Grams, and Mystic River). So it’s reassuring, sort of, to see him use The Gunman as a pulpit for his humanitarian concerns (presuming I’ve correctly extrapolated the political firebrand’s credited contribution to the screenplay), but there is a disappointing transparency to the character, as if he’s afraid that reinventing himself too much in the Neeson mold will reveal, God forbid, a desire to stay popular in a profession he has threatened to quit numerous times. In The Gunman, one of our most transformative actors–a guy who as recently as 2011 turned himself into the spitting image of The Cure‘s Robert Smith and affected a childlike drawl for the length of a feature–comports himself with a tedious self-seriousness, makes time to surf, and smokes way too much to be a credible action hero. He’s Sean Penn in all but name, and he’s kind of a drag.

Saint Laurent (2014)

Posted in2014, 2015, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Belgium, Biopic, Drama, France, Romance, Theatrical

Saintlaurent

***/****
starring Gaspard Ulliel, Jérémie Renier, Louis Garrel, Helmut Berger
screenplay by Bertrand Bonello and Thomas Bidegain
directed by Bertrand Bonello

by Angelo Muredda Bertrand Bonello enters the postmodern biopic sweepstakes with Saint Laurent, no less than the third chronicle of the titular French designer and haute couture icon in as many years. With regrets to Pierre Thoretton’s understated but chilly L‘amour fou, which comes at its subject through the reminiscences of his lifelong professional and personal partner Pierre Berge, Bonello’s project is almost certainly the most fetching (thanks in no small part to costume designer Anais Romand), marrying a contemporary fixation on the limits of biographical storytelling with the sort of impressionist brushstrokes the Matisse devotee might have appreciated. In the wake of filmmakers as disparate as Todd Haynes and Abel Ferrara self-consciously toying with the limits of the biopic form, ostensibly killing dynamic subjects by pinning them to the wall, Saint Laurent isn’t as radical a work of genre subversion as some of its adherents claim, but it sure as hell is beautiful, channelling its subject’s hedonist spirit and delicate aesthetic sensibility in roughly equal measure.

Lucy (2014) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

Posted in2014, 2015, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, France, Scarlett Johansson, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Lucy1

*/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras C
starring Scarlett Johansson, Morgan Freeman, Amr Waked, Choi Min-Sik
written and directed by Luc Besson

by Walter Chaw I recall Luc Besson confessing that his The Fifth Element was based on an idea he’d had as a child; I’m going to wager the same is true of his dreadful Lucy. It’s a pre-pubescent boy’s fantasy of cool: a mash of silly pop-science buoying a beautiful woman’s mutation from impossible party girl into deity through the agency of stem-cell-related drug abuse. The good news is that South Korean superstar Choi Min-Sik (Oldboy) gets a mainstream American debut in a juicy role that nonetheless feels like a wasted opportunity (see: Beat Takeshi in Johnny Mnemonic). The bad news is Lucy is prurient pap that pup-critics will declare proof of “vulgar auteurism,” no matter the redundancy and ignorance of the term itself. Perhaps fitting, then, that the only defense of a movie this obnoxious and wilfully dumb is a term and movement founded on the same principles. I’ve defended Besson in the past–I’m an unapologetic admirer of Leon/The Professional and The Messenger (and Danny the Dog, which he produced, is a peerless statement on the relationship between Western and Asian action stars). But Lucy is reductive, sub-La femme Nikita effluvia that takes a premise niftily played with in Ted Chiang’s beyond-brilliant 1991 short story “Understand” and grinds it into a grey paste.

Hell of the Living Dead (1980)|Rats: Night of Terror (1984) [Blood-Soaked Double Feature] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1980s, 2014, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, France, Horror, Italy, Sci-Fi, Spain, Zombie

Mattei1

Virus
*/**** Image C+ Sound B Extras B
starring Margit Evelyn Newton, Franco Garofalo, Selan Karay, Robert O’Neil
screenplay by Claudio Fragasso, J.M. Cunilles
directed by Bruno Mattei

Rats – Notte di terrore
*½ Image C- Sound B Extras B
starring Richard Raymond, Janna Ryann, Alex McBride, Richard Cross
screenplay by Claudio Fragasso, Hervé Piccini
directed by Bruno Mattei

by Bryant Frazer It’s quite possible there is no better-known director of truly terrible genre movies than the late Italian filmmaker Bruno Mattei. Though I’ve not seen any other Mattei films, I feel comfortable making that assessment based solely on the “blood-soaked double feature” assembled here by the B-movie mavens at Blue Underground. By any rational measure, Hell of the Living Dead and Rats: Night of Terror are cheesy barrel-scrapings, budget-starved and blandly offensive horror counterfeits. But by the standards of Mattei’s oeuvre–which also includes nunsploitation, Nazisploitation, women-in-prison flicks, and mondo-style “documentaries”–they are the cream that rises to the top of the milk. Unless you’re willing to make a case for his nunsploitation flick The Other Hell, or maybe one of the early Nazi sexploitation pictures, these two films seem to form the cornerstone of Mattei’s reputation, such as it is, among genre buffs.

TIFF ’14 Wrap-Up: The Gift of MAGI and some quick takes

Posted in****/****, 2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blog, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Sweden, TIFF

by Bill Chambers I try my best to stay away from the TIFF Bell Lightbox, Toronto’s state-of-the-art cinematheque, during the Festival, because for a goodly portion of those ten days it becomes Pandaemonium with a red carpet. But I made what I hope is a self-explanatory exception for the Industry conference “Ad Infinitum: Bigger, Faster, Brighter Movies – The Changing Creative Landscape of Digital Entertainment,” where Douglas Trumbull–who designed the lightshows for, among others, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Blade Runner; directed the cultish SF movies Silent Running and Brainstorm; and engineered Back to the Future: The Ride–debuted/previewed his new MAGI process, a digital replacement for his late, lamented Showscan. Trumbull took the podium to introduce a featurette on his work that set the context for UFOTOG, a short subject shot in 4K resolution and 3-D at 120 frames per second (fps). Although the piece dovetails with Trumbull’s geeky interest in space invaders (the title is a portmanteau of “UFO” and “photography,” just as MAGI is a weird anagram-cum-abbreviation for “moving image”), its raison d’être is to serve as MAGI’s proof of concept. Good thing, too: as a narrative, it’s pretty incoherent.

TIFF ’14: Clouds of Sils Maria

Posted in2014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Film Festivals, France, TIFF

Cloudsofsilsmaria

***½/****
starring starring Juliette Binoche, Kristen Stewart, Chloë Grace Moretz, Lars Eidinger
written and directed by Olivier Assayas

by Angelo Muredda A master class on acting played simultaneously to the orchestra and the cheap seats, Olivier Assayas’s Clouds of Sils Maria is an odd, beguiling thing. Juliette Binoche is Maria, an international star of film and theatre (naturally) on her way to accept an honorary award on behalf of the director and dramaturge who made her career when she was only eighteen in his infamous Maloja Snake, which sounds a lot like The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant by way of All About Eve. When he dies, Maria finds herself commissioned to star in a remake by a hotshot talent of the German stage, who sees her now as Helena, the older woman in the same-sex romantic drama, giving her role of the young seductress and abandoner Sigrid to rising starlet Jo-Ann Ellis (Chloë Grace Moretz). If that isn’t enough, the text–a younger man’s treatise on the loves and rivalries of women, as Maria has come to see it–has seemingly taken on a radioactive agency of its own, creeping into Maria’s hip-joined relationship with soulmate, line-runner, and personal assistant Valentine (Kristen Stewart), who’s becoming yet another Sigrid at about the same pace Maria is settling into Helena’s skin.

TIFF ’14: The Look of Silence

Posted in****/****, 2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Denmark, Documentary, Film Festivals, Finland, France, Germany, Indonesia, Israel, Netherlands, Norway, Taiwan, TIFF, UK

Lookofsilence

Senyap
****/****
directed by Joshua Oppenheimer

by Bill Chambers Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing is devastating because it doesn’t offer any moral opposition to the glibly boastful first-hand accounts of Indonesian death squads; and his The Look of Silence is devastating because it does. A B-side to The Act of Killing but no mere Blue in the Face afterthought, The Look of Silence follows Adi, a 44-year-old door-to-door optometrist whose senile father is 103 and whose mother improbably claims to be around the same age. The father has forgotten but the mother has not that Adi was preceded by a brother, Ramli, who was killed during the “communist” purge (the picture reiterates that anyone who didn’t immediately fall in line with the military dictatorship was tarred with the same brush, regardless of political or religious affiliation)–though “killed” somehow undersells his execution, a two-day ordeal that culminated in Ramli’s castration. Adi watches Oppenheimer’s footage of the murderers describing his brother’s death in that animated, kids-playing way familiar from The Act of Killing, though these are not the same two “actors” who appeared in that film, underscoring that desensitization to the atrocities committed has happened on a national, not individual, scale.

Telluride ’14: Showcase for shorts

Posted in****/****, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, France, Short Films, Telluride, Telluride 2014, UK

Tellshorts2014

Toutes des connes **/**** (France, 6 mins., d. François Jaros) Recently redubbed Life’s a Bitch, Toutes des connes is a fitfully-engaging relationship dramedy composed of a few dozen ultra-shorts featuring a guy (scriptor Guillaume Lambert) who breaks up with his girlfriend, goes through stages of grief and acceptance, then gets back together with the girl. It’s well done for what it is, but it feels like it needed half the time to be what it is. Toutes des connes doesn’t do anything surprising or innovative, announcing itself conspicuously as a calling-card film for director Jaros. Yes, I see that you can shoot and edit, though the grieving dude with the shaving-creamed face staring at the mirror thing was funnier in Raising Arizona.

Lucy (2014)

Posted in2014, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, France, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

Lucy

*/****
starring Scarlett Johansson, Morgan Freeman, Amr Waked, Choi Min-Sik
written and directed by Luc Besson

by Walter Chaw I recall Luc Besson confessing that his The Fifth Element was based on an idea he’d had as a child; I’m going to wager the same is true of his dreadful Lucy. It’s a pre-pubescent boy’s fantasy of cool: a mash of silly pop-science buoying a beautiful woman’s mutation from impossible party girl into deity through the agency of stem-cell-related drug abuse. The good news is that South Korean superstar Choi Min-Sik (Oldboy) gets a mainstream American debut in a juicy role that nonetheless feels like a wasted opportunity (see: Beat Takeshi in Johnny Mnemonic). The bad news is Lucy is prurient pap that pup-critics will declare proof of “vulgar auteurism,” no matter the redundancy and ignorance of the term itself. Perhaps fitting, then, that the only defense of a movie this obnoxious and wilfully dumb is a term and movement founded on the same principles. I’ve defended Besson in the past–I’m an unapologetic admirer of Leon/The Professional and The Messenger (and Danny the Dog, which he produced, is a peerless statement on the relationship between Western and Asian action stars). But Lucy is reductive, sub-La femme Nikita effluvia that takes a premise niftily played with in Ted Chiang’s beyond-brilliant 1991 short story “Understand” and grinds it into a grey paste.

Venus in Fur (2013)

Posted in2013, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, France, Theatrical

Venusinfur

La Vénus à la fourrure
***½/****
starring Emmanuelle Seigner, Mathieu Amalric
screenplay by David Ives, based on his play
directed by Roman Polanski

by Walter Chaw If it’s stagebound, Roman Polanski’s Venus in Fur, an adaptation of David Ives’s play that is itself an adaptation in part of the Leopold von Sacher-Masoch novel, is at least not stagebound without a purpose. It reminds of Adaptation. in its awareness of itself as an object open to deconstruction (and Derrida is mentioned in the text to make it metacritical in that sense as well); the fact that it’s a play captured on film only underscores its conceit. Venus in Fur is also a career summary for the octogenarian director at a point where his contemporaries are declining steeply in their dotage. Spry and clever, surprisingly funny at times, and at all times indisputably alive, it finds Polanski’s themes of gender subversion in high dunder, opening with a quote from the Apocryphal Book of Judith where the titular heroine seduces enemy general Holofrenes and decapitates (read: emasculates/castrates) him as he reclines in post-coital bliss. Polanski casts an actor who could be his younger doppelgänger, Mathieu Amalric, and opposite him in this two-person drama Polanski’s own wife, Emmanuelle Seigner–transparent, vulnerable, courageous casting that reminds very much of Hitchcock in his late masterpiece period. Venus in Fur is Polanski’s Marnie: a grand survey of all of his sexual peccadilloes that works as apologia, confession, and explication, eventually conveying Polanski’s acceptance of himself as deeply flawed, but better for the wisdom.

Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1970s, 2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Werner Herzog, France, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, West Germany

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Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht
***/****
DVD – Image A- Sound B Extras A
BD – Image D+ Sound B+ Extras A
starring Klaus Kinski, Isabelle Adjani, Bruno Ganz, Roland Topor
screenplay by Werner Herzog
directed by Werner Herzog

by Walter Chaw Nosferatu, the Vampyre isn’t scary so much as it’s just delightful; it’s not topical so much as it’s an extremely competent, sometimes inspired tribute to F. W. Murnau and his classic 1922 Nosferatu. Werner Herzog’s hand at the rudder is steady and Klaus Kinski’s performance as Count Dracula is definitive, but the picture is an exercise in style generally lacking in the New German auteur’s main throughlines, i.e., representation, class, and the vagaries of the creative process. What does survive relatively intact is Herzog’s nascent surrealism, which flowers during the picture’s endlessly disturbing tableaux of plague victims celebrating the last of life with rat-infested banquets and danses macabre. One could extend a little and support that the film’s scenes of apocalypse and pestilence hint at a loathing of immigrants and the perception of cultural corruption, but there’s a damning ornamental emptiness at the centre of Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (henceforth Nosferatu) that places it forever out of time–without a father, as it were. The film’s reason for being (it’s a shrine to Herzog’s favourite German director) is also the end of the conversation.

Ernest & Celestine (2012) + Jodorowsky’s Dune (2014)

Posted in2012, 2014, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Comedy, Crime, Documentary, Drama, Family, France, Luxembourg, Theatrical

Ernest et Célestine
**½/****
screenplay by Daniel Pennac, based on books by Gabrielle Vincent
directed by Stéphane Aubier, Vincent Patar, Benjamin Renner

JODOROWSKY’S DUNE
**½/****
directed by Frank Pavich

by Walter Chaw Broad, earnest, unassuming animation from France, Ernest & Celestine is the tale of a little girl mouse, Celestine (voice of Pauline Brunner), and gruff bear Ernest (Lambert Wilson), who overcome their cultural prejudices to become fast friends. Celestine is outcast because she’d like to be an artist instead of a dentist; Ernest is outcast because he’s a busker struggling to eke out a subsistence living. Over a series of misadventures, the two end up doing the Badlands in Ernest’s ramshackle hideaway, awaiting their fate and trying to enjoy their borrowed time. It’s all leading to a grim ending, but it’s not that kind of movie.

Tess (1979) [The Criterion Collection] – Dual-Format Edition

Posted in1970s, 2014, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, France, Romance, The Criterion Collection

Tess1

***½/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B
starring Nastassia Kinski, Peter Firth, Leigh Lawson, John Collin
screenplay by Gerard Brach, Roman Polanski, John Brownjohn, based on the novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
directed by Roman Polanski

by Bryant Frazer In the annals of feel-bad literature, Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles is a corker, pitting natural beauty and goodness against a battery of opposing forces–the church, the aristocracy, modern technology, human avarice–and finding beauty debased. It was a loaded area of study for Roman Polanski, who adapted it as a Hollywood artist in exile, working in France rather than nearer the book’s setting of Wessex, England, for fear of his deportation to the U.S. on rape charges. Just as Polanski’s bloody Macbeth has been interpreted as a howl of pain following the murder of his beloved wife, Sharon Tate, his Tess can be read as an act of penance, if not a bid for rehabilitation.

Weekend (1967) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in****/****, 1960s, 2014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, France, Road Movie, Satire, The Criterion Collection

Weekend1

WEEK END
****/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B
starring Mireille Darc, Jean Yanne, Georges Staquet, Juliet Berto
written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard

by Angelo Muredda “The horror of the bourgeois can only be overcome with more horror.” So says a militant cannibal as he stands over the remains of one such bourgeois husk late in Weekend, Jean-Luc Godard’s farewell to the alienated pop art and American genre gerrymandering of his early period. As the line about horrors piled upon horrors implies, Weekend is nasty, as valedictory addresses go–a scorched-earth attack on France under Charles de Gaulle that finds nearly all of its citizens massacred in car crashes of their own design and converted into consumable products, namely food. The humanism of minor tragedies like Vivre sa vie and the heedless joy of Frank Tashlin homages like Une femme est une femme has here curdled into a new, ugly form. Although its title suggests a world of leisure and free play, one doesn’t enjoy Weekend so much as one endures it.

Eyes Without a Face (1960) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in****/****, 1960s, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, FFC Must-Own, France, Horror, The Criterion Collection, Thriller
Eyeswithoutaface1

Les yeux sans visage
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Pierre Brasseur, Alida Valli, François Guérin, Edith Scob
screenplay by Pierre Boileau, Thomas Narcejac, Jean Redon and Claude Sautet, based on the novel by Jean Redon
directed by Georges Franju

by Walter Chaw Five films changed the conversation in 1960. They were the fire, though the embers were stoked in the years leading up to them. Looking for signposts in the Eisenhower Fifties, you find the juvenile-delinquent cycle, plus the outré horror flicks of England’s Hammer Studios, or Japan’s tokusatsu, or France’s Nouvelle Vague. More directly, you find a pair of films based on works by the team of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, Diabolique and Vertigo. But in 1960, there was this quintet, each the product of parallel genesis, each proof after a fashion of a Jungian collective unconscious, perhaps, certainly that things long-simmering inevitably boil over. There’s an idea in my head, put there by Ethan Mordden’s Medium Cool, that everything that happened in the arts in the United States throughout the Fifties points to what was about to happen in our culture in the Sixties. Mordden is the source of my favourite teaching point when it comes to the two eras: that in the Fifties, if you didn’t listen to Mother, society was doomed; and in 1960, if you listened to Mother, you were Psycho.

Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

Posted in****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coen Brothers, Comedy, Drama, France, Music, Theatrical, UK

Insidellewyndavis

****/****
starring Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, John Goodman, Justin Timberlake
written and directed by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen

by Walter Chaw I love the Coen Brothers, despite my suspicion that most of their movies don’t think much of me at all. What’s often read as disdain for their characters I’ve read mainly as antipathy for their audience: I believe they like their characters just fine, it’s just that they could give a shit about your opinion of what happens to them. I love the Coens for their literary acumen, for their fine ability to understand not simply the form of genre–and, in their adaptations, of authors–but the entire function as well. They don’t just adapt Cormac McCarthy and Charles Portis novels, they adapt those writers’ entire bodies of work. O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a remarkable retelling of The Odyssey, for instance, because in addition to following the outlines of the poem, it adapts its themes and storytelling strategies; it’s a dissection and a representation and glorious, of course. They return now to The Odyssey–or, at least, to the character of Odysseus–in Inside Llewyn Davis, a picture set in 1961, among the bohos and coffee shops of a Greenwich Village on the verge of Bob Dylan and the counterculture, and it’s populated with lost souls in overlapping underworlds. Transpose that passage from Homer where Odysseus fills troughs with sheeps’ blood to draw the undead (and finds his poor deceased mother there at her drink) to scenes in Pappi’s (Max Casella) infernal nightclub as proto-hipsters and neo-beatniks assemble blandly on the edge of a trembling something while performers bleed out before them. In rituals for new gods, after all, there must be lambs to slaughter.

SDFF ’13: The Fifth Season

Posted in****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Mystery, Netherlands

Fifthseason

La cinquième saison
****/****
starring Aurelia Poirier, Django Schrevens, Sam Louwyck, Gill Vancompernolle
written and directed by Peter Brosens & Jessica Woodworth

by Walter Chaw It begins as a puzzle, the active-engagement kind where a film, maybe an art film not very good and certainly not lacking in pretension, wears all the hopes of its creators on its sleeve. But then, out of nowhere, Peter Brosens and Jessica Woodworth’s The Fifth Season (La cinquième saison) ties together all the pretty pictures into an entirely honourable updating of a few of the ideas from, but most importantly the atmosphere of, Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man. Truth be told, the pictures are more than just pretty: they’re stunning at times, and it’s easy to be mesmerized by them–by their surrealism and meticulous framing, and, at the end of it all, by their gorgeous absurdity. This is rapturous filmmaking that in its first minutes watches two teens kiss, tentatively, in the cold and the woods, their breath trembling the soft down on each other’s faces. We feel, with them, the discovery of something new. The Fifth Season is a film about textures, but rather than just be a film about textures, it does something that maybe Terrence Malick’s movies do, certainly Bela Tarr’s: it makes its form comment on its function.

Bastards (2013)

Posted in****/****, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Directors: Claire Denis, Drama, France, Revenge, Theatrical, Thriller

Bastards

Les salauds
****/****
starring Vincent Lindon, Chiara Mastroianni, Julie Bataille, Lola Creton
screenplay by Jean-Pol Fargeau and Claire Denis
directed by Claire Denis

by Angelo Muredda A Claire Denis film through and through, Bastards is nevertheless a brilliant departure for one of the most distinctive artists in world cinema–an indignant revenge thriller with, of all things, a straightforward plot. Of course, the plot is scrambled, doled out in the runic fragments that have become Denis’s stock-in-trade. We open, for instance, in the rain, as a throbbing Tindersticks track underscores a series of beautiful but inscrutable nocturnal images: glimpses of a man forlornly staring out his window, languorous tracking shots of a nude young woman in heels roaming through a deserted street, and finally a tableau of a dead man’s body splayed out beneath a fire escape, surrounded by paramedics in the background as a woman, probably his wife, is draped in a tinfoil blanket in the fore. Although films like L’Intrus have primed us to accept such shards as part of an impressionistic array of visual information, adding up to a textured view of nighttime Paris as a hopelessly lonely place, in Bastards the pieces fit together in a precise way we’re simply not allowed to know until we’ve arrived through the movie’s own idiosyncratic channel, and at its own deliberate pace. That makes it one of the most elegantly constructed of Denis’s eleven features–a grim noir story broken into its component parts, then reassembled into a haunted funhouse image of itself.

TIFF ’13: The Past

Posted in2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Mystery, TIFF
**/**** directed by Asghar Farhadi by Angelo Muredda The Past is a heartbreaker, a badly misjudged project that retraces each major step of Asghar Farhadi's A Separation but arrives at the finish line with little to show for itself. Like Farhadi's previous film, we start with a divorce, this time between Parisian Marie (Bérénice Bejo, channelling Marion Cotillard's more hysterical performances, especially for Christopher Nolan) and the now Tehran-based Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa), who flies back into town to sign the papers and see his ex off into her new relationship with Samir (Tahar Rahim). That Samir has his own troubled…