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Once more I ventured to the increasingly product-placement ridden London International Film Festival. Once again, I selected films mostly by directors I know (for the auteur has waited down a darkened alley in cinema’s town and has emerged to take us by force), rather than the other. The other being a selection of relatively unknown films which will not be given general release, even on these hallowed shores of the Thames, and simultaneously enhancing my cinematic periphery. I tried that last year here and became myopic with hate.

Thursday 16: The day after the Opening Night Gala (to which I wasn’t invited):

Love Live Long

(Mike Figgis; UK; 2008) in the New British Cinema selection:

Figgis here accepted an offer to make a film that he initially thought to decline; this offer, and a ‘minimal’ budget of £100,000, made by the executive producers, née organisers, of the infamous Gumball Rally, with little restriction or proviso except that said rally must appear in the film, somewhere.

Off Figgis the “filmmaker” went and scribed a one page treatment, gathering together a couple of actors a couple of days before principle photography began in Istanbul.

It soon after loses itself in the equally crowded streets of politics; Figgis’ handheld camera following the fragile Rachel through a million person rally (who knows if Figgis here intended a linguistic and humourless pun) against Islamic fundamentalism.

It is unfortunate that the film so quickly becomes hackneyed and predictable after an opening ten minutes that includes a genuinely harrowing and intricately timed scene where Rachel, reflected and filmed in a bathroom mirror tantalisingly places a razor-blade against her wrist; the blade hovering, moving almost imperceptibly closer to and further from vulnerable flesh and veins; a minute metaphor for her indecision. Figgis holds this shot just, uncomfortably, long enough for us to find hope that she will not make the slash. Then she does.

The scenes after this, except one, serve to mock us and our stupid hope, and then realisation dawns that not only should we not have hoped that she did not slash her delicate wrists but that she had cut deeper, and from wrist to elbow rather than sideways, as Sophie Winkleman’s manifestation of, and the character of Rachel herself, are revealed as, as complex as the rally-drivers’ reasons for racing.

Throughout the film the camera’s function, personality and point of view are shattered and reflected through a prism of confusion as it functions variously as Figgis’ own POV as he plays a ‘journalist’ following the fictionalised ‘Darren the Rally Driver’; the audience’s POV as purveyor of the fiction/documentary’s, as in the scenes of the anti-extremism march; Rachel’s revealing ‘Suicide Diaries’ (revealing the underdevelopment of script and character as much as anything else); and a final facet to which I will return soon.

About midway through this hybrid “mockumentary”, at its conjoining crack, possibly, this effect became annoying and incredible. The lines between the first two facets above becoming blurred and therefore jarring. This is exemplified in the most affecting scene in the film, where Darren speaks to his wife on his mobile ‘phone in his hotel room as the supine and underclothed Rachel caresses herself on the hotel bed, him swilling beer and prowling around the perimeter of the bed. The scene holds the essence of both characters, that he is a wanker and that she is emotionally damaged, if not broken, vulnerable, self-destructive, but also, ambivalently, it begins to suggest the opposite ascendency in the characters’ power struggle. Her submission here metamorphoses into a power tool later and his primal male domineering is soon to be exposed as the superficial posturing that it is.

It is again unfortunate that this scene’s sister scene and the film’s dénouement should be played out in such fear of innovation; using that spurned lover, sub-Adrian Lynne, cliché. At home with his wife and children, Darren receives a call from Rachel who is obviously watching him from a parked car, the camera becoming her eye; she is the voyeur as well as us, and he the prey. She makes comments like; “Is that your wife? She is very pretty.”, “I am not far away…”, she may as well have said; “Got any spuds at home for a Gigot de lapin and potato gnocchi?”. As Figgis admitted himself in the introduction to the film, this ending was never planned and was improvised and filmed in a day. And it shows.

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La Belle Personne

(Christophe Honoré; France; 2008) in the French Revolutions selection;

I have to admit I have never seen 17 fois Cécile Cassard (2002) nor Les Chansons d’amour (2007), for differing reasons. The former because of its inconsiderate unavailability on DVD and the latter as I fucking hate musicals. I hate musicals as much as I hate the Beach Boys, and I hate them so much that I leave anywhere some sod has deigned to play them as soon as I can. Which is just after I have beaten said sod around the head with a copy of Pet Sounds. About his other two features; I think Dans Paris (2006) was my favourite film of last year and that Ma Mere (2004) was interesting if flawed. Hand in hand with Ma Mere, blissfully unaware and, as yet, relatively uncorrupted, a progeny, is where I would see La Belle Personne. Another literary adaptation, it lives in the same amoral house, or, at least, attends the same school.

Ostensibly, and simply, this is a story about a teacher’s (Louis Garrell, in his fourth job with Honoré) improper desire, or love, for his pupil. Billed as Honoré’s most straightforwardly realistic film in the Film Festival’s programme, I can’t understand why then a pupil should (or could) sing his suicide note as pop song before dashing his brains out on the school’s courtyard concrete. I hate musicals yes, but I am not yet, a realism fascist; I like Buñuel, Svankmeyer, Mike Leigh…

I was hoping for more of the simple realism of Dans Paris here; not for many months previous or since seeing it have I come out of a film, found out when it is next showing and bought another ticket. But, instead the fickle loves and near incestuous sexual interrelations of the Parisian schoolchildren of Personne make the plot overly complicated in a way that the earlier film’s flashbacks of the cries, and finally the whimper, of a relationship fighting against its own demise, managed to avoid.

Nemours (Garell) is sleeping with fellow teacher Ms Perrin and student Marie and wants to sleep with another student Junie (Sedoux), as does everyone, except her cousin Matthias as he is gay, maybe, although still sleeping with a another girl. Yet, he is not the only one, Henri is with Catherine who is sleeping with Matthias on the side, but is not the other girl that he is sleeping with, or the boy, yet Henri was sleeping with Matthias but that stopped when Matthias began sleeping with the other chap. I think. And there is a further story of lovers’ duplicity told in a cul-de-sac, flashback subplot which serves to underline that this sort of sexual liberation has always been rife within the school’s walls and is condoned and possibly transmitted from generation to generation, teacher to pupil.

In the scene where, faithful to the source novel’s (La Princesse de Clèves) plot, a love letter is incorrectly attributed to Nemours, the last line revealing that the author loves everything about the addressee, even their knees, I had the sense that as with Dans Paris, Honoré was again sprinkling his narrative with Nouvelle Vague references (given the plot of older man and younger girl Rohmer’s Claire’s Knee (1970) sprang to mind). Yet, my concentration was almost fully consumed with following the twists and turns of the various lovers’ whims and, guiltily, the sheer cold beauty of Laurent Brunet’s cinematography.

Having avoided Les Chansons d’amour and yet to see 17 fois Cécile Cassard, I am still to have Honoré’s brilliance, or otherwise, confirmed to me. Maybe it was the strength of the two leads in Dans Paris that held it aloft in my esteem. But, as with Ma Mere, La Belle Personne contained enough luscious, dark and existentially empty moments that I will have to continue to defer my judgement that Dans Paris was simply an anomaly.

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Hunger

(Steve McQueen; UK; 2008) in the Galas and Special Screenings selection:

There is an awful lot of hype surrounding this film. Most of which I think happened whilst I was in the cinema on a Monday night watching Ulrich Seidl’s Models (1999). I had seen Hunger in the afternoon and written most of these thoughts concerning it not long after that, but was unaware that London was plastered with posters advertising it. I am sure some of it has to do with McQueen’s place in the pantheon of Turner-prize winners. When I stumbled out of The Mall and down the stairs at Charing Cross tube station, my mind still attempting to focus on that smudged and smeared line between the fictions and facts and documentary and fibs of Seidl’s film, I walked up an unending Carrollian corridor of Hunger posters; the positive reviews covering each calling out to me, as they are paid to do. I didn’t know whether this was one of those occasions like when my dad bought a new car and when asked what had driven him to choose an ear-wax orange Skoda, suspecting it was just a punishment for teenage insubordination, his reply was “Because no-one else has one.” Only then to drive the thing for the first time, dropping me off at a party most likely, to find every moron in my hometown chugging along in a burnt-umber Estelle. One never notices the existence of things until one has it and it seems that everyone else has it too. Or something like that.

Hunger opens with a textual history, briefer than mine above, of blankets and torture. The Maze prison its guards and IRA prisoners. There is a clatter over the top of this black and white, inter-title text, soon revealed to be, and reaching a painful crescendo, of, tin lids clashing with wet cobblestones, shown in light-reflected close-up. This aural assault is a weapon of disorientation and aggression that McQueen returns to later in the film, drawing parallels between both sides of this standoff. More gaps in an ignorant audience member’s (I hang my head in shame) knowledge of the era are filled in when one Mrs Thatcher’s nasally pompous tones can be heard on the radio, explaining exactly why the Government would not grant the prisoners political status. But, not before an earlier shot which shows so much promise.

A prison guard, the only to be given a face, a family, a life, if not a name, readies himself for a shift, submerges his scabbed and bloody hands in a sinkful of water, and has a fry-up placed in front of him by a doting woman, who one takes to be his wife, although there is no evidence. The camera opens on a shot, at an odd angle and in close-up under the table, focusing on the napkin on the guard’s legs, where he drops a few crumbs and wafts them from his lap with his hand; this entire gesture is used again and again by McQueen, once more to draw links between guards and prisoners. But, here too is a juxtaposition, if only subtley and to a minor degree, of the wastage of food and in the consequent scenes, of starvation and its intrinsic pain.

The predominant palette is soon set to blue; Hard, cold blue, and will barely change throughout, except for shit brown and lurid green, for light relief. Still we are following the prison guard, Ray Lohan, as ostensible protagonist; the camera often lingers on him in the crowded communal staff rooms of the prison; another abstract and recurring shot in the yard of the prison, the camera in medium close-up, angled, crooked maybe, stationary on Lohan smoking deeply, leant against a wall in the snow. This shot, stands out for its beauty, and its obvious metaphor for the emotional torment (guilt?) that Lohan feels.

It is in one of these scenes that McQueen focuses in, again, on Lohan’s hands, the tools of his trade, the knuckles threshed, split, bloody, and with the surrounding and omnipresent blue of the prison walls and the falling snow, he captures a splendidly unnerving congregation of red, white and blue. Alone, this shot would have been somewhat subtler than it ultimately is. Unfortunately, McQueen has already, maybe five minutes before, shown a detailed close-up of an anonymous prison guard’s Union Jack key-fob as he opens his locker. The two together just smack of flogging a dead horse. McQueen should have had more faith in himself and his audience.

I suggest that Lohan’s inner turmoil may be guilt as the three shots of his bloody hands submerged in sinks, so markedly brings to mind Macbeth: “A little water clears us of this deed.” Of course, this is evidently not true for Shakespeare, Macbeth, McQueen or Lohan.

Unfortunately, further scenes are not as elegant as these. Much of the prison life depicted, the torments inflicted on the inmates, are no more harrowing, if less melodramatic, than those in Alan Parker’s Midnight Express (1978), Hector Babenco’s Carandiru (2003) or even parts of a Clockwork Orange (1971). That McQueen soon refers to stock, conventional shots of porridge; the long shots along unnaturally lit corridors, the cramped, close-ups inside cells, the camera looking up, ever so slightly, at the guards and often down on the prisoners, is a shame after the opening scenes. And still, there are touches of humour; I cannot doubt that when new prisoner (Brian Milligan’s) Davey and the faeces-smearing Gerry (Liam McMahon), by way of introduction, compare prison sentences and in reaction to Davey’s “Six years.” the heavily bearded Gerry responds “You lucky bastard”, McQueen is calling upon the memory of Michael Palin’s inverted inmate in the Python’s Life of Brian (Terry Jones; 1979).

Another hint at dark humour, which so soon after turns nasty; is the scene where the inmates are finally warranted their civilian clothing. They are all given ridiculous golfing clothing á la Goldfinger, only to get back to their cells and completely annihilate them. Each piece of furniture is obliterated and McQueen’s editing here adds to the violence; the sharp, aggressive cuts between cells and inmates, their actions mirroring one another (possibly out of necessity as the cells are so sparse), and one is thankful of being placed behind the heavy steel cell-doors, the camera peaking through the letter-box shutter at the explosions of anger in response to another humiliation.

The guards’ and warden’s response to this destruction? Riot police, of course. And more violence and humiliation. Here, McQueen humanises the authoritarian mass, rather ham fistedly, with shots concentrating on a young, one would assume rookie, as he acts as he has been taught and marches into place in a line and beats his police-issue truncheon on his shield with his colleagues. Later still, we see him separated from the crowd; inmates being beaten and the anonymised riot-grunts beating in one corridor, he in a solitary, blue-quenched room beyond an adjoining wall, the two scenes juxtaposed in an intelligent but oft-used shot covering both spaces at once (see Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love, 2001, for example).

The rapid editing and the aural assault of the increasing, rhythmic din of heavy wooden truncheons on reinforced plastic shields, again, intensify the unharnessed aggression. The drumming is suddenly cut through with an edit and a new scene opens, following Lohan into what becomes the living room of an old people’s home, replete with medicinally-comatosed elderly and knitted chair-back covers. Lohan sits opposite his mother as she stares into the distance, her thoughts probably transcending time as well as space, and asks after her, without getting a reaction. Just as the audience, or I at least, was bemoaning the conspicuousness of placing these two scenes together (the untamed brutality and the docility and quasi-peace of the care home) and before Lohan has time to repeat his question, a lone moustachioed man enters the room, places a silenced pistol to the back of his head and empties his cranium all over his mother’s blouse. Not that she notices. Here endeth any association with guards as individuals. This scene comments on the infiltration of ‘the troubles’ into everyone’s homes, but also tidily erases a character whose presence the second half of the film does not have time or space for; there is no funeral, no weeping wife left in an over-large house, nothing. This is not, necessarily a criticism; just a recognition of an analogously brutal and necessary act of erasure, the art and content of the film in tandem.

The next shot is by far the lengthiest most static of all in the film; Michael Fassbender’s Bobby Sands and Liam Cunningham’s Father Dom Moran’s conversation concerning the morality of Sand’s decision to hunger-strike until death if necessary. For much of the scene, the camera is set exactly between the two characters as they face each other over a table, both dragging deeply on their cigarettes; a mise en scène of, initial, equality. Various edits give us point of view shots and close-ups of the individual characters, but not many. The prisoner and priest’s ethical sparring is soon ‘won’ by Sands. Or, at least, Father Moran concedes to Sands’ devotion to the cause. Sands’ winning punch, not a knockout, but one that warns Moran of his inherent danger, is his telling of a childhood memory in which the schoolboy Sands is a cross-country runner who makes the moral decision to assist and quicken the death of an injured foal and independently accept the (physical) punishment imposed and enacted by a priest who bares witness to the act of compassion or murder, depending on your perspective. This reminiscence is such a plain suggestion of Sands’ deep moral dedication to those weaker than himself and his ability to endure physical castigation for the universal benefit of others. And, of course, after this scene begin the prolonged scenes of his physical and mental deterioration through starvation.

McQueen here creates an unnerving, hallucinatory and touching requiem for Sands. Bed-bound without the aid of the male prison nurse who dotingly attends to his many bed-sores; another visual marriage between prisoners and the prison guards; the lesions covering Sands’ broken, emaciated body and the wounds on the knuckles of Lohan; McQueen moves the camera around Sands’ hospital room and prone husk.

At one point a flock of birds swirls through a sky superimposed above Sand’s head, openly meant to be a ‘vision’ of his and as the image subsides the camera begins to float and swoop as if a bird itself. This vision here is possibly a premature omen for Sands’ immanent death. The imagery hints at the last moments of fellow-Tate Prize Winner (2004) Jeremy Deller’s film Memory Bucket where millions of bats, silhouetted against the sky of a Texan dusk, emerge from nearby caves. Yet, this sort of imagery has a more purely cinematic lineage too, such as The Cranes Are Flying (Mikhail Kalatozov: 1957) or, more recently, Kwon-taek Im’s 2002 Chihwaseon, where the flight of the eponymous cranes and swallows respectively act as symbols or portents of death. Also, the metaphorical representation of animals for the soul calls to mind the recent Garage (Leonard Abrahamson; 2007) where the death of the protagonist is followed by shots of a Shire horse, which, previously, has been linked with the protagonist’s life, freed from its tether and pen.

The subjects of these hallucinations are ambiguous. Sands more than once wakes to find a small boy in his room, and McQueen does not suggest an easy answer to whether it is Sand’s own young son (referred to by Father Moran) or a representation of himself as a child, his past and that telling memory of cross-country running and equine-icide. Soon after, however, at the juncture of Sands’ death and the release of his soul, one assumes, the visual flashback of the same child running through the countryside and the flutter of birds’ wings make all plain. It is Sands’ past that has informed his present decision; his physical strength, commitment and morality have been forged in his younger self and are now unbreakable.

The film finishes with another textual history lesson like the one that began the film, filling in any factual gaps, like the amount of prison guards that were actually assassinated and other hunger –striking inmates that died after Sands, who all remain nameless. This ending acts as a metonym for all that is wrong with the film; the half that offers the factual/important information in a straightforward manner, the radio broadcasts are missing an emotional core and the more abstract and emotional sections are missing an alternative perspective. This does not detract from the film being a powerful experience, just one that looks at this period of recent history with a simple if not myopic eye.

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Liverpool

(Lisandro Alonso; Argentina: 2008) World Cinema selection;

Sparse. The sparseness of this film, Alonso’s fourth feature, envelopes it like the snows of the Tierra del Fuego village where two thirds of the film is set. The acting, camera movement, soundtrack (there is an opening credits track, one more in a bar and occasionally the radio but certainly no extra-diegetic sound), the dialogue and geography are all sparse. There are many, many long, long, stagnant takes of the protagonist, the perennially drunk or at least swigging Farrell, where the camera barely moves or, if it does, maybe just nods as he rises from a table, usually to drink some more. Alonso introduced the film for the NFT 1 audience and was unable to confirm why he had chosen the title ‘Liverpool’ for his very Argentinean film. Maybe he is making the delicate suggestion that Scousers are also alcoholics. I don’t remember seeing my Nan ever touch a drop. Except at Communion.

The ending suggests an answer of sorts; Farrell’s, retarded, sister toys with a ‘Liverpool’ key ring, given to her by Farrell along with a wad of cash. Maybe Farrell is suggesting that she travel, like he has on his cargo ship. However, I am content to assume that it is as arbitrarily given a name as Alonso suggests. Just so as I no longer have to bother thinking about it.

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Hooked

(Adrian Sitaru; Romania; 2008) Cinema Europa selection;

Again, the audience were lucky enough to have the filmmaker present to introduce the film, although in many cases all this reveals is nothing more than the audience’s sycophancy.

Sitaru’s first feature not made for television is an interesting, if derivative, affair. It opens with the camera following a rather chubby, bearded Romanian chap through a badly lit corridor towards an external door and as he exits the building he accidently lets the fly-screen door flap back into the ‘camera’s face’ and he, Mihai, apologises for it. Here is the first indication of the camera actually representing a given character’s perspective, rather than that of an omnipresent eye. Outside, the cinematography takes on a grainy super-8 quality, and given that the two characters are packing their car for a picnic, it is suggestive of footage of a family holiday circa, 1973, (although as Sitaru explained, and maybe others knew, this was just an effect of blowing up mini-DV for projection). However, after a confusing few minutes, where harsh edits fuse together the points of view of Mihai to ‘Mihaiela’, his lover, each holding the camera as they interact with one another, the happy holiday mood is soured as the couple drive out of town and bicker. It becomes apparent that she is married and that he is her lover and that they are deceiving her husband to go for a romantic day in the country.

During their journey into the country they pass many a roadside prostitute and see a dog crossing the road, which Mihaiela finds “cute” prompting Mihai to, tellingly, ask why she wonders so many dogs are run down. Tellingly, for not long after this, and another bicker, a third person’s POV is represented, and is hit by the couple’s oncoming car. The third character is soon revealed to be one of the myriad prostitutes. The couple decide that she is dead and to take her to the hospital. I suppose that shock here accounts for this strange ‘closing the barn door after the horse has bolted’ scenario. This crass presentation of the prostitute, ‘Ana’, and by extension the other road-side prostitutes, as dogs, is misguided to say the least. Why should an audience care for a character whose worth the director has so quickly associated with that of a stray mutt? Fortunately, the sterling performance of Maria Dinulescu as Ana expunges Sitaru’s initial tonal faux pas. Although, he will insist on reviving it again and again through Mihai and ‘Mihaiela’s’ dialogue about the prostitute’s charge being five lei, the price of a beer. Of course, Sitaru is here raising important issues about the value of life, as his compatriots Cristian Mungiu and Cristi Puiu did before him, but to offer a reply before he has even begun the discussion is a mistake. In the Question and Answer session after the film, Sitaru was at pains to offer a universal and not a specifically Romanian reading of these issues.

To return to Dinulescu’s performance, that Ana appears as an ingénue from whom a latent, devilish foreboding emanates is much to do with Dinulescu (compare her performance to that of Winkleman’s in Figgis’ film), but not everything. The use of the POV shot in the manner in which Sitaru employs it is associated with films intending to shock and scare. Situating the viewer as the character in front of whom the killer is just about to appear, or even the killer himself, adds to the immediacy of the reaction. From Peeping Tom (Michael Powell 1960), the shower scene of Psycho (1960), The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick & Eduardo Sánchez 1999) or Romero’s Diary of the Dead last year, the handheld camera has allowed the POV to be used to full intimidatory effect, and its use here cannot help but add to the unnerving performance of Dinulescu as Ana. She manages to turn the couple against each other with untruths and the power of allowing them to confirm their own doubts about one another, their faith in love.

Hooked resembles, as a child can closely resemble a great-uncle, the plot and character’s of Polanski’s debut feature, 1962’s Knife in the Water. Sitaru was approached with this comparison at the screening and flatly avoided the association, instead referring to the script being based on a short story by a pal of his. Unfortunately, no-one asked whether this chum had indeed repeatedly watched Knife in the Water whilst penning this story.

This denial struck a cord as Sitaru was happy to name-drop other key influences; suggesting that the original few drafts of the script were of a kin with Rashomon (Kurosawa, 1950); and the works of Tarkovsky. Indeed, there is a hint of the final strains of the Russian poet’s Mirror (1975) in the final scene here. After Mihaiela and Mihai have argued one too many times and she has taken the car and is sat in the lay-by where they originally hit Ana, and he is left at the riverbank, angling, Ana appears to be drowning in the river, but is doing so in the middle of the river, negating concern as how could she have swam to the centre if she could not swim? Mihai ignores this trick, encounters the Game-keeper, who tells him of Mihaiela’s whereabouts and finds her, whereupon the couple engage in some short-lived conciliatory sex in the passenger seat of the car. A cut places the audience in the woods overlooking the lane, trees silhouetted against the sunlit countryside, the camera moving slightly from side to side, as it does in Tarkovsky’s film before he lets it pan along the forest wall into the future. Here though, instead of representing the ambivalence of time; past, present and future existing mutually and symbiotically, this shot is purely set up to create an ambiguous ending. The point of view of this character (quite obviously Ana) travels down the slope toward the lane and waits in a bend in the road, low, as it did when it was struck by Mihai and Mihaiela’s car, and steps out in front of an oncoming van…

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Still Walking

(Hirokazu Kore-eda; Japan; 2008) World Cinema selection;

Kore-eda’s latest feature is a family drama in the vein of Yasujiro Ozu’s of fifty-plus years ago. It opens with a mother and adult daughter preparing food in the family kitchen, a light-hearted bickering and the mother attempting to impart culinary secrets, which are rejected by the daughter, accompany the peeling, washing and salting of assorted vegetables. This scene holds the ends of the two threads that, quite simply, weave throughout the rest of the film: the family’s history and interrelationships and the transference of knowledge and traditions from elder to younger generations. Much of which occurs in the focal points of kitchen and adjacent dining room.

Soon after this scene, the elderly patriach of the family, Kyohei, appears, grumbles and goes for a leisurely walk, stopping to pass the time with an ageing neighbour and talk about her ailing health. Seconds before this, we learn from the matriach, still at the kitchen sink preparing food, that he is a retired general practitioner. This morsel of information, so subtly inserted into the narrative, expands over the time of the film, casting a shadow of nearly all the characters and their actions.

This older physician also hesitates on his jaunt to study the sea on the horizon. For now, this has no ore meaning than that of a whimsical man in the winter years of his life staring out to sea. But, once again, Kore-eda is introducing the seeds of thoughts in order that they blossom later in the film.

We are now introduced to the remaining members of the family, the youngest son, Ryota, with his new wife, a widow with son, travelling by train to the family reunion and the husband and two children of the daughter from the opening scene, already arrived at the parental home and busily emptying the fridge. The reason for the reunion is soon revealed as the twelfth memorial of the death of the eldest son, Junpei.

This loss is intrinsically linked to Kyohei’s grumpiness and his relationship with his second-born son and once more, pervades throughout the film, without any resolve.

Apart from a handful of modern details; the inclusion and frequent use of mobile ‘phones (there is a joke made at the expense of the mother, that although she owns one, she uses the landline), one of the children’s use of a portable games console, the rest of the film reads like Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953) and his penultimate work The End of the Summer (1961). The elderly patriach and the signs of an affair early in his marriage; the family reunion based around a death; the concerns about conventions transcending generational gaps; the quarrelsome, yet ultimately loving marriage at the head of the family and the discussions centred on the re-marriage of a widowed daughter(-in law). Here there is again an element of renewal, in Ozu’s latter film the family worry about how hard it would be for her to marry again, but in Kore-eda’s she is remarried already, even though Kyohei is unhappy with the arrangement.

In fact Kyohei is unhappy with practically everything, and from this stems much of the film’s humour; this cantankerousness and the occasional comedic scenes of mistimed manners. These conventions are sometimes lightly mocked and at times these ridicules of the established conventions receive aggressive reactions.

Whereas in The End of the Summer the modern and ancient worlds are still seen as partitioned, if only by a screen of rice paper thinness, the contemporary, future being represented as malignant; the grotesque Crematorium chimney sticking out of the countryside like a sore thumb and the ominous ravens that accompany the shots of the chimney, in Kore-eda’s film the melding of these worlds has taken place.

What Kore-eda is here concerned about is much the same as Ozu, but from the perspective of where the inevitable changes have happened. He is now suggesting that the new generations should be conscious of the transference of these conventions and habits, and possibly even superstitions, from their elders. Kyohei bemoans the death of his eldest son, his “heir”, as does his wife Toshiko, because his lineage, particularly that of a GP, cannot go any further. However, other familial traits are passed on through progeny to their direct offspring.

Both son and daughter leave with their respective spouses and children and the older couple, having seen Ryota and his family to their bus home, begin the ascent home. A voiceover by Ryota here explains that his father soon after passed away and that he and his son never went to see a soccer game with him, as he had promised, and of his mother’s death so soon afterwards and that neither did he take her on a car journey; another promise broken. Far from concentrating on these losses and the missed opportunities they create, Kore-eda only refers to the deaths in briefly and in disassociated voiceover. Whereas the death of a parent in each of Ozu’s films brings the family together again in mourning, the epilogue here has Ryota, his wife, step-son and daughter at the graveside of Junpei performing the same rituals as we saw his mother do earlier, pouring water over the gravestone and reciting verbatim her lines that the water must be cooling on such a warm day.

Further still, on leaving the cemetery Ryota tells his young daughter that the yellow butterfly they see is so coloured because white butterflies that survive the winter return the next summer yellow; a superstition of which his mother has previously told him.

Overall, Kore-eda’s film compares favourably to those of Ozu, especially the subtle tonal shifts, from the frosty initial reception, mostly from Kyohei, that gradually thaws as the film and the day progress toward evening, and the acting is uniformly good. However, I am just unsure of why this film is important. Is Kore-eda suggesting that the concerns raised by Ozu fifty years ago, and more, have not been heeded, addressed? If so, why the straight regurgitation of Ozu in order to say it?

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Un Lac

(Philippe Grandrieux; France; 2008) French Revolutions selection:

Grandrieux’s third feature opens with a close-up on the red-jumpered body, from which grunts of exertion reveal his gender. Slow realisation ensues, that he is swinging an axe into an object off-camera, the dense thud of steal into heavy bulk, unmistakeable, but what that bulk is remains ambiguous, until the camera pulls back slightly to reveal the boy’s face and the tree he is attempting to fell, both surrounded by a thick blanket of pine and snow.

The camera roves about the forest, often unfocused, filming the trees individually, in silhouette, from below, creating a sense of vertigo and provoking fleeting thoughts of Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov’s 1930 Romance sentimentale. Thoughts which are reinforced later in the film when the camera roves around the lake, concentrating on its muddy banks, like the Russian film, but here, nearby to the house that this young man shares with his family; sister, blind mother and younger brother.

For now though he has hitched the felled trunk to long straps attached to the saddling of a great shire horse and is trudging through the snow with the regal beast, the handheld camera shaking as the cameraperson also lifts heavy feet to fight through the deep snow underfoot. Quite suddenly the boy has fallen sideways and is fitting in the snow, saliva bubbling at the corners of his mouth, his whole body jittering as the seizure takes its toll. He comes back to full consciousness, the camera at the side of his face as he gazes around the landscape, capturing the sense of his inability to fathom why he is there, if not even, initially, where he is.

He is next to be found in a tight embrace with the teenage girl who we learn is his sister. The camera is close to their bodies, implicit in their mutual affection; an intimacy that the audience cannot help but share. In this scene come the first words of the film, maybe some ten minutes has passed when Alexi confirms to Hege that he has had another epileptic fit (although these exact words are never used; the dialogue throughout reveals concretely as much as the imagery; very little), through tears of fear, possibly, of a condition which he does not understand.

The siblings’ embrace becomes a furtive, fumbled attempt by Alexi to advance the sibling sensuality toward something more obviously incestuous, but this physical pursuit is off camera, the hint at Alexi’s intentions coming from the tone of Hege’s admonishing “No, no.” and the ensuing brief dialogue between the two, Alexi saying that she is still his sister and her replying that he is still her brother, alluding to past experimentation or a conversation about such desires.

These indoor scenes of family life are all lovingly shot as the relations between each couple in the unit is one of tactile communication, a habit that no doubt has evolved from the sightlessness of the mother and her need to ‘read’ people’s faces with her hands in order make that affectionate connection to them as she is denied it through eye-contact. Faces and hands are shot in golden browns and burnt oranges, their edges often blurred as if one is viewing the images with tears in ones eyes, although they stand out against the dark background, all else but these essentials of expression and love falling into shadow.

The equilibrium of this emotional centrifuge is thoroughly destabilised by the unexplained arrival of Jurgen, at least one of the siblings being drawn into his orbit. Alex is sitting at the edge of the lake, the cold visible around him and in the smoke it makes of his breath, the camera tight against his face, moving intricately over his mouth as it widens. Intercut with this is the progression of a young man through the snow-laden forest, his breath, heavily exhaled but lightly floating in the air in front of him, as Alexi’s does. The camera jolts with the movements of its operator. This young man appears next to and behind Alexi on the shingle beach of the lake, who betrays no surprise if he feels any, and he introduces himself, and explains his presence, again the camera tight against the character’s face, roving over his attractive features; “My name is Jurgen. I have come to chop wood.”

Grandrieux does nothing to offer any easy clues to his meaning here, or the details of the narrative. Although the story is linear, seemingly, the location of the house even is never divulged; the North somewhere is all we can ascertain from the environment and weather, even the geography of the house is uncertain; how each room is situated in relation to others and how many exactly there are, are neither explained. This spatial uncertainty, allied to the temporal and emotional incongruence, the lack of tenuous facts, adds to the feeling of being in an unreal world. An irony, given the importance lain on the act of feeling; touching in order to understand the parameters of your existence.

Jurgen accompanies Alexi into the woods to cut trees, Hege and the younger brother (billed only as l’enfant in the film’s credits) bringing them flasks of cooling water through the day. It is here that Alexi begins to, rightfully, suspect of the blossoming of the romance between Hege and Jurgen. Their furtive looks at one another, jealously regarded by Alexi, and a stolen kiss near a waterfall, also surreptitiously witnessed by him, drive him off into the forest alone at night. The three youngsters hunt for him by torchlight and it is Jurgen that finds him, half-frozen, and revives him through rigorously rubbing his face and naked torso. During this night-time search Grandrieux captures one of a number of shots of ethereal beauty that stand out in a film so lusciously shot; torchlight reflects off frozen dew along the myriad branches creating a hue of white, dazzling orbs in the night. Another of note being Alexi, and the younger brother travelling by horse, emerging at first as a miniscule dark grey profile proceeding toward the camera from a blanched white background. These images enhance the mood of surrealism and mystery that surround the events in the film.

These external scenes are harsh, blue and white in juxtaposition to the sumptuous internal, family scenes in autumnal colours and black. Outside the camera moves swiftly and jarringly with the characters, inside it is nearly immobile.

As with much of the rest of the film Grandrieux never offers an open answer to the arrival of Jurgen. It is possible he has visited on previous years to cut wood and his relationship with Hege, which on this occasion is consummated, is not one in its infancy but has been tended and accepted over many seasons. Possibly he has, or previously, answered an advertisement for a wood-cutter in a newspaper.

Equally disorienting, the film never indicates what decade it is set in either, it could be anywhere within the last 25 years; in a film where there are no more than say 150 words spoken, literal facts are barely expressed.

The timelessness of the film, the scenes of childhood spent in the chalet in the woods with immediate family, the absence and then later return of the father, Christian, to the family home (with no explanation to his absence, of course), especially a touching scene where Alexi sobs at his father’s feet, tightly embracing his midriff, inevitably call to mind Tarkovsky’s Mirror (1975) and by extention Andrei Zvyagintsev The Return (2003). Yet, it s the work of another confessed Tarkovsky protégé, Aleksandr Sokurov, that this film owes most to.

The internal family scenes; their intimate bonding and the colour scheme are all reminiscent of Sokurov’s familial trilogy Mother and Son (1997), Father and Son (2003) and Aleksandra (2007), yet especially the first two. The sensuous caresses of sibling and sibling, mother and daughter, in the dark confines of the home, all lit with the ochre and umber of Father and Son’s palette. If anything, Grandrieux’ film takes this intimacy further, and I am not referring to Alexi and Hege’s uncomfortable earlier embrace. Un lac could justifiably refer to itself as either Sister and Brother, Mother and Daughter, Brother and Brother or even Father and horse, so far does the tactile, soft-lit, affection flow. All it is missing in the Great Russian cinematic lineage is some reference to Mikhail Romm (and possibly there was) to link Eisenstein to Tarkovsky.

The ‘meaning’ of the film is as visible as one of its own darkened, internal scenes. Hege leaves after the return of the father. There is a tearful scene between mother and daughter in the fluttering snow-fall where Hege divulges her decision to leave with Jurgen, but she offers no explanation as to why. And maybe this is the hub of it all; the frustrations, sexual and otherwise, of such an insular existence. Their emotions stunted by this oppression, they must leave or else find other outlets. It is possible that Alexi’s frequent jaunts into the forest to collect wood are as without necessity as the plot would suggest. There are no scenes where wood is burnt or used for construction, and are one way in which he releases his pent-up desires. Maybe they are a reflection of his masculinity; whilst his father is away he has become the patriach and he must provide. Although Jurgen appears in order to chop wood too, he is soon embroiled with Hege, with no need for axe-wielding relief.

Whatever Grandrieux’s true intention, this opaque and quite stunningly beautiful film remains in its glorious surface, and in the depths of its many shadows, an enchanting, almost fairytale-like, Russian elegy.

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Hansel and Gretel

(Yim Phil-Sung; South Korea; 2007) World Cinema selection:

The opening titles give many clues to Hansel and Gretel’s main themes, or theme; that of children being vulnerable to dark forces. In this credit sequence the defenceless infants are the eponymous Hansel and Gretel, represented in illustrations from a children’s book of the tale. These fictional images, intercut with shots of archaic and odd children’s toys, show the lost siblings in the typical sequence of entering the forest and finding the house and so forth.

Immediately after the credits, we are introduced to the protagonist, Eun-Soo, played with wide-eyed innocence throughout by Jeong-myeong Cheon, driving his four-by-four along a forest-bound road, doing business on his mobile with his boss, extolling the virtue of the “individuality” of the children’s toys they sell. He accepts another call from his wife/lover who accuses him of being indifferent to her pregnancy and threatens to visit the hospital, one assumes to abort the pregnancy, which certainly doesn’t seem to make an impression on him one way or another. Either way. Eun-Soo swerves to avoid what looks like a rabbit/hare in the road, loses control of his ‘car’, and is catapulted off of the road with it into the forest. He wanders from the wreck and collapses further into the gloomy undergrowth.

After regaining consciousness in the now night-darkened woods the fairytale clues begin to flow with abundance.

He wakes to find a little girl, red cape draped over her shoulders and flashlight pointed at him. The obvious evocation of the Little Red Riding Hood tale is something of a red herring for now, although later one of the fable’s primary narrative concerns becomes important. Eun-Soo is led by the little girl to a house in the forest, the Home for Happy Children with cherub statues in the garden, yet its foundations are not made from chocolate. There he is introduced to the rest of the happy family; mother, father, son and another, younger, daughter. The house, decorated cloyingly with signs of childhood innocence, is crammed full of images of rabbits and bears, especially, statues paintings and toys. These complete the four primary folktale referents: Hansel and Gretel; Little Red Riding Hood; Goldilocks and the Three Bears; and the Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories. During this off-kilter, quasi-perfect family introduction, it is divulged that firstly, there is no mobile reception and that the landline is disconnected/out of order, quelle surprise!

Apart from this lack of telephonic contact and until now the fairytale reference has taken precedence over the horror film trope. Until, that is, Eun-soo loses consciousness once again, and wakes to the sound of the two adults arguing in the room next to his, where he has awoken in bed. From this point on, however, both folktale and horror cliché are used with postmodern abandon. Eun-Soo leaves his room to investigate the raised voices and encounters the eldest daughter, Young-hee, stood at the end of the corridor, in shadow, and uncommunicative, the first of various allusions to Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). This fusion of both horror genre and folkloric conventions and quotations posits the film, for now at least, in the world of the brothers Grimm but perhaps, more accurately, in Roald Dahl’s infamous revision of popular folktales, Revolting Rhymes.

When, once more, Eun-Soo awakes in the morning and goes downstairs, he is offered a plateful of confections as a ‘meal’, prepared by the children no doubt. This is the first sign of the Hansel and Gretel story being inverted; it is the children’s choice to eat these foods and to tempt Eun-Soo with them. At this meal Eun-Soo encounters the volatility of the eldest child Man-bok’s anger and what is obviously a raw nerve for all of the children, the importance of mothers and, by extension, parents.

Eun-Soo tries to find his way out of the woods but is defeated by its labyrinthine and illogical paths and the enclosing and premature darkness, returning to the house and to sleep. Only to wake in the morning to find a note form the ‘parents’ to say that they have gone for a couple of days and requesting that he look after the children, written in a suspiciously infantile scrawl.

He wakes that evening to the sound of footsteps above his head in the loft and, of course, goes to have a look. What should he encounter in the loft hatch but that modern favourite of the J-horror Ring cycles, but a long-dark-haired lady in a white gown? Unsurprisingly, this mad lady in the loft (hints of Jane Eyre’s Bertha?) is revealed as the original, missing ‘mother’ who unravels any prior confusion with the plot so far, explaining that it is the children who are grooming and enslaving adults to fulfil their absent parent roles, only to disappear conveniently. The whereabouts of the ‘father’ is not questioned yet, but left until a later, grisly exposé.

Again, Eun-Soo spends a day attempting to leave the woods and return to the ‘highway’, in order to talk to his pregnant wife/lover, but more importantly, to visit his sick mother. Again he fails, this time by slipping down a slope after hearing another ‘person’ in the forest, once more losing consciousness. Whilst he is out cold the trees around him move in a dual evocation of both Evil Dead (Sam Raimi; 1981) and, maybe, the Br’er Rabbit tale. Once more in this scene there is temporal manipulation, the first when the day draws in and becomes night within a few hours of morning at EunSoo’s first attempt at freedom, this time the season changes from a mild Spring to Winter overnight. This temporal and spatial (if you consider the maze-like qualities of the forest) omnipotence is as yet unallocated, but it is certainly inferred that it is something to do with the ominous and dark Man-bok. On Eun-Soo’s journey into the woods, through the driving snow, he encounters a new couple who have had an accident in their vehicle and are being guided by the aggressive youngster to his house; an obvious replacement for the (hopefully) departing Eun-Soo.

As the new couple are initiated into the house, the husband is revealed to be a zealously devout man of God with a hint of, obligatory, paedophilia (as he suggestively caresses the earlobe of Young-he whilst muttering of sweet angels) and the wife a thieving, nasty aggressor with a line in ‘children should be seen and not heard’ fascism. The wife’s violence toward the children provokes Man-bok’s exhibition of his telepathic powers (another child in the lineage of Danny of The Shining, The Omen’s (Richard Donner; 1976) Damien and, markedly, the eponymous Carrie (Brian DePalma; (1976) as it is anger that initiates their use) to her near-non-tactile strangulation.

Jung-soon, the youngest daughter hints that the heaven would be like their house and, accompanied with the constant collective “Angels” nomenclature applied to the infants and the children’s lack of understanding of ‘death’, this insinuates that they may be ghosts, á la The Orphanage (Juan Antonio Bayona; 2007), haunting the house of their demise, unable to leave and that the adults are living in a parallel realm something like the narrative of The Others (Alejandro Amenábar; 2001), or that each of the adults has actually died in their respective automobile-accidents and are equally held captive by/in the house.

Eun-Soo leaves the house and enters the surrounding woods, for the umpteenth time, but, this time pursues the ostensibly oblivious Man-bok and leaving a trail of breadcrumbs through the woods (he has found and eaten this non-confectionary food in the kitchen and discovered the whereabouts of the disappeared ‘father’; a hunk of partially eaten meat in the ‘fridge, wearing his shirt). He follows the boy to an incongruously placed blue door in the middle of the woods and here the Alice-Carrollian increase as if a certain cake has been consumed.

Man-bok exits and Eun-Soo enters the door, to discover a dusty, cob-webbed library of children’s notebooks, collecting and pictorially detailing (if only in infantile hand) the history of the three children and the myriad ‘parents’ that have passed through the house (and possibly the bowels of their replacements). Young-hee finds Eun-Soo here, entering the room and standing in shadow as she did in the corridor at the beginning of the tale. As she fills in holes in his knowledge, through his reading, and moves closer to him into the light, the true history of the children becomes apparent to him, and those of the audience who have never read a fairytale or seen a horror film before, or indeed saw the quick shot of Man-bok leaving the door.

As the light finally illuminates Young-hee’s face here skin is revealed to be wrinkled and aged, She explains that this is why there are no mirrors in the room, an alternate world ‘through the looking-glass’. Eun-Soo is scared by this discovery and falls backwards into piles of notebooks and dislodges amongst them a file from/on the ‘Happy Home for Children’ with photographs and biographies of Man-bok, Young-hee and Jung-soon; they were born in 1959, ‘60 and ‘65, respectively. A flashback ensues which is interwoven through parallel editing with events back at the house where the paedophile/wolf Deacon-byun has trussed up Jung-soon and is threatening her with a pen-knife, justifiably and deliberately riling her siblings, notably Man-bok.

During the flashback we learn that the three children were, amongst other older children, residents of the Home, which served as an orphanage for ‘damaged’ children, and simultaneously victims of the orphanage owner’s physical and sexual abuse. The owner/wolf savagely beats the male children and we are shown a scene where Young-hee offers herself to the owner in her sister’s stead as she “is prettier” and is dragged off towards another room.
The older children are all locked away to starve to death in a separate part of the house, so these three are presented to what must be a naive proto-social worker and a chap dressed as Santa in order to receive presents on behalf of all of the children (the absence of the others is explained through their being in town at school). This is where the children begin their diet of confections and receive their copy of Hansel and Gretel, which in their innocence and the home which is hermetically sealed from adult and external influence, becomes their guidebook.

In the present, Deacon-byun has attacked and injured Man-bok, not a very good idea, but he is intoxicated with religious fervour, and sexual desire, one assumes. Man-bok, and then the other two, turn on him injuring and knocking him unconscious with a ceiling beam. In the flashback they also turn on the orphanage owner, but they kill him by forcing him into the open wood-fire oven by use of their collective telepathic powers. They have learnt to punish “bad adults” from their Christmas gift. With the aid of the recently returned Eun-Soo, they vanquish the religious paedophile, as they did the other, orphanage one and after a teary goodbye Eun-Soo leaves and returns to the reality of the highway and the accident. A black, slightly prolonged cut, to suggest time passing.

And, open from black onto an apartment decorated for Christmas with photographs of Eun-Soo’s lover/wife, him and their newly born son. He leaves to get some powdered milk and returns to find a window open and a notebook under the tree, which opens to find the final page has a drawing of the three children smiling.

Of course, Yim Phil-sung is saying nothing more than adults are capable of, and often do, (even Santa Claus), corrupting children’s innocence and chooses the tropes and references of fairytale and Horror genre to suggest first the innocence and then that innocence corrupted, by paedophiles especially. Terry Gilliam’s recent Tideland (2005) also mixed these themes; fairytale (Lewis Carroll’s Alice) with undertones of paedophilia all dusted with a dark, macabre grit.

For any viewer suspicious that the whole story has in fact been a dream of the unconscious Eun-Soo, post-accident, he himself addresses and negates this, in the closing moments of the film. Saying that, if it was a dream why is he so concerned about the children and all that happened; keeping newspaper clippings of car accidents that have since happened on the highway where he himself crashed and those about the escaped paedophile, child murderer ‘Deacon’-byun. If we accept this tacked-on and frankly ridiculous argument, and we have had proven that any earlier suppositions that the children were in fact ghosts quashed through the revelation that they are in the real world in fact aged, then we can come to only one conclusion. That the entire story was a manifestation of Eun-Soo’s anxiety over the immanent birth of his own child: the misguided male imagining cloying, unreal childhood innocence with the horrors of being a father. The final shot is of the three children, obviously having just deposited their Christmas present under Eun-Soo’s tree, in silhouette, in the snow outside a non-descript building that has many signs on it proclaiming its name to be “Dream”.

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Nucingen Haus

(Raoul Ruiz; France/Chile; 2008) in the French Revolutions selection:

Of the one hundred films, shorts, features, TV series and goodness knows what else, that are attributed to Raoul Ruiz on the holy Internet Movie Database stretching back over forty years, I have seen one. Now two. The differences between Nucingen Haus and Time Regained (1999) are many and notable, yet, so are the similarities. However, there would seem to be, on first viewing, more of Henry James’ 1898 novella The Turning of the Screw than Ruiz’ earlier film in this supernatural tale.

The film opens with the digital camera hovering over a river, filming water and reeds moving together in serene flow. Next the screen is suffused with a beautiful pink dusk, the sun descending slowly beyond the profiles of palm trees and pond. Ruiz seems to be suggesting that DV images can be beautiful too, you know. Which is true, of course, but not after this point when his film takes on the look of a TV drama. The look and content at points reminded me of nothing but ITV’s David Suchet starring Poirot.

After this opening, the film settles on a couple at a restaurant table. A middle-aged gent is eating, yet we cannot see his partner’s face, although she is noticeably a well-dressed young lady. He and we overhear other diners talking of one Henry James the third, a writer of fiction, and a voiceover informs us that the gent sitting in front of us is the subject of the gossiping neighbours and that he is none too partial to such hearsay.

A flashback, or possibly a scene from one of James’ books, ensues. We spend much of our time in this realm, the fictional space of the novelist/narrator/protagonist’s literature or memory. Of course, this could be a description of Proust’s narrative, but here the incomplete knowledge of what is happening stems as much from (faux-)supernatural interference as from the limitations of memory. Whichever, the protagonist, younger (we can tell as he no longer has that greying talcum powder in his hair and moustache) and his current wife appear at the titular Chilean mansion after he has won it gambling. The house is full of the losing gambler’s nieces, nephews, other relations- Dieter, Lotte, Bastien-, a servant – Ully-, and many ghosts, one a former relation and others of Chilean peasant-workers. All mad. Or probably. Or are they? Or not? I couldn’t have cared less after a half hour of this quasi-surrealist drivel.

The younger James’ wife slowly goes mad, driven that way by the spectral subterfuge of the inmates/residents. He is bothered by an apparition throughout, who no-one else can see, but looks like the Scottish Widow. And not too bothered when the pretty but insane (”She has the mind of an eight year old.”) Lotte kisses him full on the lips. The vampire/lesbian/ghost who we discover, or do we, is that of Leonore, a relation horrifically murdered a few years before, but how many no-one can remember, because time stands still here, of course. Or not.

All I could find as evidence of Ruiz’ standing as a much-revered filmmaker of many years’ standing were the long, stately, panning shots which frequently traversed the large spaces of the eponymous house, whereas the film as a whole is stagey, the acting abominable, everyone looking uncomfortable with their own bodies, and the diabolical journeys into full-fledged surrealist imagery, in arty black and white, flashbacks within flashbacks, white Stallions galloping through Chilean plains, were laughable. There were a number of points here where I thought the whole thing was a black-humoured joke and was waiting for concrete evidence, or a punchline. There was none. Although the joke persisted until the closing credits.

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The Beaches of Agnes

(Agnes Varda; France; 2008) in the French Revolutions selection:

Varda’s latest effort opens with the ‘grandmother of the French New Wave’ standing, appropriately, for her moniker, which she must be fed up with, and the title of her film. Ever the playful postmodernist, she talks to straight to camera to let us know that she is playing the role of a little old lady. Then, accompanied by Varda’s omnipresent voiceover, the film’s crew assemble a plethora of mirrors on the beach, propped by driftwood, buried in the sand, placed on easels.

Here, already we have a hint at some of the themes and tools of explication that Varda entwines with her, deceptively simple reminiscence about her past. Deceptively simple, of course, because Varda’s past flows via many the same channels as those of other filmmakers and it also past the ports of many important historical moments.

It is, of course, not the first time that Varda has created a film with such a complex metalanguage, but the language cannot help but become more complex each time Varda adds another layer by making and inserting another film into the lengthy list of referents. (One could argue that with the frequent use of ‘out-takes’, repetitions of previous shots in this film, that it in fact becomes part of it’s own past at the exact time that it is being shown. But, more of this later). Her cinécriture gathers meaning through various sources which are edited together in strands that weave together to create a whole of truly emotional brilliance.

On her journey of the memory via the waterways of time, Varda docks at various works of her own; from La Pointe-Courte (1961) through to The Gleaners and I (2000) stopping at Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962) Black Panthers (1968) Ulysse (1982) Vagabond (1985) and a port she calls home, Jacquot de Nantes (1991), as well as practically all her others.

Her epilogue explains that Varda believes that inside everyone is a landscape and that inside her is a beach, hence the title, obviously, but water has always been close to Varda and her to it. We can see in La Pointe-Courte the importance of a subsistence and existence that relies and revolves around the water and here Varda also reveals that some of her formative years were spent living on a docked sailing boat. She conveys most of this journey by water, literally sailing herself from geographical point to point, but within many of the allusions and themes water is present.

What we also learn about Varda’s youth is that she studied art history at the Ecole du Louvre. This knowledge of art has informed much of Varda’s work, as have her photography and her beginnings with the Théâtre National Populaire, so we expect this film to be no different.

The opening scene of Beaches evokes not only Dali with its household objects displaced to an alien landscape with little verticality, but also with one or two specific shots of framed mirrors on easels, Renè Magritte’s mid 1930’s paintings The Human Condition and The Key to the Fields. Varda later refers to a ‘l’amour fou’, a mad love, possibly she means to call to mind the father of the Surrealists André Breton’s 1937 novel of the same name and openly talks of the surrealist poets and artists who influenced her. Along with the Surrealists, Varda talks of Picasso and the Impressionists and other artists and art movements, which are all woven through Beaches along with other topics.

There are clips from many of Varda’s own films in Beaches, but there are also a number from the films of other French filmmakers, contemporaries of Varda, such as Jacques Demy and Chris Marker. The appearance of Chris Marker’s frequent alter-ego, the cartoon representation of Guillaume-en-Egypte, his pet cat, provokes Varda to discuss the Nouvelle Vague, the movement in which she found initial early fame, but one that could not claim her as one of its own. However, these discussions with Marker/Guillauime are only the forum in which Varda openly recalls memories of this exciting time in not only French but the world’s cinema.

However, on a number of other occasions, Varda recalls the memory of Marker’s 1962 La Jetée. Firstly, the way she uses still photography early in Beaches; photos of her childhood passing with voiceover and sound-effect as in Marker’s photo-roman. Varda also inverts this stylisation when she revisits the locations of her childhood, she meets two grown men, mere boys when she lived there, who have never seen more than still photographs of their father (a key figure in La Pointe-courte). She sets up a show for them, projecting the moving images of their father onto a projector on a cart which the men propel as they watch. There is also a passage in which Varda shows a selection of the many photographs she took whilst travelling around China in the 1950s and there is one, quickly revealed, where the locals are facing the camera with overlarge black-lensed goggles, like those worn by the scientists in Marker’s film.

Jacques Demy’s memory casts a sombre shadow over much of Beaches. Even Varda’s insatiable playfulness cannot persist throughout and she sheds more than one tear when talking of the father of her son Matthieu and her husband and lover of many, many years. Of course, much is made of Varda’s homage to Demy in the final months before his death and re-enactments of his childhood in the film which he oversaw Jacquot de Nantes (1991). Varda is in the process of creating a similar work in order to remember herself here.

Again, apart from the many transparent discussions that Varda has about Demy’s work, she also makes funny and subtle (or maybe not) reference to them. There is a later scene where she creates some quasi-installation art stunt and brings her production company Ciné-Tamaris (named after her cat, these left bank Parisians and their felophilia) out onto the street where it is located, and creates a temporary beach around it. On the second day on which this stunt and filming are planned the heavens open and instead of Varda abandoning filming she walks through the rain on the fake beach with a large colourful umbrella swirling, the camera following it rather than her, as she takes it down and props it against a wall. She is fusing images of herself through the beach with that of Demy, the umbrella, evoking his Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964).

The re-enactments here of her own childhood; the many still photographs that are framed by repetitions of themselves; the revisiting of childhood homes and film locations; Varda’s film clips; the many other cinematic references; the art historical imagery, all interweave in a temporality transcending symbiotic past, present and future to create a misè en abymè of intimidating complexity. A complexity that I have not even begun to unravel here. All of this is also splintered again when Varda talks of the fragmentation of memory. Which is, indeed, the crux of Beaches.

In the experienced hands of a film-maker like Varda, which her regular audience should recognise alone, these topics, the self and cinema, are akin to Godard’s Histoire du Cinema (1997/8) rather than the commonplace sycophantic or egotistical documentary.

Near the very end of Beaches Varda, whilst sat in a shed whose walls are made from reels and reels of unused footage from her films, expresses that she feels that she lives “in cinema”. Within the timeless ebb and flow of this film, she confirms that she indeed does, she has for much of her life and that she more than deserves her place in that particular home.

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The Silence of Lorna

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne; Belgium; 2008) in the Film on the Square selection:

The Dardenne’ brothers have returned to the world of illegal immigrants and the depths that they stoop to in order to carve out a better life for themselves and those that they love, which they investigated in their 1996 film La Promesse, and, before that, with their practically unknown made-for-TV documentary of the mid-seventies.

Here again we have that, pared-down, bleak mileu of the peripheral; the disenfranchised, the illegal, the angry, the young. With it the handheld camera, following tightly on one character, although not quite the claustrophobic, persistent camera of Rosetta (1999) or Le Fils (2002); the modest realism; the moral knot at the centre of the plot; the soundtrack devoid of extra-diegetic music; Jérémie Renier, Olivier Gourmet; and almost surprisingly yet just as regular, blackest of humour; the blocks of primary colours amongst the grey and humanity.

This may read as a simplistic and damning condensation of the common denominators in the Dardenne’s films. Yet it is not my intention, to damn. Lorna is yet another touchingly dark, humanistic look at the ways in which modernity can corrupt individuals’ inner morality, and others’ not. The Dardennes not only return to the topic of immigration as in La Promesse, but have emphasised its effects by concentrating on one character, her pursuit of the capitalist dream and ultimately, although without distinct conclusions, her failure to reach these aspirations, as in they studied in Rosetta. However, this is a more expansive narrative than its immediate predecessors, Le Fils and L’Enfant, which both concentrated on two central characters. Lorna is undoubtedly the protagonist, but she is accompanied by a myriad of other characters, again, like Rosetta.

It is possible to read Lorna as an older sister, if not a future projection, of Rosetta. Both characters share the drive of cash, an explanation that they rely on, if not entirely believe themselves, to justify their actions. They also share a penchant for red, yellow, blue clothes, capitalist mores which are centred on snack shops, and, more importantly, an inability to control their inner emotions, especially an irrepressible certainty of what is just and right. Whereas Rosetta cannot repress her physical bursts of anger when she feels that she has been treated unjustly, Lorna seems to have the same problem with her voice. Whenever she is told that she should not talk to someone, to say something specific, she does.

It is apparent that her approach and complaint to the police that her junky plastic husband Claudy physically abuses her (a concoction of her own, the damage is self-inflicted) in order to save his life, backfires and leads if not directly to his murder then certainly accelerates it.

Later, when she believes herself to be pregnant by Claudy, rather than her lover Sokol, she is told by Fabio, the ‘arranger’ of her plastic marriages, not to mention it to the next ‘husband’. Of course she does, and, had the pregnancy been real, she would have sealed the baby’s fate. It is true that Fabio has already said that an abortion would be necessary, but it is not certain.

Her (faux-)pregnancy having soured the deal between the wealthy Russian intended as her next ‘husband’ and Fabio, which was to be an opening into the Russian market, which also causes a rift between her and Sokol (as through confessing pregnancy she is also admitting to something other than being the Virgin Mary) and after repaying the capital these two men invested in the deal, leaving herself with €100, or so, Fabio decides to drive her to Albania. She, as we do, fears for her safety and when Fabio asks her for her phone we understand her reluctance to hand it over, but Fabio is also aware of the inherent danger. Denied this outlet for communication, she begins to talk to her non-existent child in utero, which also works as a sign of her ‘breakdown’. The ethical repression, the stress of such a life is too much for her, as it was for Rosetta, to bear.

This sort of black humour, and the enigma of the title, are, of course not new for the Dardenne brothers. The irony that this tale is not about Lorna’s silence but the opposite is similar to the same questions asked of L’Enfant, who is the child of the title, mother, father, baby? There are moments throughout all the Dardenne’s fiction features of Cimmerian humour; when Amidou falls from the scaffold in La Promesse, and Roger and Igor attempt to disguise his corpse with a wooden door, a chicken belonging to his wife escapes her grasp and flaps around atop the door or the scene in Rosetta where Riquet, in order to impress Rosetta, plays her a recording of his drum-practice and she and the audience sit in embarrassed silence for long, long minutes.

Once more the Dardennes, with Lorna, do not offer an easy reading of their intentions, nor an ending of the narrative, in fact. Again, the audience seems to have a story revealed to them a certain way through and then obscured again, possibly near its conclusion, but as likely not. The insular, insulated environs of Seraing are visited over, and the brothers seem to repeat themselves, but there are subtle differences here. Yet, if you regularly found a work of art as near-perfect as a Dardenne brothers’ film on your doorstep, anyone would find it difficult to stray far from home.