keith-farman-1 Reviews

United 93 (2006)

Superbly crafted docu-drama. But.....

[8/10 · 7 June 2006]

If this film sets the tone for the many 9/11 related films in the pipeline it will have served a useful purpose. Though necessarily conjectural in detail, in broad terms it tries to tell the nightmare story whose tragic ending we all know, without embellishment. Claustrophobic cinematography, an atmospheric understated score and self-effacing performances by a largely unknown cast, give Greengrass's film an impressive air of authority. Its razor-sharp, relentless editing creates a crescendoing pace towards chaos that is so effective that at moments one has to remind oneself to breathe out.

No, the questions that press in remorselessly are not aesthetic. There is no sign of disrespect towards these iconic victims in the form or content of this superbly crafted docu-drama. It is in the fact of its existence and its commercial cinematic production and distribution within a disturbingly opaque political context, that one's doubts and qualms are aroused. There are no rights and wrongs here - only judgements. Many Americans for example, regard re-cycling 100's of tons of metal from the World Trade Centre debris into the building of a new warship, as respectful and appropriate recognition. Others, and I am among them, regard it as at best, deeply insensitive to the precious uniqueness and diversity of belief of the thousands of human beings whose lives were erased before our very eyes in September 2001. Death. Live. Reality TV with a vengeance. Greengrass's film engenders precisely the same ambivalence - you cannot look away for a moment, but feel as if you should. Seductive, transfixing imagery. Obscene in effect, but not intent.

Greengrass has made some no doubt sincere efforts to justify his film. That he made it, not how he made it. For me, the ultimate justification is that he has recreated an image of an appalling reality with such care and attention to detail that it forces us to ask ourselves - should I be watching this? And genuinely struggle with the answer. Whatever it may be. After all, unlike the live TV pictures, United 93 is a planned, financed, publicised creation, that will make a substantial, intentional and desired profit. The camera makes unwitting but not always unwilling, voyeurs of us all. All is intention. And you can't prove an intention. I hope I will not be misunderstood when I recall a harrowing but in a sense uplifting story from the concentration camps: in unspeakable conditions, with no shred of privacy, when individuals went to the toilet, their fellow inmates, human beings, turned away. Cherishing the dignity of another and with sensitivity recognising it through refusing to look.

I would not argue with the view that watching the film of the original events of 9/11 was in a sense a duty - in a democratic society. Yet real political events and actions that led up to such insanity helped bring it about. And unless we are in a sense responsible for the actions of those we elect, then democracy is a sham. But in their endless repetition, are we in a sense watching the same images? Is the legitimacy, sensibility of these repeated viewings, automatically validated by the fact that in a literal sense they are the same? This is the kind of dilemma Greengrass's film poses for me. Surely it is of the logic of corruption that we are unaware of it when it is taking place? Refusing to watch the events of 9/11 as a means of denial is as dubious as passively sharing their repetition. The great strength of United 93 is that as it displays good judgement, avoiding all the major pitfalls and horrendous insensitivities we may fear from future films, it poses profound questions about our relationship to images we pay to see and that are created with the motivation to profit. Only in this can I see real justification - the film does not, and does not seek, to offer any insights or explanations to illuminate these dreadful events. To help us understand them better. To accept the view that they are simply inexplicable, meaningless, insane acts by insane people is to buy into the fear and paranoia peddled by politicians both sides of the Atlantic. There is no future or peace in victim-hood. Even less if it is revengeful.

And I cannot help but wonder whether a film with the same rigorous attention to detail and concern for the horror experienced by precious human beings, about to die needlessly and pointlessly, would get made, still less watched, if it were set in Baghdad on the first night of what was called 'Shock and Awe' - to America's eternal shame. And ours.

Down in the Valley (2005)

Shane with attitude

[9/10 · 7 June 2006]

Don't miss this elusive, allusive film if it hits a screen near you. See it before it becomes a cult movie. Profoundly American, it resonates with the contradictions of a culture whose real roots have been severed and is therefore struggling to live out its own mythology as a substitute. Desperately seeking sustenance and solace in a false memory of its real past.

There are echoes of Badlands in this story of an archetypal American drifter. Having no roots, personal, social or occupational, he tries to live by the simple, direct values of the mythical west whose fantasised reality he creates for himself. Harlan has cowboy skills that won't get him a job; and uncompromising personal and social attitudes of independence and individual freedom. If these were ever real in the wide-open spaces of the pioneering west, they have no place or space to be, in the claustrophobic urban, cheek-by-jowl industrial ugliness of contemporary America.

Ed Norton is one of the few actors around today who could sustain such a movie. And though all the supporting performances are excellent, Norton's powerful screen persona carries the weight of the film's strong atmosphere and tone. Norton's Harlan exudes danger. A sinister unpredictability of the superficially and misleadingly normal.

Evan Rachel Woods' rebellious teenager Tobe (short for 'October') impulsively invites gas station attendant Harlan to join her and her friends going to the beach. Just as impulsively, 30-something Harlan throws up his job and goes. Almost surprised by Tobe's overt sexual precociousness, Harlan's fantasised simple Texan cowboy self enters into a naïve, even tender romantic relationship with the half child, half woman, but fully sexual Tobe. In the process he befriends her introspective, almost autistic 13 year-old brother Lonnie (a first-class Rory Caulkin). None of this sits well with Tobe's father Wade, stepfather to Lonnie. Wade is a gun-collecting Vietnam war veteran turned prison warder whose short temper and aggressive but dangerously controlled and controlling personality, is both suspicious of and threatened by, Harlan's apparent openness, honesty and genuine feeling for both Tobe and Lonnie. His respectful attitude cuts no ice with the deeply suspicious Wade.

Jacobson's direction maintains a sense of distance from his characters by seldom going in close; concentrating largely on mid and two-shots. Exteriors stay long and convey a sense of expansiveness and scale reminiscent of traditional westerns, also used so effectively by Ang Lee in Brokeback Mountain. Elegant and simple editing creates an almost lyrical tone to Harlan and Tobe's burgeoning romance, which looks convincing yet carries an undertow of imminent menace. A superb and evocative soundtrack composed and largely performed by Peter Sallet, both musically and lyrically, reinforces this plaintive, elegiac tone. The apparent lightness of the unlikely romance is set against a brooding backdrop with more than a hint of an imminent storm. This is superb film-making, its various elements subtly blended together into a satisfying and affecting whole. Underpinned by Jacobson's own lean, expressive screenplay. In conception and execution this is very much Jacobson and Norton's (co-producer) film. Very personal.

A showdown with Wade sends Harlon off to re-visit his actual or fantasy past. We are left unsure. We become witness to the extent of his fantasised existence and this, with the sense of foreboding intimated earlier, turns the tone of the film darker and more disturbing. Throughout, recurring images echo the western fantasy Harlon lives out: escaping with both Tobe and Lonnie riding through the urban landscape, up to the hills; teaching Lonnie how to shoot; and playing out fantasy western scenes in his apartment. Shades of Travis Bickle (Taxi Driver) here. A Shane with attitude. Harlan is highly skilled in the use of western-style handguns, quick-drawing and fast-shooting. It is no coincidence that guns convey a totemic power throughout the film both in Wade's love of collecting them and Harlan's passion for the skill in handling them. A gun figures in the critical dramatic event in the movie. This pivotal moment poses the thought that these essential tools of the pioneer opening up a vast and hostile country, become corrosive and subversive to the necessarily different basis of personal and social relationships in the densely populated urban setting of modern America. Right idea - wrong time.

The denouement of the film further blurs the line between fantasy and reality. Between old cherished verities and contemporary uncertainties. Again recalling Brokeback Mountain. Our feelings about Harlan, just like Lonnie who helps him against his stepfather, are deeply ambivalent. Like Tobe and Lonnie we have no frame of reference within which to judge Harlan appropriately. And to choose what Wade represents is unthinkable. As the brother and sister say their farewells to Harlan we are left with an impression not so much of an oddball with a deluded fantasy, as a man with a keen sense of a once genuine reality somehow misplaced in a time and place no longer capable of understanding or sustaining it.

A beautifully made, multi-layered film that engages and absorbs on a simple narrative level but which resonates with thoughtful and challenging ideas about today's America and its sense of cultural identity in relation to its past - real and imagined. A rare treat. See it.

Sophie Scholl: The Final Days (2005)

Heroism to respect and cherish

[9/10 · 1 February 2006]

True heroism, like martyrdom, must be imposed by fate, not sought. This is a profound moral principle that exercised Joseph Conrad in Lord Jim. Again, Robert Bolt's Sir Thomas More in A Man For All Seasons does everything he can to avoid his looming martyrdom - except sacrifice his conscience and moral identity.

This is not the only moral concept within this quiet, dignified, deeply moving German film, that resonates with significance for today's world. Much literature and most films, portray heroism as dramatic, with feats of daring and thrilling actions. This finely judged, beautifully played little film shows us heroism of a different kind: an unshakeable belief in justice, loyalty to personal conscience, and conviction unto death of the reality of the idea of freedom.

The story of the events leading up to the actual execution in 1943, of Sophie Scholl, her brother Hans and friend Christoph Probst, is horrifying for the sheer banality of their offence. As members of a student group, the White Rose, they were secretly distributing pamphlets daring to question Hitler's conduct of the war and the likelihood of victory. On discovery they are drawn into a process with none of the strutting, grandiose black clad villains so beloved of decades of British and American movies. Like someone standing too close to a dangerous machine, they are caught by a tiny thread of circumstance and increasingly dragged deeper and deeper into its destructive mechanism.

Each meticulous step in their tragedy is efficiently recorded, documented and processed with a detached calm that makes one shudder when one recalls the sheer bureaucratic efficiency with which the same machine disposed of 6 million Jews, Gypsies, and other selected groups of human beings. It is enormously affecting that three of the brightest and best of German youth are subjected to the same fate because of their refusal to conform to a corrupted nationalism and a cowed people. Perhaps because it suggests that the collective insanity that was Germany in the 30's and 40's was not a uniquely German phenomenon but one to which any society might succumb if the voice of justice is silenced, the rule of law subverted and fear becomes the currency of social life. Another conventional and comfortable fiction of British and American movies cast in doubt. And a thought for today.

The moral and dramatic heart of this absorbing film is in Sophie's extended interrogation by Mohr (Gerald Held), one time rural policeman now grateful to the Reich for his elevation to interrogator with the power of life or death over his prisoners. Mohr looks more like a stern Bank Manager unconvinced by a cash-flow projection than a leering, jack-booted man in black with silver lightning flashes. A father himself, he clearly finds Sophie's moral conviction and stubborn resistance disturbing. He can relate to her intelligence, her attractiveness, determination and self-destructive honesty. Everything except her moral condemnation of Hitler and the Reich. Mohr is like someone who knows the emperor is naked but is shocked when someone says it out loud. The acting in these scenes is simply superb, we see Sophie's sheer naked courage and idealistic conviction shake Mohr's blind unquestioning conformity. Only to be retrenched behind blank, dead, unthinking eyes.

The excellent Julia Jentsch (The Edukators and Downfall) plays brilliantly the intelligent, idealistic Sophie with her absolute commitment to justice and freedom. She moves towards her death through a system reminiscent of a strictly run, aseptic hospital. And at every step of the way, we see ordinary people, trapped in a nightmare they can see but not change. Each finds a way to show Sophie their empathy; from the communist prisoner staying alive by working for her jailors to the warderess who bends the rules to allow the three condemned young people a final cigarette and hug of comfort before their execution.

A great strength of the movie is that Sophie's religious faith is shown but left entirely personal. Both in her interrogation and sham trial, she appeals to moral principle and humanity not religious belief, in her defence of freedom and her refusal to be silent in the face of injustice.

This film is as unsettling as it is moving. It makes one ask - how many of us in similar circumstances, would have the courage to stand against the sheer weight of social conformity reinforced by an atmosphere of fear and an implacable application of lethal power? Heroism indeed, serving a belief in the ultimate right to personal conscience and the indestructibility of the idea of freedom in justice. The intensely moving photographs of the real Sophie Scholl and White Rose group that close the film give them a final victory over their oppressors. Sixty years after their deaths, their story is told and their memory cherished. It is fitting that such heroism be recognised. If you can seek this one out don't miss it. Inspirational.

zettel

March of the Penguins (2005)

Triumph of The Will.........to survive.

[21 December 2005]

Peerless cinematography (Laurent Chalet, Jerome Maison) and impeccable, sensitive editing (Sabine Emiliani) make this a shoe-in for a documentary Oscar. Every camera shot, every note of Alex Wurman's lyrical score, breathes a sense of respect for these extraordinary, impossibly endearing creatures. So it is disturbing to read that in the French version Jacquet has actors voicing-over two of the penguins to express shamelessly anthropomorphised, totally unnecessary, human endearments to one another.

Thankfully we are spared that crass excess in the US version. Here only Morgan Freeman's narration is heard. Many critics have considered even this overly sentimental. In truth, one cannot watch the extraordinary story of the Emperor penguins' annual walk 70 miles over the Antarctic ice, not once but six times, to and from their breeding grounds, without using words which parallel their behaviour to many of the best qualities in human beings. Without the stupid misjudgement of actor voice-overs, I defy anyone watching the mating and parenting rituals of these comic yet irreducibly dignified creatures, not to be driven to use words like tenderness, fortitude, determination, care, even grief. And they are rightly used. Freeman's words, not tone, do occasionally err towards the sentimental but nothing can diminish the stark, hardly credible story of the penguins' against-all-odds survival in the coldest place on earth.

There is a serious philosophical issue here. It is not that when we see other creatures displaying behaviour like stroking, holding, caressing, gentleness etc we falsely anthropomorphise our description. Rather, if we accept our own evolutionary roots as mammals, and reject certain philosophical misconceptions about language, we should say our language of love and affection also has its roots in strikingly similar 'given' forms of behavioural response to each other and the world around us. Especially say the naked vulnerability of the newborn. The test of anthropomorphism not always easy to apply, is whether animals are attributed with behaviour that only makes sense for self-conscious, language-users. But many of our deepest human emotions such as grief have primitive roots. To describe the female penguin in the film whose chick has died from cold and who tries to steal another penguin's chick, as a form of grief is not a misuse of language. You must simply maintain a sense of penguin grief as having many important differences from human grief, despite some very real basic behavioural forms of expression in common. We recognise it because we share it.

This point of view will hardly endear itself to the large Christian Fundamentalist and Creationist market the film has attracted in the US. It is hard to imagine a less convincing creature than the penguin to support the Creationist prejudice. They look like birds designed by a committee. Literally neither fish nor fowl. Or creatures who only ever made it halfway out of the evolutionary swamp. Superbly adapted for the water, their long trek across the ice plodding upright or sliding ignominiously on their stomachs seems like an almost human perversity. Out of water their flightless wings become merely charming absurdities. And their painstaking, frustrating efforts to protect first their eggs and then chicks from the lethal cold, is a triumph of determination over genuinely effective evolutionary adaption. And if God intentionally made creatures in this form then the penguin is long overdue for product recall and re-design.

Much is in the eye of the beholder here. The discreetly shot pictures of the penguins mating are either sensitive or coy depending on your starting point. Also I expect it is true that the more brutal realities of penguin life are not dwelt upon at length. The only other issue I suppose is whether Jacqet has imposed a false 'narrative' on the instinct-driven struggle for survival of these beautiful creatures. Here for me a similar philosophical point to that above applies. In the seasonal, cyclical continuity and 'connectedness' of the penguin group behaviour we are perhaps witnessing the natural history basis of the apparently universal human tendency to see our lives as a story: a narrative of connected, purposeful behaviour directed to a planned and hoped for outcome with a deeper meaning.

All this intellectualising apart. MOTP is a delight. OK the oooh and aagh count is high. But nothing but nothing can still the sense of extraordinary triumph over implacable necessity of these caneless Chaplinesque waddlers who seem to be locked in a perpetual battle on land at least, with the perversity of their own bodily deficiencies. The pictures are simply mesmerising; from the long strung out single file columns stretching into the distance like refugees from Dr Zhivago to the socially organic earth-bound flock of hundreds of creatures huddling for survival warmth in mutual dependence against the worst weather on the planet. You don't have to attribute human qualities to them to regard them with the utmost respect and admiration.

King Kong (2005)

The Apeman Cometh

[7/10 · 21 December 2005]

The eyes have it. Of all the multi-million $ visual illusions created for King Kong, the most critical to the film are the prehistoric, 25 foot Gorilla's eyes. However breathtaking the CGI generated action sequences, and they are superbly filmed and edited - it is the real sense of a primitive creature forming a meaningful attachment to a single human being around which this frankly preposterous story pivots. The importance of the eyes as a means of conveying 'innerness', thought, personal identity is a cliché of cinema acting. Quite how the eyes, even seen through the camera lens, communicate this sense of 'another' is a phenomenon as subtle as it is genuinely profound.

The Kong of the original 1933 movie and this faithful remake is essentially anthropomorphised, especially in the thrilling, CGI choreographed fight scenes with other pre-historic animals. The haymaker swings and punches are very exciting but hardly I would have thought gorrilla-like. This isn't a nerdy complaint: the dramatic effect of the breathless chases and titanic battles is all that matters - and it works. But the achievement of a sense of individuality for Kong is conveyed with a subtlety that really puts the more crash bang wallop of CGI action in the shade. Without a sense of Kong as a kind of individual, protecting the human to whom he has formed a unique attachment - there is no movie. With all these acutely observed anthropomorphised behavioural signals in place, we then 'read' genuine emotion, even pathos, into those great eyes. It is worth noting that the close-up in movies places us within the most private, intimate space of a character, gorilla or not, only achieved in real life in very special conditions of personal intimacy. Part of the unique power of the eyes in movies perhaps. And the basis of its inescapably voyeuristic quality.

Peter Jackson is a frustrating movie-maker. He can brilliantly set up a mis en scène of 1930's New York in 5 minutes of economical editing and evocative cinematography, then drag out getting to Skull Island and the first appearance of Kong for another 40 minutes or so. Learning from Spielberg in Jaws, Jackson builds up tension before Kong appears, its just that the intervening 40 minutes is pretty dull and uninspired. However, while the unbearable, cumulative tension of Spielberg's movie virtually evaporates as soon as we see the clunky metal reality of the phoney shark, Jackson's Kong stands up to every scrutiny and never disappoints. But Jackson's movie-making sprawls across the screen, in this case taking 187 minutes to cover essentially the same story, in a sense the same film given its faithfulness to the original, which came in at 104.

Jackson's editing willpower seems to desert him with CGI footage. Instead of being an immensely powerful means to achieve a dramatic effect, it simply becomes an end in itself. This tendency began with the LOR trilogy and persists here. At least KK only has one ending. As Jackson piles impossible thrill upon impossible thrill in the second hour of the movie, one at times begins to suffer from astonishment fatigue. So many creatures, so many battles, so many shocks your brain jams with overload. And this lack of pacing makes an already pretty average script clunk even more than it should. LOR and KK despite their amazing and highly entertaining strengths, share the same inherent weakness - a lack of cadence. Their narrative seems to have only two speeds - slow or flat out. Only late on with the scenes with Naomi Watts sharing the beauty of a sunset with a 'contemplative' Kong does the movie achieve a kind of stillness that allows the illusion of an impossible relationship to breathe a little credible life.

Casting is patchy. Naomi Watts is good in an impossible part and deserves an Oscar for the longest unbroken sequence of reaction shots in movie history. Jack Black just can't seem to make off-the-wall entrepreneur-come-filmmaker Carl Denham quite fit and despite a good crack at writer Jack Driscoll, Adrien Brody looks miscast. The rest do a good job with pretty cardboardy characters to work with including a confident Jamie Bell in an add-in part. But the heart and soul of the movie of course is Kong and the credibility Watts just about manages to convey of an affection and empathy between impossibly disparate species. (I'd leave any psychoanalytic concepts in the car for this one by the way). The third star of course is CGI. A star who many Directors are beginning to discover, is becoming far too big for his boots, prohibitively expensive and starting to suffer from the law of diminishing returns.

The end result is an at times breathlessly exciting movie whose subtext morality tale plays no better nor worse than the original - which is pretty marginally. And Kong reigns absolutely supreme as the most realistic cinematically generated creature in movies so far. In his faithfulness to the original it is a pity I think that Jackson leaves himself open to the same criticism levelled against the first film's portrayal of the native people of Skull Island. Why oh why are aboriginal people always portrayed in such a crass, ignorant, farcically stereotypical way? Leering, filthy, witless, pitiless 'savages' just there as fear fodder. It may seem a bit precious to refer to this in a review of an old-fashioned adventure yarn movie and I'm not talking from political correctness, but this story could have been enhanced not harmed, by a more intelligent portrayal and use of this aspect of the story.

Well worth a visit. But be warned - the 12A certificate is yet again misleading. I would think twice about accompanying any child under 12 to this at times graphically scary movie. Like the latest Harry Potter, KK demonstrates that the 12A certification needs serious re-thinking as it is misleading parents into taking too many too young kids to too many too scary movies.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005)

This one rocks

[21 December 2005]

Pulp Fiction? Give me a break. This off the wall, can't be pigeon-holed, literate little gem has far more style, wit, laughs and ironic self-mockery in its little finger (which the dog eats by the way). Lets hear it for Mary Gail Artz and Barbara Cohen - casting Val Kilmer and Robert Downey Jnr was high risk and inspired. Kilmer's reported ego appears to have mellowed into a nice line in self-mockery. And Robert Downey Jnr is developing an engaging screen persona of self-deprecating, rumpled, world-worn vulnerability that avoids the distraction of his off-screen troubles by quietly playing on them within his characters.

Not to dismiss Tarantino, but Shane Black's homage here, especially to Raymond Chandler and classic American film noir has a truth and warmth that goes deeper than pastiche. Chandler was a genre writer of unique style and class. The greatest compliment to KKBB is that it convincingly recreates that style by bouncing its snappy, sparky dialogue off the wall of contemporary attitudes. And its changes of pace and style keep our head well in the game. It's great fun.

Re-inventing the classic noir narrator who drove the plot along by filling in the audience quickly and efficiently by talking at them; Black let's Downey's Harry Lockhart talk to us as well. Even addressing us directly as 'dear audience' using the device to share his thoughts and feelings with us at what is happening to him on screen. This is giving a cinematic device a literary spin. Which is probably full-circle, as I guess the movie narrator has literary genes.

Told in chapters, each with the title of a Chandler Novel, KKBB rollercoasters you through a plot that never quite gives up the ghost but almost commits suicide several times, only to be snatched back with a convincing slice of realism that hauls you back on board. It even has its own 21st century 'it' girl in Michelle Monaghan who is a dead ringer for Lauren Bacall in looks but most definitely a modern gal. Monaghan's 'Harmony' is a wickedly, sexy, sassy, c'mon fella..keep up if you want to play, kind of girl. You ain't on one foot, you ain't in the game.

Val Kilmer's Gay Perry spins irony out of stereotypes and for my money should be as much fun for gays as straights. Recently asked, no doubt for the umpteenth time about the screen kiss he shares with Downey, Kilmer replied with a comment that could have come straight from the movie - "It could have been a problem…but then he (Downey) is a great kisser, it was so tender, and the way the light caught his hair as he leaned his head back….it was no problem at all". Delicious. The movie carried beyond the frame.

I won't even try the plot. Just like the Big Sleep - the movie and the book - no one, including the writer, seem to know where its going but somehow its denouement seems to make sense though neither he, nor we, are quite sure how we got there. Black writes this like the real Chandler on a bender with Downey's Harry Lockhart pretty much Philip Marlowe on magic mushrooms.

This one rocks. You'll laugh out loud with a kind of conspiratorial glee that is pretty rare in the cinema nowadays. The language and the humour are scabrous but full of wit and style. Don't miss the opening - it beautifully sets the tone for a great night out at the movies. Zettel 2005

Factotum (2005)

A Quantum Movie

[7/10 · 21 December 2005]

Factotum is a quantum movie. Or rather in its efforts to depict the chaotic life of radical writer Charles Bukoska's autobiographical alter ego Henry Chinaski, the paradoxes and inherent uncertainties of quantum theory seem an apt metaphor.

Hank, like Bukowska is a dedicated alcoholic drifting indifferently through any odd jobs he can con his way into then disdainfully neglect until he is inevitably 'canned', spend the pay-off on booze and then ricochet randomly off to repeat the process elsewhere. It is as if, like the theory, through his alcoholic haze Hank sometimes has an idea of where he's going but isn't really clear where he actually is. Alternatively he sometimes has sense of where he is, but none at all of where he's going. Like a particle with no discernible fixed identity, he bounces randomly around the world colliding with people, places and events of which he is part, but in which he makes no stable intentional intervention and to which he displays no discernible interest. This process is constantly re-fuelled by a 24/7 intake of alcohol and nicotine. If this sounds incredible then we should remember that the real Bukowska's body survived this punishing regime for 74 years until his death in 1994.

If this were all, then Norwegian Director Bent Hamer's film would not be the absorbing work that it is. For through this fog of alcohol shines the dim light of Hank's determination to write. Not in the least for its rewards or recognition, but because it forms the nucleus of his fragile identity. And through the excellent use of Hank as narrator, the stark, clinical, austere quality of Bukowski's writing emerges. This is the poetry of skid row, the unsentimental, unflinching account of life at the margins of normal society about which Hank is entirely indifferent and Bukowsa himself viewed with contempt. There is a brief, doomed, flirtation with the idea that we might have some control over our destiny through Hank's initially successful foray into betting the horses. Racing I guess offers the illusion that even if God plays with dice, with a bit of determined effort a man might beat the odds. Of course this ends in failure - the house always wins in the end.

The paradox of quantum theory is that the precise and rigorous lucidity of the language of science, expresses a view of the world of matter that is devoid of certainty and inherently rests upon mere probabilities. Similarly Hank's island of lucidity is the drive to write; to create a meaningful response to a meaningless world. His behaviour is as random and unpredictable as the chaotic, senseless events of the world that provoke it. Yet an urge to coherence emerges through his irresistible drive to write about that world. He has simple appetites: alcohol, nicotine and sex and no moral, emotional scruple gets in the way of satisfying them. He is drawn into transitory friendships and fragile sexual relationships by the basic need to drink, smoke and have sex. The only relationship he has with any semblance of continuity and personal satisfaction is with fellow alcoholic Jan.They share these basics needs and arrive at a kind a stable modus vivendi where they are fully met without having to wander about the world hoping to pick them up in a run down bar. Jan's predilection for leaping into bed with every random bum she takes a fancy to, the dirtier the better, eventually fractures this sex-of-convenience arrangement. Here Hank packs his bag and leaves with the air of a guy popping out for a night's bowling rather than walking away from the only half-way stable relationship he's ever had. This fictional account mirrors Bukowska's own 10 year relationship with Janet Cooney-Baker also a long-term alcoholic who eventually lost her fight with the booze in 1962.

Hank lives in a down-beat, dead-beat world where his holy trinity of physical appetites are the only distraction from that world to which he is always, by choice, an outsider. The film is visually and aurally dark in tone. Yet through this, Hamer's screenplay, leaning I suspect heavily on Bukowska's own writing, cuts clinically and strikingly like a surgeon's knife making an incision to open up to the unflinching eye, the diseased or damaged part of life that may need surgical repair or excision. This is writing honed to a razor-sharp edge that is simply startling and despite inducing a sense of recoil, exercises a strange fascination. If I have a regret, it is that more might have been made of the occasional moments of darkly ironic humour flashing like flinty sparks out of the sheer absurdity of the many irredeemably hopeless situations Hank stumbles into. I don't now Bukowska's work but occasionally in this film Hank's blurred perspective seems to be a weary "so what?" in response to the world: at others there is a flash of rebellion that engages us much more.If there is much of Hank Chinaski to like we find it here.

Matt Dillon is a revelation and has never for my money done anything remotely in this league before. Lili Taylor is equally convincing as bed and bottle-mate Jan and even manages to tease a kind of pathetic tenderness out of the role. Marisa Tomei is effective as one of Hank's random, ricochet lays who is locked into a very weird foursome with two female friends and an older man who manipulates sex from all three by funding their booze and basic needs.

Factotum is no nice night out at the movies. Its darkness is as heavy as it context would imply. Yet it is constantly absorbing and thought-provoking. It is immensely successful in portraying the world and experience of an autobiographical character based upon a writer both Jean Genet and Jean-Paul Sartre called "America's greatest poet" This 'factotum', jack-of-all-trades, late in his writing life, by all accounts became master of one. Off-the-wall, in-the-gutter but cinematically on-the-money.

Zettel

Broken Flowers (2005)

Broken Flowers: a tragi-comic visual poem.

[9/10 · 6 November 2005]

Broken Flowers - Jim Jarmusch Jim Jarmusch writes movies. I don't mean he writes screenplays - though he does. No, he uses images the way a poet uses words. No waste. Every image carries weight. Resonates. Certainly his two most recent movies, Coffee and Cigarettes and now Broken Flowers are visual poems. Broken Flowers, unlike C&C is a narrative poem. It is a short, beautifully composed short story with Bill Murray's Don Johnston - with a 't' - at its heart.

In a sadly now lost interview, Steve McQueen once said a man should feel as much as possible and show as little as possible. This unfashionable conception deserves deeper examination than our contemporary conventional wisdom is likely to give it, but it sums up Don Johnston literally to a 't'. However subtle, Bill Murray's humour is delightfully accessible. The deeper emotions of his more serious characters are harder to read. And his extraordinary, almost unique 'innerness' as an actor makes you work hard. In a superb performance in an excellent film, it is a fine judgement as to whether he might have given us just a little bit more colour and shading. We can see only too well why the women in his life kept leaving him but he makes us work a bit to see why they would have been with him in the first place. Murrray has cornered the market in men who can give but not take - Bob Harris in Lost In Translation and now Don Johnston in Broken Flowers. In a key piece of dialogue early on, as current partner Sherry (Julie Delpy), follows the other women in Don's life - out of it - he asks "what do you want Sherry?" She replies "what do you want Don?" And he's stumped. One feels Sherry would settle for any answer but not for none.

When he receives an unsigned letter from an ex-girlfriend, amateur sleuth neighbour Winston (Jeffrey Wright) cajoles Don onto a reverse road trip of his life. The distinctive typed missive, addressed in red writing on a pink envelope, excites Winston's forensic aspirations and informs Don that his hitherto unmarried, unparented life actually created an unknown son 20 years ago, For Winston this is an intriguing mystery to be unravelled. For a reluctant Don it draws him into revisiting his former selves through the women he once either loved, or bedded; or (it is left unclear), perhaps both.

Broken Flowers, although like C&C, visually poetic in form and style, is more short story in content. So simple, pared down and explicitly existential in spirit, it brings Camus to mind. Pretentious thought that may sound, Jarmusch's poetic visual style has all the direct simplicity and philosophical resonance of Camus' prose. Asked for some 'fatherly' wisdom, Don apologetically replies, "The past is gone - I know that. And the future is still to come. So I guess there is just now." Outside the context of this elusive and allusive film, these remarks sound like a banal tautology. But there's the art. Jarmusch's art. His simple film 'language' resonates with feeling and, unusually for movies - ideas. Poetic. And if philosophical ideas seem a fanciful allusion for simple words, a remark of Wittgenstein's comes to mind when he observed that despite its apparent form, the expression "War is war" is no mere tautology.

As in C&C, but to a lesser extent, Broken Flowers has an episodic 'chapter'-like structure. Or more precisely, series of verses. And Jarmusch's cinematic style has a distinctive literary feel to it. His editing quietly 'punctuates' each scene and sequence precisely and without distraction. The full stops and commas of cuts and fades, provide a clear narrative structure, so that when the camera or the lens move, or the shot is held, it is precisely the contrast that makes it work so well. And like a good poet, Jarmusch likes to leave words, images and phrases hanging in the air. Unexplained. Unresolved. Jarmusch's great quality as a filmmaker is that his work is participative - a dialogue with his audience and their own experience. And like all good poems Broken Flowers will mean different things to different people even though its basic facts are not in doubt. In his art, the facts are the starting point, not the end. Want facts as conclusion, resolution - an answer? Try science. Or Hollywood.

Broken Flowers is, as the old saying has it, a mystery wrapped in an enigma: Winston's mystery - Don's enigma. Its ending is as satisfying, as it is unresolved. Murray doesn't so much show us Don's emotional life, still less act it, rather he lets small glimpses of it escape. His tears over the ex-girlfriend who died in a car crash; his sense of failure about Sherry; his warmth and understated friendship with Winston and his family. But poignantly, we see he wants to have had a son. Wants them to find each other. Murray superbly insinuates to us a man full of feeling who is bemused by his own inability to find a way to let it out. As in many of his characterisations - a genuinely tragi-comic figure.

Zettel 2005

Saraband (2003)

Footprints in the snow

[9/10 · 6 November 2005]

Saraband is like a cup of very hot, black, excellent tea on a bitter Winter's day. Not everyone's brew. A drink that must be sipped, taking in its satisfying heat little by little. No sweetness here, just a few hints of tenderness and compassion like single grains of sugar dissolved and almost lost in the whole. And yet, its threads of distinct but interlaced flavours, some astringent, slake the thirst and clean the palate.

Cinema reduced to its essence. Without detectable artifice, in this apparently valedictory film, Bergman turns his unflinching gaze upon not so much life, with its dreams and aspirations, but upon existence itself. And in an extraordinarily moving way - celebrates it without false hope or comforting promise. The sheer will to be, survives the hostile random events of life and the transience of personal relationships and the comfort they fleetingly provide. With non-judgemental fascinated detachment, Bergman's camera shows us an implacable truth of the human condition, which we each find our different ways to deny.

A profoundly existentialist film. Our despair and failures are of our own making, as is our happiness and our occasional joy. We are defined not by what the world does to us, but by how we respond to it. The illusion of escape from this relentless personal challenge, is represented in the film by Johan's son Henrik's deceased wife Anna. The self-indulgence of the belief both that all was well when Anna was alive, and therefore that his present unhappiness is a consequence of her absence, is systematically dispelled.

If the essence of art is a passion to look and a capacity to see. Bergman's camera explores human faces more revealingly and with greater intensity than any filmmaker alive. I know nothing of his method of working with actors but it is an extraordinary collaborative artistic achievement. Liv Ullman reminds us in Saraband that beauty is a spiritual quality and that she can reveal an astonishing richness of emotion and thought when listening as well as speaking. This is performance that transcends technique.

Key characters from 1973 Scenes From a Marriage Marianne (Ullman) and Johan (Erland Josephson) reappear in Saraband. Divorced for more than 20 years and with little contact in between, Saraband's thin narrative thread begins with Marianne's apparently random, motiveless decision to suddenly visit Johan. Everything in Saraband suggests to me that Saraband is not just a catch-up. That would be too parochial a theme for this final film in a unique career. From within Saraband itself one can say that Ullman's Marianne appears to have no hankering for the past or unresolved feelings for Johan. Her response to his night-time existential dread, in one of the most moving scenes in the film, is not one of reawakened sexuality or remembered love, but more a compassionate tenderness for a flawed human being momentarily frightened at the reality of his own mortality. Johan's dread is not simply of death. Rather, clear-eyed to his own flaws and failures as a man and especially as a father, he knows these are irretrievable and irredeemable. This is the dread of self-contempt and in her emotional wisdom Marianne realises this and tries to comfort him without a false forgiveness he would recognise and reject. The sensitivity not just of the import of this scene but the way that Bergman shoots it with the naked Ullman in silhouette, is a masterly piece of cinema.

Karin, Henrik's cellist daughter, and Johan's granddaughter, supplies the future dimension of Saraband and is played with an impressive hemmed in vitality by Julia Dufvenius. Her implied physical surrogacy towards her emotionally dependent father, after her mother's death is treated more as the only form of support that could reach him, than one of guilty incestuous passion. In this strand of the existential dilemmas, the relationship between Karin and Marianne becomes critical. Bergman's respect for the moral strength of women and scarcely concealed contempt for the behaviour of men, plays out through the relationship between Marianne and Karin. Here we see the only laughter and fun in the movie arising from a sense of solidarity between these two women; the one at the hopeful beginning of her journey through life; the other at an end, tinged with a weary resignation and as we come to see, an unresolved personal tragedy.

Bergman allows himself one partial moment of relief from the unremitting emotional austerity of the film. And it is key. The toughest challenge of all to the existentialist perspective of our world as a function of choice, however difficult the circumstances, is the case of those who are too mentally or physically impaired to be able to make such a choice. As if a class of people are excluded from life. References to Marianne's institutionalised, totally withdrawn daughter Martha drift through the movie like accusatory shadows. At the end, in another moving scene, we see Marianne appear to elicit a first ever, momentary flash of recognition from her daughter. But consistent to his theme, Bergman leaves it ambiguous as to whether this moment is real or desperately needed wishful thinking by Marrianne. He has by this stage so drawn us into a deep engagement in her emotional life that we both hope she is right and respect her self-deception if not.

Music provides a satisfying structure and accompaniment to the movie, its 'dance' of characters adds enormously to its beauty and resonance.

This is an emotionally implacable film. You need to feel pretty existentially robust to put into it the effort of concentration it needs and deserves. No single film could possibly 'sum up' the cinematic genius of Bergman. But as a distillation of decades of impressive exploration of profound themes in human life, Saraband is a more than worthy celebration of the work of one of the greatest Directors the medium has known.

Elizabethtown (2005)

Great, great movie in both senses.

[9/10 · 6 November 2005]

Elizabethtown is a great, great movie. In both senses. It will make you laugh, and cry, and will keep surprising you throughout. It fits no pigeonholes. A bit like life really. But it takes a while to adjust to its quirky, eccentricities of tone and narrative. There's nothing wrong with the first 30 minutes of the movie but at that stage you'll probably think my opening remarks are crazy. You keep wondering where it's going and then it engages you and draws you in. Stop fretting about where we're going it seems to say, and I'll show you interesting, illuminating things about relationships, about life, without telling you about them. So often movies reflect our cultural fiction that our lives are a narrative, a story, with a meaning to be discovered rather than created. Elizabethtown is much nearer the truth: the sense of what we see and do is found not in what the world does to us but how we respond to it. But first you have to re-learn how to look.

If this sounds heavy, philosophical tosh that's me not the movie. It has a lightness of touch and tenderness of feeling that is irresistible. If the image of a newly widowed, middle aged woman tap-dancing to 'Moon River' at a memorial dinner for her dead husband sounds like Mel Brooks on a bad day, let me tell you it will clutch at your heart and moisten your eye. Of course it does no harm that the widow in question is played by the superb Susan Sarandon, who, in a relatively small role has never been better. The little sequence above is a great moment of cinema and will run and run.

It is no surprise that Sarandon is excellent, but Kirsten Dunst is a revelation. Her quirky Clare, is a Holly Golightly for today. Funny, sad, elusive, and yes at times exasperating. But playing against a screwed-up understated Orlando Bloom, their oddball relationship strikes an engaging note of ragged reality. Indeed a test case of whether you can buy into this deeply romantic tone is I guess how you feel about Breakfast at Tiffany's. Hate that and you'll hate this. And vice versa. I love BaT but there are more layers to Elizabethtown. In its bitter-sweet perceptive way, Crowe's screenplay has more than a echo of Capote. And its strange, motley crew of almost randomly jumbled together characters also says much, it seems to me, about America, its contradictions and unities. Its heart, if you will. As an idea, there is nothing earth-shattering about the thought that there is more to life than work and alpha-male aggressive over-achievement. But making the alternative seem the rational, sensible sane view of life is a tough call. As Union Leader Jimmy Reid once famously remarked "the rat-race is for rats." George W Bush, Neo-Conservative, Corporate America this ain't. A movie for people who get Charlie Brown. And cherish the fact that he too is profoundly 'American'.

Elizabethtown has a soundtrack to die for. Cameron Crow's missus Nancy Wilson sings and assembles some great music to underscore perfectly the film's narrative tone. This film exudes a love of music and pretentious though it sounds, a love of life. It is downbeat, unfussy, and in a very distinctive way, brilliantly integrates the essential elements of a good movie: excellent writing, strong, inventive performances, and sharp, pacey editing. But in the end it is the unity of these elements that make this one special. And just as in the world of music, the singer-songwriter has come to represent a popular music paradigm of the synthesis of words and music, so writer-director Crowe has assembled a satisfying cinematic whole that is far more than the sum of its undeniably good parts. And the performers bring much to the party, as despite the undoubted quality of the writing, I suspect on the page, it would look as if there was simply nothing there.

Elizabethtown may prove to be a sleeper at the box-office, but to this reviewer there is a lot more to this one than immediately meets the eye and even on that level it is as funny, touching, inventive a movie as you'll see this year. Don't miss it.

Zettel 2005