Category / Film

by Jonathan M

Neds (2010) – Don’t Let You Get the Best of You

David Simon has a lot to answer for.

There was a time, around the turn of the millennium, when big institutions had their day in the sun: In foreign affairs, people began to look to the United Nations as a venue for resolving political conflicts while independent NGOs were seen not only as fonts of specialised knowledge but as self-less agents for change and charity.  In domestic affairs, the backlash against the Thatcherite era of cuts and privatisations gained political substance as people began to demand proper investment in schools and hospitals.  In the UK at least, this unexpected belief in the power of institutions to change the world swept the Labour party into power with a mandate for an ‘ethical foreign policy’ and massive investment in public services.  For a while, people believed.  People felt the institutional sun on their up-turned faces.

But then, as these things inevitably do, the wheel began to turn.

It is hard to tell when precisely it was that the rot began to creep into cultural representations of social institutions but it was pretty obvious when the roof fell in.  Over the course of five short series, David Simon’s HBO series The Wire took a crowbar to the knees of pretty much every large social institution in America: The police, organised labour, politics, the media, schools and even criminal gangs.  Nobody escaped Simon’s forensic wrath.  According to The Wire, no institution could be trusted to deliver social change because institutions rely upon human agents who are invariably both too self-serving and too short sighted to act in the interests of society as a whole.

Change, we were told, simply could not come from above.

If The Wire’s brutal analysis constituted the crest of a wave of disillusionment then Peter Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters (2002) was undeniably a distant but powerful off shore surge that contributed to the bathymetric sway.  The film focuses upon Ireland’s infamous Magdalene asylums, institutions run by the Catholic Church with parental consent that effectively pressed young women into slavery in order to ‘protect’ them and others from their fallen morality. Over the course of 119 minutes, The Magdalene Sisters wages a viciously effective assault on the notion that charitable institutions could ever be anything other than venues for misguided authoritarianism and the psychological and physical abuse of vulnerable people.

But what of the individual in all of this?

If it is unacceptable to suggest that the poor are simply lazy and that the vulnerable are simply weak, then surely it is just as unpalatable to suggest that the poor and vulnerable are nothing but the passive victims of misguided social institutions?  If may well be reductive and simplistic to place all of one’s faith for social renewal in large institutions but it is just as simplistic to paint these institutions as nothing more than part of an unjust and exploitative system.  People are individuals.  People have choice.  People have agency.  A more sophisticated representation of the ills of our society would allow for this.  It would acknowledge the responsibilities that we have to ourselves.

Peter Mullan’s latest film Neds (Non-educated Delinquents) attempts to examine both sides of the coin.  Set in 1970s Scotland, the film depicts a social landscape bristling with institutions that are quick to open their arms to working class children but just as quick to turn their backs on these same children if they fail to follow the (largely unwritten) rules.  However, while Mullan does a brilliant job of depicting the fickle and irrational nature of big institutions, his film’s real power comes from a willingness to recognise that we play a large part in our own downfall and salvation.

Continue reading →

by Jonathan M

127 Hours (2010) – Moments Exist Forever But Last No Time At All

Biographies are interestingly false.  Drawing on collections of facts about a person’s life, they attempt to present these facts as being in some way related to each other.  First one thing happens, and then another thing happens.  The audience is invited to infer either that the first thing caused the second thing or that both things are expressions of unseen psychological law.  A character trait.  An obsession.  A neurosis.  A fleeting moment of psychotic anger.  But this is to assume that the facts of our lives are connected in meaningful ways and that there are fixed patterns to our psychological states that govern our actions in a predictable and rational manner.

This is rather a large assumption to make.

The philosopher David Hume expressed a degree of scepticism about the idea of the self as a thing with fixed characteristics.  According to the traditional reading of Hume, the self is a series of perceptions that are bundled together by coherence and consistency.  One interpretation of this is that we are our own biographers and that by choosing to place discrete events and moments of our lives in a series of imagined causal relations, we are fashioning a narrative and thereby fashioning an identity for ourselves. Our continued existence is a myth.  And yet…

The philosopher Derek Parfit, himself an intellectual descendent of Hume, argues that while it does not make sense to say that we are a single person who exists through time, there is a degree of psychological connection between the different selves that make up this illusory person. The key to psychological connection, according to Parfit is memory.  The physicist David Deutsch explains the physics of behind this idea in his book The Fabric of Reality (1997):

 

We exist in multiples versions, in universes called ‘moments’.  Each version of us is not directly aware of the others, but has evidence of their existence because physical law links the contents of different universes.  It is tempting to suppose that the moment of which we are aware is the only real one, or is at least a little more real than the others.  But that is just solipsism.  All moments are physically real.  The whole of the multiverse is physically real.  Nothing else is. – Page 287

 

As a person, I remember my anterior selves and the impressions I get of my anterior selves allow me to construct an image of an enduring personality.  A personality constructed from a series of discrete but completely real selves.  A series of moments in time.

Danny Boyle’s film 127 Hours is an adaptation of Between a Rock and a Hard Place (2004) the autobiography of the outdoorsman Aron Ralston who, after being trapped beneath a boulder for five days, decided to saw his own arm off using a cheap folding knife.  Ostensibly about the realisation that even the most self-reliant of people get lonely, the film is really an exploration of the idea that we are nothing but a series of moments.

Continue reading →

by Jonathan M

Films of the Year : The 2010 Edition

2010 was a great year for film.  Great not just in terms of the films that were released onto our cinema screens (due in no small part to 2009 being a vintage year for Cannes), but also in terms of the films that I got to watch for the first time.  2010 was a year in which Hollywood struggled with mere competence while the art house roared in defiance.  A year of triumphs.  A year of breakthroughs.  A year of brilliance.

In fact, 2010 was such a good year that I found it surprisingly difficult to limit myself to just ten films.  My original long-list contained nearly thirty titles all of which, in leaner years, might have made it onto the final shortlist.

As usual with my Best of the Year posts, I have posted links to any pieces I may have written on or around the films in question.  However, I hummed and hawed so massively over one particular title that I felt compelled to write a little something to justify its inclusion.

Continue reading →

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Deadly Outlaw Rekka (2002)

Back around the turn of the millennium, Takashi Miike was the poster-boy for a new brand of cinephilia.  A cinephilia that used DVDs to traverse cultural boundaries in search of more sex, more violence and more extreme imagery.  Since then, Miike and his film seem to have fallen into relative obscurity, victims of a maturing DVD market and the director’s own refusal to abide by traditional genre boundaries.  However, as my Videovista review of Deadly Outlaw Rekka shows, there’s life in the old dog yet.

Deadly Outlaw Rekka is about a culture clash within the Yakuza.  A culture clash between the gangsters who see themselves as business men and the gangsters who cling to the old ways.  Ways of honour and blood.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Carlos The Jackal (2010)

As you may recall, I am quite a fan of the work of Olivier Assayas.  Once a critic for Cahiers du Cinema, Assayas has gone on to become one of the most under-rated directors working in France today.  His films generally fall into one of two streams — either they are mercilessly cold tales of espionage set against a corporate background (much like Demonlover) or they are much warmer mainstream dramas about the difficulties people face trying to connect with each other (much like Irma Vep).  As ostensibly different as these the two streams of his directorial career, both share the same unifying vision of human nature.  A vision that is painted in the brightest and most spectacular strokes in his latest film Carlos.

As my Videovista review suggests, Carlos is essentially a human tragedy about one man’s attempt to find a place for himself in a world full of principles and politics but very little human warmth.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Aftershock (2009)

According to the latest industry figures, 3D has started to lose its allure for American cinema-goers.  This will come as a big disappointment to Hollywood as 3D not only allowed cinemas to hike their ticket prices, it also seemed to offer an experience that could not yet be replicated at home.  An experience that rivaled the interactivity of video games and social media.

Of course, it does not help that most of the films to benefit from a 3D release have been relentlessly awful.  Xiagang Feng’s Aftershock presents itself as a different type of ‘cinema spectacular’, the first IMAX-native film to be made outside of the US, it is a film that begins with raw spectacle before settling down into a carefully plotted family melodrama.  The results of this different take on cinematic spectacle are… encouraging as my Videovista review explains.

by Jonathan M

Leap Year (2010) – Too Much Information

What a piece of work is a man.  A species that evolved amidst the mighty trees of a world-spanning tropical forest now spreads across this planet like an impenetrable oil slick.  Our litter fouls the highest peaks, our scientific instruments plumb the deepest depths.  We go everywhere.  We adapt.  We feed.  We breed.  We spread.  And yet, despite our adaptability and despite our ambition, the majority of our species now live in cities.  We could live anywhere and yet we choose to shut ourselves away in cramped concrete boxes.  Why is this?

Despite most films being set in some kind of urban environment, few of them manage to capture what it really feels like to live in such an alien and bizarre landscape.  Roman Polanski’s Apartment trilogy perhaps comes closest but Repulsion (1965), Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Tenant (1976) all stress the Otherness of city life while down-playing its attractions.  Patrick Keiller’s London (1994) may well skewer the combination of hollowness and (largely fictitious) potential for adventure and fun that comprise London but its detached narration and photographic sensibility makes its message cerebral rather than instinctual. Analytical rather than subjective.

Winner of the 2010 Camera D’Or award at the Cannes film festival for best debut feature, Michael Rowe’s Leap Year (a.k.a. Año bisiesto) seeks to capture the elusive charms of city life by depicting a life characterised by a profound ambivalence to human intimacy.  An ambivalence that expresses itself in every aspect of a young woman’s life.

 

Continue reading →

by Jonathan M

Mugabe and the White African (2009) – How to Poison Your Own Well

In the 1880s a man named Cecil Rhodes established the British South Africa Company. Created along the lines of the somewhat more famous British East India Company and backed by a private mercenary army known as the British South Africa Police, the BSAC cut a swathe through Southern Africa waging wars, acquiring land and playing various local kingdoms and principalities off against each other.  By the end of the 1880s, the BSAC had received a royal charter and their lands lost their original political identities in favour of the name of Rhodesia.  For over seventy years, the British South Africa company oversaw the economic exploitation and development of the lands through a collection of White land and business owners.  Eventually, in 1965, Southern Rhodesia declared its independence.  This, as far as many white Zimbabwean land-owners are concerned, is when the rot set in.

Mike Campbell purchased the Mount Carmel estate in 1974.  He did so under the white-minority government of Ian Smith but when Smith’s regime collapsed and the country changed its name to Zimbabwe Rhodesia under a black government.  While many white land-owners left the country, either for Apartheid-era South Africa or ‘Home’ to Britain, Campbell stayed to work his land.  He had no problems with the government.  No problems until 2000 when the government of Robert Mugabe launched a programme of land seizures whereby the land of Zimbabwe would be returned to Black Zimbabweans who had long been disenfranchised first by the colonial rule of the BSAC, then by the rule of Ian Smith’s White-minority government and then by the inequalities of a capitalist system which, despite de-colonisation, left much of Zimbabwe in the hands of a few rich land owners.

Like many of the White land-owners who stayed on after de-colonisation, Mike Campbell was the victim of government intimidation and violence as one by one the old land-owners were forced off their land and the land was turned over to government cronies whose lack of interest in running the farms at all let alone for the common good has resulted in wide-spread famine and the economic collapse of what was once one of Africa’s most prosperous countries.  Where other land-owners sold below market rates and ran, Mike Campbell stood his ground.  He stood his ground by taking his case to the Zimbabwean supreme court and when that failed he took it to a South African Development Community tribunal in the hope of forcing the Mugabe government to respect his property rights over the Mount Carmel estate.

 

There is a fascinating political documentary to be made out of this struggle.  What is so fascinating about Campbell’s case is that it seems to serve as a microcosm for many of the moral and political issues surrounding the West’s relationship with its former colonies.  Indeed, should a government ignore property rights in order to redress an old economic injustice?  When that old injustice was motivated largely by a racist mindset, is it acceptable for a government to adopt a similarly racist mindset in order to redress the moral balance and undo the harms of the past?  If this sort of redressing of the moral and economic balance is morally acceptable, then can a government’s ends justify their means and are they compelled to obey bodies of international law when those laws protect the status quo?  Many political questions can be asked of Mike Campbell’s court case but Lucy Bailey and Andrew Thompson’s documentary Mugabe and the White African is not interested in asking them.

 

Continue reading →

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – We Are What We Are (2010)

THE ZONE have my review of Jorge Michel Grau’s recent art house cannibal film We Are What We Are (a.k.a. Somos Lo Que Hay).

Though undeniably atmospheric and full of potential, the film never quite manages to get its ducks in a row.  Instead of developing a coherent line of thought, the film flirts with various ideas.  Cannibalism as a relationship with one’s family.  Cannibalism as living a GLBT lifestyle.  Cannibalism as living in a state with a corrupt police force.  All of these ideas drift through the script and the film’s imagery but none of them are ever fleshed out or pursued.

Watching the film I was reminded of the post-’68 vendetta waged by the Cahiers du Cinema against Costa-Gavras’ film Z (1969).  In her flawed but punchy history of the Cahiers, A Short History of Cahiers du Cinema(2010), Emilie Bickerton characterises the Cahiers reaction to the Serie-Z as :

With Z you had a film-maker who was addressing politics on the surface, but simultaneously banalizing it.  Costa-Gavras was thus perfectly attuned to the changes in public demand: he offered a film that was shot with panache, a lively score, a hint of experimentation (…) it was intelligent and committed but never revolutionary, in either narrative content or aesthetic form. — pp. 65

I think a similar failing can be identified in We Are What We Are.  It is a film that relies quite heavily upon an audience’s familiarity with genre tropes.  To make sense of the film, you have to be aware of serial killer narratives, zombie narratives and crime narratives.  It presents itself as a film that has taken on the ideas and imagery of genre only to project them forward into a more ‘grown up’ cinematic milieu and so it appeals to people who, though familiar with genre tropes, are wanting more from their cinematic experiences than explosions and special effects.  However, despite promising a deeper level of intellectual engagement than your average genre piece, We Are What We Are is empty and insubstantial.

This is a growing problem.

by Jonathan M

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) – The Tragic Decay of Language into Mere Words

Much has been written, not least by me, about the best way to approach the films of the Thai New Wave director Apichatpong Weerasethakul.  Most responses seem to fall into one of three categories :

 

The first is made up of rejectionist accusations of wilful obscurantism.  The second is composed of equally ill-judged, but somewhat more charitable, suggestions that his films contain a profound political and/or spiritual message that we are unable to decode because we lack a sufficient knowledge of Thai culture.  Both of these views are attempts to articulate a sense of frustration with the fact that, despite his obvious technical and artistic skill, Weerasethakul is somehow failing to communicate his ideas in a way that makes them accessible to anyone who is not him.  This sense of frustration has also resulted in the emergence of a rather more drastic category of reaction.

The third category is best summed up by the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum’s assertion that we suffer from “a lack of analytical context in which to place this material”.  Indeed, my own reaction to Weerasethakul’s work is that his films are both so obviously brilliant and so utterly incomprehensible that we need to develop an entirely new critical language in which to discuss his work.  A language focused not upon ‘narrative’ and ‘character’ but upon mood and atmosphere, the careful layering of images, colours and sounds to evoke emotional responses.  Under this view, Weerasethakul is effectively bypassing our traditional analytical tools and the tricks of cognition we use to make sense of cinema (and the world) in order to plug directly into our brains.

 

Weerasethakul’s latest film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (a.k.a. Loong Boonmee Raleuk Chat) constitutes a serious challenge to this third approach to the director’s work.  It is a film that revisits many of the director’s favoured themes and images but places them into a much more traditionally cinematic framework.  Far from operating on the level of pure sensation, unadorned by critical analysis, Uncle Boonmee is a film littered with genre tropes and familiar ideas.  Ideas that not only make the work much easier to understand, but actually prompt us to revisit many of the director’s earlier works and ask whether — despite this year’s Palme D’Or at Cannes — something has not been lost along the way.  Something beautiful and mysterious.

 

Continue reading →