It is difficult for me to articulate quite why it is that I adore Jacques Nolot’s Avant Que J’Oublie (2007), or Before I Forget as it is known to English speakers. Ostensibly your typical French drama about middle class angst, alienation and spiritual decay, the film deals with an ageing gay man who looks back over his life with considerable bitterness as he considers all the things he lost and all the things he failed to gain. However, while filled with negativity about his own past, the central character Pierre (played by Nolot) is gripped by terror when he thinks about the future as his health dwindles, his sex drive sputters and his days come to be consumed by talk of money, food and how he will most likely die alone. There are hundreds of films that deal in exactly this kind of bourgeois malaise and many of them leave me completely cold. What makes Nolot’s films so special is that, unlike many dramas that aim for the universality of human emotions while achieving only the generic, Nolot’s films are specific. They carry the specificity that comes only from the autobiographical and it is the candour with which Nolot describes his life that makes his films so uncomfortable and yet so utterly compelling.
Category / Film
Stuck (2007)
It is difficult for me to write about Stuart Gordon’s Stuck without also ranting about the state of London cinema distribution. However, I shall curtail my habitual rant on the subject by merely pointing out that Stuck is, much like Durabont’s The Mist (2007) and Friedkin’s Bug (2006), a genuinely impressive piece of genre film-making that was cruelly stripped from cinema screens just as it began to generate some decent word-of-mouth and thereby find its audience. Although best known for successfully joining up separate Lovecraft stories in order to create Dagon (2001), Stuck shows that Gordon is also adept with contemporary horror. By ‘contemporary horror’ I mean horror films such as Bug, Wolf Creek (2005) or Eden Lake (2008). Horror films that are stripped of fantastical elements and which, instead of dealing with their different issues through metaphor, deals with them in a synecdochic manner by having certain characters stand in for trends in human nature or contemporary culture that the director and writers wish to address. Despite the apparent nihilism of its cynicism and violence, Stuck is actually a deeply moral film. Beneath the brutal gore-filled images and the (admittedly ill-judged and self-defeating) black comedy, the film speaks not only of the worst in humanity, but also the best.
Some thoughts on Tarkovsky’s Stalker
There’s an excellent article in The Guardian Today about Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1980). Written by Geoff Dyer in preparation for the film’s screening at the BFI Southbank on the 10th of February, Dyer tries to work out what it is that makes Tarkovsky’s film such a powerful work. The article gives some nice biographical information about the making of the film and trots through a number of different interpretations without any of them sticking but the really interesting part of the article is a particular quote that perfectly encapsulate how I feel about the film.
“The film itself has become synonymous both with cinema’s claims to high art and a test of the viewer’s ability to appreciate it as such. Anyone sharing Cate Blanchett’s enthusiasm for it – “every single frame of the film is burned into my retina” – attests not just to the director’s lofty purity of purpose, but to their own capacity to survive at the challenging peaks of human achievement.”
The Stranger
Videovista have My Review of Orson Welles’ The Stranger (1946).
As I mention in the review, the real meat of The Stranger is its take on German war guilt. There are many films dealing with this issue, but I’d be genuiely interested to know if there are any films that take a harder line on it than The Stranger. Apparently, while Welles himself stopped short of claiming that the only solution to the ‘German Problem’ was eradication, he did express serious misgivings about the idea that Germany could ever be rehabilitated by the means of social programmes.
It is interesting to watch The Stranger now because Germany itself seems to be going through a phase of cinematic introspection. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others (2006) tried to humanise East German bureaucracy by presenting it as a system characterised by very real human fears and emotions, Dennis Gansell’s Die Welle (2008) suggested that Fascism could just as easily appear now as it did in the 1930s and Uli Edel’s Der Baader Meinhoff Komplex (2008) treats with significant sympathy the idea that, had it not been for left-leaning terrorists, Germany might well have returned to Fascism in the 1970s.
My view is that Welles is almost correct. The Germans do secretly long to march beneath the banners of the Teutonic Knights, but then, so does every human being. Everyone wants ther opinions to be made law. Everyone wishes that their opponents would just ‘go away’.
Kokoro
Videovista have My Review of Kon Ichikawa’s Kokoro (1955)
This weekend, I went to see an amateur production of the opera La Sonnambula by Vicenzo Bellini. Unlike Kokoro, the opera was terrible. The singing was bad, the acting was wooden, the set was ugly, the staging unimaginative and the entire thing was incapable of inspiring any emotion at all other than possibly pity or amusement.
You know you’re in trouble when the romantic leading man steps on stage and you can’t help but think that he would be better off playing a duplicitous junkie pimp.
However, I mention the opera as it really made me think about the process of direction. In Kokoro, the film lays out this intricate web of negative emotions involving alienation, guilt, grief and resentment. It goes on for an hour and a half making it abundantly clear that the central character is a miserable sod and, through flashbacks, it allows us glimpses into the man’s youth showing us why he was so miserable. However, with about half an hour to go, it became obvious that the film was ‘treading water’. As a melodrama, the film was making the kind of moves that lead to a grand reveal but no reveal was forthcoming. In a film so obviously well written and directed, this struck me as profoundly bizarre and so I set about reading between the lines and working out that, actually, the film is all about homosexuality.
But why did Ichikawa not make that plain? was it the actors refusing to be physical? was it a reflection of the source material (which is apparently just as coy)? or was the director himself uncomfortable bringing those kinds of themes to light in what was a very mainstream production?
Auteur Theory paints the director as a supremely powerful creative first mover. He makes the decisions, his decisions shape the film. But how does this idea sit with the fact that some productions might well be hampered by factors external to the director’s decision-making process? In that case should the director walk out or rightly take the blame for the entire thing? If the director can’t be blamed for those kinds of problems, then to what extent is he responsible at all?
The Cloning of Joanna May
Videovista has my review of this mini-series based upon a novel by Fay Weldon.
I’ve read better examples of Feminist SF. Hell, I’ve seen better examples of Feminist SF but I think The Cloning of Joanna May demonstrates one of the more interesting historical quirks in the way that Feminist ideas permeated into mainstream culture.
One of my problems with with a lot of Feminist SF – certainly at the level of the classics of the sub-genre such as Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and Joanna Russ’ The Female Man (1970) – is that many of its central concepts have never seemed that revolutionary or alien to me. I was born in 1976 and growing up, I was well aware of parents who would keep their little boys away from war toys whilst encouraging their little girls to play football. So when it came time for me to read about some of these ideas, I always felt that the battle had been won and that the ideas of a lot of Feminist SF were old hat, mainstream or blindingly obvious.
However, while I took one lesson away from these ideas, others took a quite different one.
The Cloning of Joanna May is the product of a profoundly cynical culture trying to have a debate with itself. Britain has never been overly fond of ‘public intellectuals’ and its public debate is arguably shaped more by comedy than it is by reasoned discourse. For example, consider the ipact of the idea that John Major tucked his shirt into his underpants or Vince Cable’s parliamentary zinger that Gordon Brown had turned from Stalin to Mr. Bean. Indeed, the most significant works of political drama in the last 30 years have been comedy in the shape of Yes Minister and The Thick of It. Both series were far more potent in shaping how we see government than any Guardian editorial or Think Tank press release.
The camp and exploitative production values of The Cloning of Joanna May push it dangerously close to being a black comedy but it is also quite sincere in its desire to deconstruct traditional gender roles. The same is true of The Two Ronnies’ series The Worm that Turned.
As with The Cloning of Joanna May, The Worm That Turned combines Feminist SF with women in skimpy outfits. Intellectually, the writers accept the ideas, but their cynicism and resistance to these same ideas comes out through lapses into end-of-the-pier comedic imagery. As parodies of Feminist thought, both series are utterly toothless so the comedy elements of both series should perhaps not be seen as resistance at all, but rather an adoption of the traditional forms of British public debate.
Kamikaze Girls
Also up at Videovista is my review of Tetsuya Nakashima’s Kamikaze Girls (also known as Shimotsuma Monogatari).
A somewhat odd blend of social realism and hyperkinetic postmodernism, the film tears a strip out of youth-oriented media but I was left perplexed as to whether the target was worth the attack.
I’ll also include a link to my review of Uwe Boll’s Bloodrayne II : Deliverance.
I Served the King of England
Videovista has my review of Jiri Menzel’s I Served the King of England.
A soft-focus picaresque comedy heavy on the naked ladies and light on the social satire.
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
One of the peculiarities of Western pre-scientific thought is its fondness for certain numbers. For example, consider the tenacity of the four elements that became the four humours or the trinity that also pops up in the works of Freud and Clausewitz. However, the undisputed king of pre-scientific theoretical numbers is the number two. From politics to ethics, metaphysics to epistemology, and cosmology to the philosophy of mind, humanity seems deeply wedded to the idea that reality can be seen as made up of two different kinds of things. I suspect that this strange fetish has its roots in some banal fact about us as a species; perhaps just as our fondness for base-10 arithmetic stems from having ten fingers, perhaps our love of dualisms comes from the fact that we can all hold up our hands and say “on the one hand… but on the other…”. Indeed, the near-universality of the concept of the ‘duality of man’ is unarguably behind the enduring popularity and the flexibility of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886).
Over the years, the story of a Victorian scientist who unlocks his darker side has been interpreted in a number of different ways. As well as the original duality of man as a mixture of good and evil, Jekyll and Hyde have also been used as personifications of introverted intelligence vs. extroverted cunning, superego vs. id and as metaphorical explorations of the use of drugs. However, while it would be interesting to compare and contrast all of the different tellings of Stevenson’s story, this review will deal only with one; the 1931 adaptation directed by Rouben Mamoulian and starring Fredric March, an adaptation that deals with the tension between man as an animal and man as a civilised being.
Waltz with Bashir
Charitably viewed, Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir is very close to being a flawless work of cinematic art. Its subject matter is relentlessly ‘serious’ and ‘important’, its visuals are not only stylish but arresting and its structure is a genuinely inventive demonstration of the links between psychoanalysis and detective stories. However, beneath the veneer of artistically slick visuals and introspection lies a film which, uncharitably viewed, is not only confused but actively confusing.
The film begins with an arresting scene in which a pack of wild dogs run through the streets leaving chaos and terror behind them. They eventually stop beneath the window of a friend of the film maker Ari Folman. In a bar, the dog-attractor explains that he has been having this same dream for years and he suspects that it is inspired by his time in the IDF when he had to shoot the guard dogs before his squad moved into a town. Upon asking Folman if he has any similar dreams, Folman responds by saying that the war and ensuing massacre of Palestinian refugees by Lebanese Christian paramilitaries are simply not present in his system. However, soon after he begins a recurring dream about him and two other soldiers floating in the sea as yellow flares light up a city. Upon seeing the flares, the young men walk out of the sea and climb into their uniforms. Concerned about this apparent memory resurfacing, Folman shows up on the doorstep of another of his friends, a therapist, and asks him what to do. The therapist suggests tracking down the other people in the dream and the other people present at the time in the hope that they will help Folman’s memories return to him. The rest of the film is made up of interviews with Folman’s friends and a few other people who share their memories of the war and the massacre, gradually helping Folman to remember his time in Lebanon.
Ruthless Culture 