Tag / film criticism

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Ida (2013)

FilmJuice have my review of Pawel Pawlikovski’s Ida, a starkly beautiful but terrifyingly under-written film about 1960s Poland.

The film is set in a starkly shot 1960s Poland where an young orphan woman prepares to take orders and become a nun. Worried that this young woman has never experienced life outside of a convent, her abbess orders her to visit with a woman who claims to be her lone surviving relative. Reluctant at first, the young woman travels across Poland to meet with a woman who turns out to be a hard-drinking socialist prosecutor with a fondness for younger men and a Jewish name. Confronted with the fact that she is actually Jewish, the young novice follows her aunt as they travel back to their family’s home town in order to confront the people who killed their family and forced them off their land.

When Ida was released back in 2013, it was received with as much warmth and submissive zeal as the second coming. Not only did it win the Grand Prize at the BFI London Film Festival but reviewers seemed to fall over themselves to declare it a masterpiece while blisteringly high Rotten Tomato and Metacritic scores made it something of a cross-over hit at the American box office. This depresses me a great deal as Ida is a desperately mediocre piece of cinema.

My review blames Pawlikovski’s script for failing to unpack either the emotions or the ideas touched on by the film:

A script with an interest in Polish religious history might have unpacked the implications for Anna’s late-blooming Judaism and explained why discovering that you are Jewish might want to make you think twice about becoming a nun. Similarly, a script with an interest in Polish political history might have noted that Jewish people were purged from the Communist party a few years after the events of the film and explored the way in which a rising tide of anti-Semitism would have forced a respected political prosecutor into near-exile for the crime of being Jewish. By choosing to gloss over the cultural, political and social context of Ida’s journey of discovery, Pawlikovsky ensures that the events of her life are forever lacking in emotional charge.

With hindsight, I now realise that the problem is far more basic.  Consider what I said about one of Pawlikowski’s earlier films The Woman in the Fifth:

There was a time when European art house film wanted to blow shit up. There was a time when values were confounded and new ground was broken both in terms of what could be said and how people could say it. European art house film used to shock the world… now it merely puts bums on seats by engaging with the same old themes in the same old ways. In the land of artistic sterility, competence is king and Pawel Pawlikowski’s The Woman In The Fifth is an eminently competent film.

Ida is another supremely competent piece of film making that looks a lot like a serious work of cinematic art despite being little more than a hollow vessel with nothing to say. Pawel Pawlikovsky is a miserable hack who makes cynical, unadventurous and boring films that degrade the language and sully the reputation of art house film. In a more enlightened age, critics would have called him out and exposed his cynicism but now they hail him as a genius. According to his wikipedia page, Pawlikovski teaches direction and screenwriting at the National Film School in the UK and this saddens me even more than this film’s undeserved success. Art house film should be about more than competence but that is ultimately all that Pawlikowski has to offer us.

 

 

 

 

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Breaking the Waves (1996)

FilmJuice have my review of Lars von Trier’s Palme D’Or-winning tragedy Breaking the Waves.

Breaking the Waves tells of a rather innocent young woman from an isolated Scottish religious community who decides to marry a man who is employed on one of the local oil rigs. At first, the couple (played by Emily Watson and Stellan Skarsgaard) seem perfectly matched as their sex life is nothing short of epic. So profound is the young woman’s passion for her husband that when he has to go back to the oil rig to work, she pines terribly. In fact, she pines so much that she prays for God to return her husband to her side. God appears to answer the young woman’s prayers when a hideous industrial accident paralyses her husband. Unfortunately, because the couple’s relationship is almost exclusively physical, the husband’s inability to have sex with his wife comes to represent a failure of their love and so he encourages her to have sex with other men.

Breaking the Waves is a film about faith. Bess uses her faith in God as a template for her relationship with Jan and because her relationship with God is one of blind, unquestioning and passionate submission, she does not have it in her to deny her heavily-medicated husband when he begins making perverse requests. Bess’s faith in God and Jan is so pronounced that when Jan’s condition deteriorates, she believes that it is because of her lack of faith and so she begins to seek out increasingly violent and degrading men with whom to have sex. The end of the film is gut-wrenching because it proves that Bess was right all along but it also leaves you wondering what kind of God/Husband would demand such blind and self-destructive obedience from those they claim to love?

I very much enjoyed Breaking the Waves and — incredibly rarely for me — I actually teared up at the end of it but my enjoyment of the film in no way diminishes the fact that I regard it as somewhat problematic.

We would all like to believe that art house film provides a viable alternative to the generic and politically dubious output of Hollywood but the truth is that European art film has its own set of well-rehearsed and problematic narratives. Narratives favoured simply by virtue of the fact that most of the people making European art house films come from a particular gender, a particular class and a particular ethnicity. One of the more oppressively ugly stock narratives in art house film involves a beautiful and engaging young woman who winds up getting beaten, humiliated, raped and forced into sex work so that the pathos of her downfall may help the director point an accusing finger at the horrors of the world. Breaking the Waves uses this narrative as does Robert Bresson’s Mouchette, Bigas Lunas’ The Ages of Lulu and it also resurfaces (albeit in a more critical and self-aware form) in films like Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu Monogatari and Francois Ozon’s Jeune et Jolie. How many times do we have to revisit this narrative before people start to realise that it’s rather long in the tooth? How frequently do you see a film in which a man’s descent into sex work mirrors their existential collapse? How many films are there in which a female character sees the horror of the world and responds by becoming a cold-eyed murderer or ruthless business woman? As I say in my review, Breaking the Waves is a brilliantly made and deeply affecting film but the reason it works so well is that there have been literally dozens of films made using the exact same storyline.

Having re-watched Antichrist since watching Breaking the Waves, I am struck by how many of von Trier’s works seem to walk the line between casual prejudice and critical self-analysis. Indeed, many critics of Antichrist accused it of being profoundly misogynistic as the plot revolves around a woman who goes insane after internalising some misogynistic texts she had been studying as part of a PhD. I certainly agree that Antichrist (much like Breaking the Waves) is in dialogue with a western tradition of misogynistic attitudes towards women but both films make it quite clear that misogyny enters the world of the film through the actions of patriarchal men who coerce their wives into acting out misogynistic  life scripts (the deranged screeching harpy in Antichrist and the saintly victim in Breaking the Waves).

It is always tempting to invoke authorial intent in order to collapse the wave function and deposit von Trier’s work on one side or another of the fence but what keeps me returning to his work is precisely this ambiguity, his recognition that horrible attitudes lie buried just below the surface and that it is often incredibly difficult to work out whether one is doing the right thing or perpetuating blind privilege and prejudice. I have long been of the opinion that the art house film scene needs a groundswell of popular feminist criticism to challenge the out-dated attitudes and tropes that are blindly reproduced in film after film but I genuinely have no idea what the social justice movement would make of a filmmaker like von Trier.

 

by Jonathan M

Under the Skin (2013) – Infected by Each Other

Jonathan Glazer’s third film Under The Skin is something of a puzzle. Loosely based on a novel by Michel Faber, the film concerns itself with an alien who poses as a human woman (Scarlett Johansson) in order to lure single men to a strange alien space. Once trapped in the space, the men are absorbed by a black liquid that keeps them alive until the time comes for their flesh and organs to be harvested. However, the more time the alien spends in the company of humans, the more she is forced to refine her seduction techniques and this process of refinement seems to alienate her from her function.

Most (positive) reviews of the film praise Glazer’s visual panache and speculate that the film is concerned with human empathy and the process of becoming human. While I don’t disagree with this assessment, I do think it short-changes what is a very clever and unsettling film. The truth is that Glazer does not give his audience very much to work with when it comes to working out what the film is about and therein lies the point that the film is trying to get across.

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by Jonathan M

Kotoko (2011) – Track the Emotions, Not the World

Back in 1986, Shinya Tsukamoto began producing short experimental films with science fictional themes. One of these films entitled “A Phantom of Regular Size” featured a man living in a dystopian Tokyo being pursued, infected and ultimately transformed by a cybernetic spirit of the age, a woman in dark glasses and immaculate tailoring who could have stepped right out of The Matrix almost a generation later.

Phantom went on to form the backbone to a series of feature films that brought Tsukamoto to the attention of a global audience. Tetsuo: The Iron Man, Tetsuo II: The Body Hammer, and Tetsuo: The Bullet Man are all attempts to communicate what it felt like to be a member of the Japanese middle-classes at the end of a period of unprecedented economic growth that had completely transformed Japanese society in the space of a generation. These films portray the Japanese as a people worn down by the technologically sophisticated society that they themselves constructed. The opening scenes of Phantom are of a man in a subway convulsing with anguish as trains roar past like the blades on an enormous mincing machine. Every passage shaves away another ounce of humanity until there is nothing left but a host for technological infrastructure, as though the machine that had robbed the Japanese of their humanity was now putting them to work debasing and infecting the people around them. The early Tetsuo films not only diagnosed the sickness that was the late-20th Century Japanese experience, they also articulated what that sickness felt like by using imagery inspired by science fiction and horror.

Tsukamoto’s Kotoko feels a lot like a companion piece to the early Tetsuo films but rather than grappling with feelings of rage and alienation brought on by the experience of living under capitalism, Kotoko is all about articulating what it feels like to be a mentally ill single mother.

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by Jonathan M

Into the Abyss (2011) – The Traumafare State

When has Werner Herzog ever made a film that couldn’t be summarised as a journey into the abyss? Early feature films such as Even Dwarfs Started Small and Aguirre, the Wrath of God seem to revel in the existential savagery of the world while more recent documentaries such as Grizzly Man and Happy People: A Year in the Taiga serve as reminders that the world has little time for the collection of bourgeois conceits that we dare to call a civilisation. The question is never whether Herzog will turn his film into a meditation on the savagery of the world, but which tone he will select as a means of approaching it:

Sometimes (as with Encounters at the End of the World and The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans) he is a whimsical fantasist who recognises that silliness is the only possible response to a world so cold and drenched with blood.

Sometimes (as with Fitzcarraldo and Little Dieter Needs to Fly) Herzog is a humanist who marvels at our human capacity to overcome the savage injustices of life.

Sometimes (as with Nosferatu the Vampyre and Aguirre) he is filled with bitterness and cynicism by nature’s ability to dissolve humanity’s finest dreams.

If becoming a cinematic auteur requires a director to develop a recognisable sensibility and carry it with them from project to project then Werner Herzog must be considered one of the most prolific and versatile auteurs in cinematic history. Regardless of whether he is producing documentaries or feature-length narrative films, Herzog is one of the brightest jewels in the crown of world cinema but he is also starting to get on.

Back in the early 2000s, a string of moderately successful films provided the veteran director with a level of visibility that had long since been denied him. Thrust into the spotlight and transformed into a celebrity, Herzog made the most of it by adopting the engagingly self-parodic persona of an austere German filmmaker who muses on the savagery of the world with his tongue planted squarely in his cheek. Long-time fans would not have been surprised by this development as Herzog has always had a fondness for deadpan satire and self-mythologising (the documentary My Best Fiend is at least as full of made up crap about Herzog as it is of stuff about Klaus Kinski). The problem with this moment of visibility is that while it evidently made it much easier for Herzog to secure funding on his next project, it also encouraged him to remain Herzog the whimsical fantasist who undercut his meditations on death and destruction with talk of depressed penguins and mutated crocodiles. Given that Herzog was now reaching 70 and more visible than ever, I was concerned that the whimsical Herzog might become a permanent fixture. Would the bitter and humane Herzogs ever return or would it be nothing but dancing souls and iguanas on the coffee table until the end? Clearly, I needn’t have worried as Into the Abyss is a documentary that shows us an entirely new Werner: Herzog the humane socialist.

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by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Before the Winter Chill (2013)

One of the first films I reviewed when I started this blog was Philippe Claudel’s debut I Have Loved You So Long, a beautifully made but cynically constructed film that skilfully leads you up the garden path before taunting you for having the temerity to set foot in someone’s garden. Like many of the works I value most, I adore and hate I Have Loved You So Long in almost equal measure: I adore it because I admire its courageous choice of subject matter (a woman who murdered her own child) and the skill with which Claudel guides us into a very specific emotional state.  I hate it because Claudel would rather get one over on his audience than use his skill to set them free with a fresh idea or perspective. I have reviewed hundreds of films in the years since I first saw I Have Loved You So Long and yet Claudel’s betrayal has always stayed with me… I am not an academic critic and I do not approach the culture I write about through a fixed ideology but one thing I believe is that great works encourage the audience to make their own choices and their own interpretations.

Given that I have something of a history with Claudel’s films, I jumped at the chance to write about his latest work Before the Winter Chill for FilmJuice.

Before the Winter Chill is one of those incredibly grown-up films that French cinema keeps quietly churning out while the English-speaking world gorges itself on films aimed at children. Set in contemporary France, the film revolves around an aging neurosurgeon (Daniel Auteuil) who has drifted through life without asking himself too many questions. As I explain in my review, the film is filled with pastoral images in which only his wife Lucie (Kristin Scott Thomas) is seen to be working. Indeed, the gap between the surgeon’s indolence and his wife’s incessant toil provides the pastoral setting (a vast modernist house with floor-to-ceiling windows that make the garden feel like part of the house) with its own emotional counter-force. Even as the film bends over backwards to establish the surgeon as an intelligent and sensitive man, it is abundantly clear that something has to give… there is too much unhappiness in every sour comment and petulant gaze. The shock to the system comes in the form of an attractive young woman who seems to be either in love with the surgeon, stalking him or quite possibly both. However, the film keeps the young woman’s motivations at arm’s length and encourages us to stretch our empathic muscles:

The film’s central mystery is a beautiful art student named Lou who seems to be very taken with Paul. Forced to assume Paul’s viewpoint, the audience is asked to keep guessing about Lou’s motivations; in one scene she is a young woman attracted to an older married man, then she is a stalker, next she is gravely disturbed and in need of help. All of these versions of Lou seem to exist in Paul’s head at the same time and his need to ‘solve’ the puzzle of Lou encourages him to spend time with her in a way that only serves to enrage his family and expose the tensions between them. While the film may begin by asking us to identify with Paul and ask why everyone is so grumpy, the film ends by asking us to identify with Lucie and ask: Why didn’t he put that much effort into making sense of the people who love him? Why did he open up to a peculiar stranger but keep everyone else at arm’s distance? How could he ask so much and give so little?

I have quite a strong critical read on this film but, unusually for me, I feel no great desire to share it with the world. As I explain in my review, Before the Winter Chill is one of those films that encourages speculation without providing sufficient clues as to why the various characters act in the way they do. People who are averse to spoilers want to preserve the sanctity of the plot, what concerns me is that by presenting you with a strong read, I would be denying you the pleasure of resolving the film’s ambiguities in your own unique way.

Part of what makes this film so satisfying is that it shows quite how far Claudel has developed as an artist. I Have Loved You So Long was an incredibly impressive debut but it was also intensely controlling as Claudel beat his audience over the head with very specific sets of emotions. Before the Winter Chill is no less skillfully made, Claudel’s use of music, acting and cinematography continue are still absolutely masterful. The difference is that today’s Claudel is comfortable with ambiguity and the audience’s right to resolve that ambiguity in a manner that works for them.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Camera Obscura: The Walerian Borowczyk Collection (2014)

This week saw the release of Arrow Films’ Camera Obscura; a magnificent box set exploring the early work of Polish director Walerian Borowczyk. As someone who already owns quite a few luxurious box sets devoted to art house film directors, you would think that I’d be immune to the packaging-foo of independent DVD publishers but Camera Obscura has taken me completely by surprise. Aside from an impressively thick booklet, the box set contains five beautifully restored feature-length films as well as Boro’s early short films and a suite of documentaries about both him and his work. To say that Camera Obscura is comprehensive would be an understatement, FilmJuice have my reviews of:

FilmJuice’s editorial format required me to break the box set down into five separate films, which is something of a pity as Camera Obscura does an absolutely amazing job of capturing Borowsczyk’s development as an artist. The key to this process of evolution are the short films included on the same disc as The Theatre of Mr. and Mrs. Kabal.   Continue reading →

by Jonathan M

World’s End (2013) – Fuck Geek Culture for Making Me a Millionaire

The World’s End may be a shit film but at least it is full of bitterness and self-recrimination. The roots of that bitterness reach all the way back to the late 1990s when the writers of The World’s End first found success with a sitcom named Spaced.

This may be hard to believe but geek culture really wasn’t really that much of a thing before the late 90s. Sure… people enjoyed the films, books, comics and games that continue to provide geeks with a sense of common ground but mainstream culture rarely acknowledged that people (other than sports fans) were beginning to define themselves through their love of popular culture. Postmodernism was popularised throughout the 1990s but what drove that popularisation was not so much the death of cultural meta-narratives as the frisson of parental approval that came with every suggestion that a creator loved the same shitty pop culture as the rest of us. We often speak of constructing identities in terms of self-expression and self-acceptance but what really drives the adoption of a particular label is the recognition of others, particularly people in positions of authority. Simply stated, geek culture was not much of a thing until the late 1990s because advertisers and cultural creators rarely pandered directly to geeks and so rarely legitimised their identities.

Things began to change is the late 1990s when marketers noticed how devotion to a particular cultural product acted very much like devotion to a particular set of cultural values. Way back in ye olde black and whitey times, advertisers realised that if you associated a particular brand of pipe tobacco with values of manliness and respectability then people who valued manliness and respectability were more likely to buy the pipe tobacco. The success of films like Kevin Smith’s Clerks and Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction demonstrated that this transferral of affection also worked with popular culture; if a film makes a reference to some aspect of popular culture then the people emotionally invested in that aspect of popular culture are more likely to seek out and enjoy that film even if the subject of the film is entirely unrelated to the subject of the obsession. First broadcast in 1999, Spaced ruthlessly exploited these quirks in human psychology by dignifying geeks with their own slice of comedic social realism.

 

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by Jonathan M

REVIEW – The Informant (2013)

After something of a break, FilmJuice have my review of Julien LeClercq’s The Informant (a.k.a. Gibraltar), from which I expected a lot but received surprisingly little.

Written by the same person as the excellent A Prophet and the epic Mesrine, The Informant concerns itself with a Frenchman living on Gibraltar who gets sucked into a world of smuggling and espionage in which everyone lies, everyone betrays and most of the smart people have protection from at least one set of customs officials. Unlike many recent films about the world of espionage, The Informant doesn’t perpetuate the now ubiquitous  Thatcherite saw that state power is necessarily evil and corrupt, instead it takes a much more credible tack, which is to suggest that people in the intelligence service are ambitious, incompetent and under so much pressure to deliver results that they invariably cut corners that impact upon people’s lives. Indeed, The Informant is actually based upon the real life story of a Frenchman named Marc Flevet who served as an informant for the French customs only to wind up rotting in Canadian and Spanish jails when French customs decided to disavow his existence for fear of political and diplomatic scandal. The fact that the film is based upon a real life story of government intrigue and ethical shabbiness should have made it a natural companion piece to Mathieu Kassovitz’s excellent Rebellion (a.k.a. L’Ordre et La Morale), which described the politically-motivated slaughter of New Caledonian activists by a French government desperate to look tough in the run up to elections. However, despite the fact that The Informant had the potential to be a proper espionage thriller with a potent political message, Leclerq’s film comes across as little more than an under-written drama:

 

This plot synopsis makes the film sound significantly more interesting than it actually is. The principle problem is one of emphasis: Had Leclerq rather than allowing the needs of his story to dictate mood and pacing, Leclerq takes his cues from the human drama meaning that a film all about international smuggling and corrupt official seems quiet and plodding rather than tense and dynamic. Leclerq lavishes time and attention on his actors who explore their characters to the full only to realise that there’s not really enough human drama in the script to support nearly two hours of film.

 

This rather reminded me of Kieran Darcy-Smith’s surprisingly well-received Australian drama Wish You Were Here, which made the identical mistake of taking a script structured like a thriller and using it to make a film whose pacing and emphasis were more consistent with that of a traditional drama. Thinking about it a bit more, I wounder whether this trend might not have something to do with the critical success of works like Top of the Lake and Polisse, which take their cues from TV in that they occupy the space traditionally associated with detective stories but deploy the narrative tools of TV drama. The key difference between The Informant and Top of the Lake is that while both slow the pacing and focus on the characters, Top of the Lake’s characters are substantial enough to support that level of attention while those of the The Informant are now. This also explains why I gave up on the universally-popular Breaking Bad; I enjoyed the early seasons that focused on the plot of a science teacher learning to become a drug dealer but at some point in the third season, a decision was made to slow down the pace and focus on the characters despite the fact that the characters were really not interesting enough to support hour-after-hour of detailed examination.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – We Are The Best! (2013)

FilmJuice have my review of Lukas Moodysson’s thoroughly wonderful We Are The Best! Set in 1980s Sweden, the film is a densely-written and realised drama about a group of diffident teenaged girls who spin their feelings of alienation and abandonment into friendship and punk rock. Based on a graphic novel by Coco Moodysson, We Are The Best! is one of those films that renews your trust in the fundamental precepts of world cinema:

The most striking thing about this film is its astonishing density. Not content with providing his audience with a whistle-stop tour of the 1980s punk scene and producing three exquisitely drawn characters, Moodysson unpacks his characters’ motivations and uses them to critique a society that sees little of value in teenaged girls. The film is littered with beautifully quiet scenes in which the girls come up against sexist attitudes and it is in these moments that we are reminded of the central aesthetic principle underlying world cinema: The depth and breadth of human experience is not exhausted by stories about heroic tough guys and mildly depressed middle-class people, so why should cinema limit itself to those types of stories?

Re-watching the film and considering my reaction to it, I was struck by the difference between the vision of Scandinavia presented in this film and the vision of Scandinavia that is presented in the so-called Nordic Noir TV series that are currently proving popular with the British chattering classes. One of the reasons why these TV series are proving so popular is that austerity has pushed British political culture further and further towards the nightmarish individualism of American political culture and the social democracies of Northern Europe are increasingly becoming totemic symbols of what can be achieved when social institutions remain under popular control. Who wouldn’t want to live in a place filled with beautiful people, minimalist interior design and supremely competent police that drive vintage Porsches and wear cooky jumpers? In fact, going by the TV series, Scandinavia is a place entirely devoid of fat or brown people! Despite believing that the state is a more effective and humane means of government than the market, I welcome any film and TV series that critiques the creation of a racially-problematic dreamworld.

We Are The Best! is set in a sports-obsessed Swedish suburb similar to that of Tomas Alfredson’s peerless gothic romance Let The Right One In. In both films, the parents are supremely liberal and the state provides housing and schooling that ensures that no child need ever feel the sting of hunger or the lash of want. 1980s Sweden should have been a paradise on Earth but society’s largesse came an inevitable price tag: Silence. The children in these films are showered with well-meaning attention but a refusal to follow the script and enjoy society’s riches means that they are forced to the margins and denied a vocabulary with which to express their discontent. This is neither Africa nor America… this is socialist Sweden and what could a bunch of middle-class kids possibly have to complain about? While the protagonist of Let The Right One wound up expressing his alienation through an unusual relationship with an intersexual vampire, the protagonists of We Are The Best! reach for a lexicon that is at once more mundane and more universally accessible: Punk rock.