Tag / film criticism

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Faust (2011)

Not the UK box art but I think this may well be the worst DVD cover of all time and I simply had to share it.FilmJuice have my review of Alexander Sokurov’s Faust.

Like many people, my first contact with the work of Alexander Sokurov was his 2002 film Russian Ark. Filmed in the Winter Palace and shot in one long continuous take, Russian Ark presents itself as a journey through Russian history. Visually striking and technically flawless, the film is a brilliant exercise in cinematic logistics as Sokurov does not just produce an entire film in a single shot, he also stage-manages hundreds of extras in real time with absolutely no room for error.

Much like Russian Ark, Faust is both visually and technically impressive:

Shot amidst narrow streets using a very narrow aspect ratio, Sokurov fills the screen with extras to the point where the film’s main characters struggle to be seen and heard. Hemmed in on all sides by people and buildings, Sokurov’s Faust withdraws into a world of ideas only to be shocked and horrified by his resulting distance from human concerns. The self-destructive nature of Faust’s psychological exile is made all the more clear through a series of allusions to great works of art which, despite their considerable beauty, are entirely lost on the self-absorbed Faust.

Based on the well-known and often-revisited story of a Renaissance scholar who sells his soul to the devil only to discover his soul’s true worth, Sokurov’s Faust presents the character as a bored intellectual who is so detached from the world that he literally would not know what to do with unlimited power were he to receive it. Much like Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, Sokurov’s creation acquires neither wisdom nor morality alongside his satanic powers.

Much like Russian Ark, Faust is the product of a man with amazing technical skill and very little to say. As I said in my review of Russian Ark, his films are lifeless collages of beautifully rendered images. Affectless to the point of absolute sterility, Sokurov is a gifted cinematographer needlessly elevated to the role of director.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Oedipus Rex (1967)

ORFilmJuice have my review of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s wonderful adaptation of Oedipus Rex.

While I am a huge fan of Pasolini’s work, his films always leave me feeling as though I have had to fight Pasolini tooth and nail in order to extract a coherent message from an enormous pile of idiosyncratically juxtaposed signs and portents. Indeed, if you read my review of Pasolini’s contribution to the short film collection RoGoPaG you will have noticed that I genuinely have no idea what it was that he was trying to say with his weird Christ/Cheese metaphor. As a result, it was somewhat refreshing to encounter an example of what Pasolini could achieve when working with a text that is already quite well understood.

Based on the classical play by Sophocles, Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex offers a moving commentary on the fact that even the most concerted rebels and outcasts are doomed to assume the roles vacated by their parents. Re-issued by Master of Cinema alongside a series of other Pasolini titles, Oedipus Rex is a useful point of entry into one of the 20th Century’s most challenging and unusual filmmakers. Indeed, having now seen Oedipus Rex, Pasolini’s Pigsty makes a good deal more sense.

Oedipus Rex is one of the most beautiful films ever made. Its opening sequences of people running around a field are fiercely reminiscent of the whispered awe that flows throughout the films of Terrence Malick. Pasolini captures the North African landscape with the eye of a painter, the deep red of the sand constantly at war with the brilliant blue of the sky while the film’s outlandish costumes seem to shriek defiance at the heavens themselves. We are here! We are human! We exist! Staggeringly beautiful, the film’s production design is reminiscent of what might have happened had the surrealist master Alejandro Jodorowsky been recruited to direct films like 300 and Immortals.

If you are looking for an intelligent and staggeringly beautiful art house film then please look no further than the BD edition of Oedipus Rex.  This is staggeringly good cinema.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle (2010)

FilmJuice have my review of Florin Serban’s debut feature If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle. Nominated for the Berlin Golden Bear and winner of the Jury Prize Silver Bear, Serban’s film is being marketed as the latest opus to emerge from the fecund soil of the Romanian New Wave. High praise indeed given that that particular wave produced not only Cristi Poiu’s The Death of Mr Lazarescu and Corneliu Porumboiu’s Police, Adjective but also Cristian Mungiu’s Cannes-winning 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days. Unfortunately, while Serban’s film does an excellent job of re-creating the corridorpunk aesthetic that has thus-far dominated the Romanian New Wave, the film itself is really nothing more than a generic prison thriller:

The problem is that while films like Police, Adjective and The Death of Mr Lazarescu used a very specific set of Romanian problems to explore what it is like to be a contemporary Romanian, Serban’s film is really nothing more than the sort of generic prison movie that could have been made anywhere. Generic in plot and unoriginal in aesthetic sensibility, Serban’s debut is a largely pointless addition to an increasingly over-loaded bandwagon. Indeed, while the film’s gritty visuals and social realism may have helped to secure international distribution, they do absolutely nothing for the film’s message or emotional impact.

Some critics have suggested that If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle is proof that we are close to reaching the bottom of the Romanian New Wave barrel and that all the talent in that particular scene has now been discovered leaving only the hacks and the wannabes. Though I have a certain amount of sympathy for this viewpoint, I think the decision to load If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle onto the Romanian New Wave bandwagon speaks of a more profound malaise with world cinema.

Consider the following hypothetical situation: You are a young Romanian who has just graduated from film school at a time when critics all over the world are singing hosannas to your national cinema. All over the world, people are paying to see Romanian film and you know that, as a young Romanian film director, chances are that you can score a breakthrough hit. However, in order to produce a breakthrough hit and launch your career, you need to attach yourself to this national cinema that everyone is raving about. Q: What is the best way of accomplishing this? A: By making the film you want to make and combining it with familiar tropes. Result: A thriller with a corridorpunk aesthetic.

If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle is best understood as a professional calling card. A demonstration of technical prowess and aesthetic pragmatism that showcases Serban’s ability to adopt popular styles in order to get a film made. Much like Tom Waller’s Soi Cowboy, it is proof that Serban can be a good cultural citizen and produce the type of film expected of young Romanian film directors. I suspect his next film will be not only better but also a good deal more personal. Florin Serban is clearly one to watch.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – RoGoPaG (1963)

FilmJuice have my review of the really rather wonderful 1960s Italian anthology film RoGoPaG. Comprising three short films directed by Roberto Rossellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Ugo Gregoretti, RoGoPaG is funny, satirical, gnomic and misogynistic in equal parts but the satire and humour of Passolini and Goretti more than make up for the pretentiousness and misogyny of Godard and Rossellini.

The film begins poorly with a well made but ultimately insipid morality tale by Roberto Rossellini in which an innocent and matronly airhostess (Rosanna Schiaffino) reinvents herself as a ‘whore’ in order to escape the attentions of a horny businessman. Schiaffino is undoubtedly charismatic but her charms simply cannot make up for the grinding misogyny of the film’s themes and plot.

Much like Pigsty and Hawks and Sparrows, Pasolini’s short film “La Ricotta” is a joyous avalanche of images and symbols that communicate mood far more effectively than they communicate ideas. The film revolves around an attempt to make a film about the Crucifixion that ends with one of the bit players dying on the cross as a result of eating too much cheese. Pasolini was evidently sent to prison for making the film and, to be honest, I can see why as the anger and hostility to organised religion are clear even though the exact nature of that anger is much harder to discern. The best short film in the collection is also the product of the least well-known director. Ugo Gregoretti’s “Il Polo Ruspante” is a well-observed and viciously delivered critique of Italian post-War consumerism in which a small family travel across the country while being fleeced by everyone they enter into contact with.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Miss Bala (2011)

Videovista have my review of Gerardo Naranjo’s Mexican crime movie Miss Bala.

The film tells of a young woman who attempts to sign up for a beauty pageant but winds up getting involved with a gang of Mexican drug traffickers. In the hands of a less ambitious director, this set-up might have resulted in one of those horrific fish-out-of-water films like Jonathan Demme’s Married to the Mob (1988) or Donald Petrie’s Miss Congeniality (2000). However, rather than play-up the comic elements of the culture clash, Naranjo uses them as the basis for a coming-of-age movie that skewers the values of contemporary Mexican society:

The idea that Mexico is nothing more than an oceanic darkness lurking beneath a thin strip of human pretence is present throughout the film’s cinematography. Miss Bala is an intensely dark and moody film and the only time that Naranjo allows us to escape the darkness is in the few sun-kissed moments when Laura is attempting to pass herself off as an innocent civilian. Compared to the shadows of Laura’s day-to-day existence, the floodlit wonderland of the beauty pageants, shopping trips and garden parties seems both grotesquely fake and beautifully alluring.

Miss Bala is an intensely clever and absolutely beautifully shot film that must class as one of the best crime movies to appear in the last couple of years.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – The Night Porter (1974)

FilmJuice have my review of Liliana Cavani’s arthouse nazisploitation flick The Night Porter.

The Night Porter tells of a former Nazi who is attempting to evade prosecution and disappear into the shadows of post-War Europe. However, this flight into shadow is arrested when the Nazi encounters a young Jewish woman who survived the War by serving as his personal sex slave. Concerned that this young woman might turn him in to the authorities, the Nazi sets out to murder her but the second the pair are face to face they tumble back into the same sadomasochistic patterns that had seen them through the War. At the time of its release, the film’s suggestion that some Jewish people might have enjoyed or benefited from their time in a concentration camp was taken as an almost impossibly transgressive thing to say as Europe was in the process of turning Holocaust survivors into a class of living saints. However, as time has passed and the moral certitudes of the Second World War have begun to evaporate, the political elements of The Night Porter are not as shocking as they were meaning that all that remains is a film is which a topless Jewish girl sings for a bunch of Nazis. As I pointed out in the review, these scenes are astonishing:

If cinematic history has been kind to The Night Porter it is chiefly due to the series of dream-like vignettes that Cavani scatters across the face of the narrative. Almost entirely dialogue-free, these vignettes chart Rampling’s transformation from a terrified child to a sexually empowered woman who fearlessly performs a topless cabaret before a group of leering Nazis. Shot with a combination of elegant eroticism and low-key surrealism, these scenes are not just amazing to look at, they are also a highly evolved exercise in visual storytelling. Indeed, the more we learn about the behaviour of the ‘little girl’ in the camp, the more we realise that there was a good deal more to the sexual relationship than a desire to survive.

The problem is that, once you move beyond the beauty of those dream-like scenes, the film begins to fall apart.

While there is no denying either the beauty of the power of these transgressive dreamscapes, it is frustrating to note that while the storytelling inside the vignettes is arresting, Cavani fails to root them in either the wider narrative or basic principles of human psychology. As with Max’s feelings of guilt and his desire to withdraw from the world and live ‘like a church mouse’, the true desires and motivations of the ‘little girl’ are never explored and so Cavani never actually engages with any of the Big Ideas that litter the foreground of the film.

With nothing to say and nearly two hours in which to say it, The Night Porter shambles along with neither point nor purpose. Lacking proper characterisation, the film struggles to engage our sympathies meaning that the descent into thriller territory towards the end of the film feels forced, fraudulent and entirely unexciting.

Released on Blu-ray with neither bells or whistles, The Night Porter does contain a few legitimately wonderful cinematic moments but aside from dancing Nazis, there is little here to explain why it is that this film has endured while other works of artful Nazisploitation such as Tinto Brass’ Salon Kitty have largely disappeared from view. Neither as transgressive as Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo or as politically engaged as Marcel Ophuls’ The Sorrow and The Pity, Cavani’s Night Porter sheds little light on the human truths lost in the moral rubble of the Second World War.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Hawks and Sparrows (1966)

FilmJuice have my review of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s postmodern/religious fable Hawks and Sparrows (a.k.a. Uccellacci e Uccellini).

Much like Pasolini’s Pigsty, Hawks and Sparrows comes across as an intensely weird and inaccessible piece of film making. Filled with portentous images as well as characters and narratives that make very little in the way of sense, both films are products of a time when the fundamental grammar of film was in the process of revision/ The works of Pier Paolo Pasolini feel far stranger than contemporary works such as Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad or Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura because Pasolini has proved to be a far less influential filmmaker than either Resnais or Antonioni. Contemporary audiences can easily decode L’Avventura because L’Avventura contains a number of techniques which, though radical at the time, have since entered the mainstream of film and TV. Conversely, the works of Pasolini contain ideas and techniques that are seldom used in contemporary art house film and so they seem as radically odd now as they did when they first appeared in the 1960s. As I put it in the actual review:

Once you accept that Hawks and Sparrows is little more than a cavalcade of images and references, the film becomes a good deal more enjoyable. Freed from the need to present an argument or tell a coherent story, Pasolini plays with the fabric of our dreams to present a succession of memorable cinematic images including dark-eyed girls with angelic wings, rampaging monks and an aging clown who is suddenly gripped by a lust for life in all its pulchritudinous glory. Hawks and Sparrows is neither particularly entertaining, nor particularly profound. However, despite the film’s decidedly experimental and disposable feel, it remains a timely reminder of quite how brave and innovative art house filmmaking can be when it decides to start rattling cages. At a time when every art house cinema seems filled with beautifully hollow dramas about beautifully hollow upper-class people, Masters of Cinema have allowed us the opportunity to (re) discover the work of a legitimately artistic and legitimately challenging filmmaker.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Pigsty (1969)

FilmJuice have my review of the recent Masters of Cinema release of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s uncanny masterpiece Pigsty.

Comprising two narrative strands, the film explores the way in which cultural elites undermine dissenting opinions by subsuming traditional vocabularies of dissent. In one strand, a young man wanders wordlessly around a volcanic landscape until he comes across a dead body which he promptly consumes. This act of consumption classifies the young man as an outcast and this outcast status allows him to acquire a following that eventually forces the local authorities to intervene. When the young man is finally given the opportunity to express himself in words, all he has to say for himself is:

I killed my father, I have eaten human flesh, and I quiver with joy.

The film’s second strand is set in the 1960s where another young man finds himself crushed between the capitalistic radicalism of his father and the logorrheic gibberrish of his leftist fiancee.  Denied the means with which to express himself as an individual, the boy retreats into a comatose state before finding some form of fulfillment in the act of fucking a pig.

Pigsty is an attempt to address the relationship between the generations and how difficult it can be for the young to express themselves when they are not the ones in control of society. Particularly striking is the way that Pasolini presents post-War German prosperity as little more than a repackaged version of the pre-War economic boom engineered by the Nazi government of the 1930s. With all of culture safely commoditised and filed away, what are today’s rebels to do but seek sanctuary in the most heinous acts imaginable? Windy, difficult and decidedly ‘of its time’ Pigsty remains a ceaseless beautiful and thought-provoking film by one of the great provocateurs and stylists of the European art house tradition.

The idea that cultural elites pull the ladder up behind them to ensure that nobody can rebel against them in the same way that they rebelled against previous generations will be familiar to those of you who have read Thomas Frank’s wonderful essay “Why Johnny Can’t Dissent”.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – The Woman in the Fifth (2011)

VideoVista have my review of Pawel Pawlikovski’s The Woman in the Fifth. Based on a novel by Douglas Kennedy, the film is a meditation on the costs and benefits of artistic creativity. Grounded firmly in the old trope of a sensitive and broken man who is only saved by the love of a good woman, the film presents its central character with a choice between a woman who makes him creative but also insane and a woman who makes him happy but only at the expense of his capacity to write.

I have two main problems with this film. The first is that the vision of creativity the film proposes is based entirely upon an almost ludicrously self-indulgent and melodramatic vision of the creative process. Many gifted artists produce great work without lapsing into either madness, violence or depression. Frankly, seeing these psychological problems as an inevitable by-product of the creative process is nothing more than palliative bullshit put about by people who really need to start taking responsibility for their own mental health. Being an artist does not make it okay for you to be a complete prick.  The second problem is that while Pawlikovski’s direction is entirely watchable, it is also desperately boring. Seriously… what is going on in art house filmmaking? when did it all become so fucking boring?

We are currently undergoing the greatest economic and social crisis since the Great Depression and the political decisions made today will shape the future of entire continents for generations to come. Given that the world is now continuously shifting beneath our feet and that our democratic institutions are positively crying out for an intelligent electorate that can understand and engage with the issues confronting them, do we really need another film about a novelist who is struggling with writer’s block? Do we really need another French film in which a bunch of listless Parisians tumble in and out of bed with one another? Do we really need another film in which a terminally passive and unattractive male protagonist somehow finds himself at the centre of a vortex of redemptive totty? The answer to all of these questions is a resounding ‘No!’

As I said in my piece about this year’s Cannes film festival, European art house cinema is rapidly becoming stale. A decaying boy’s club dominated by a shrinking clade of middle-aged white guys, both its ideas and its language are in desperate need of renewal and The Woman in the Fifth is yet further proof of the scene’s increasing creative sterility. Did we need another film about a novelist with writer’s block? FUCK NO! Nor do we need another polite little film directed by a middle-aged European white guy. Pawel Pawlikovski is not a bad director by any stretch of the imagination but he is a director who is part of the problem. Pawlikovski’s early works including Dostoevsky’s Travels and Tripping with Zhirinovsky were deeply personal reflections of a youth lived under Communist rule. However, as Pawlikovski freely admits in the Blu-ray’s extras, he has decided to set aside the things that made him unique as a director in order to churn out the same old derivative francophilic shit as every other art house director. Clearly… this shit needs to stop.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Total Recall (1990)

FilmJuice have my review of Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall. The review is of the freshly released and genuinely fantastic Blu-ray release of the film and it ties in quite nicely with this recent piece I also wrote for FilmJuice about the films of Paul Verhoeven.

The first thing that struck me about this film was how violent and sexually explicit it is by the standards of contemporary big budget filmmaking. Indeed, the likes of Michael Bay will frequently include women draped decoratively across motorbikes or ascending stairs but the actual sexual content of their films is practically non-existent. The reason for this is two-fold: A) These big budget films have absolutely immense budgets and in order to maximise their profitability, they need to be accessible to as wide an audience as possible. Hence the death of the ’18’ rated action film that dominated much of my childhood. B) The target demographic for most contemporary action films is teenaged boys whose sexual experience is usually limited to ogling and giggling… so whenever Bay has an actress bend over but not actually have sex with anyone, he is attempting to position his film in the sexual universe of horny teenaged boys. Compared to contemporary action films, Total Recall comes across as not only quite explicit but also quite surprisingly adult… particularly strange is the weird sexual energy that fizzes between the characters of Schwarzenegger and Stone as they beat each other up and pretend to be married:

One particularly wonderful element of the film is the relationship between Schwarzenegger’s violently bulging everyman and Sharon Stone’s pouting secret agent. Indeed, Stone plays the roll of a woman who is either a loving wife to Schwarzenegger or deep-cover operative assigned to keep him under surveillance lest his secret identity as a Martian freedom fighter begin to reassert itself. Rather than pitting these two personae against each other and musing as to which is the ‘real’ one, Verhoeven simply runs them together meaning that Stone’s character comes across as a lovingly traitorous wife who wants to kill her husband and have sex with him, quite possibly at the same time. Victims of actual domestic abuse might squirm as Schwarzenegger and Stone flit between flirting and kicking each other across the room but Verhoeven fully embraces the tension and presents it almost as a form of sadomasochistic play. Tellingly, when Schwarzenegger decides that he can no longer trust his wife, Stone’s character makes one last attempt to win him over by offering to let him tie her up. Verhoeven’s bizarre sexualisation of domestic abuse is both intensely unsettling and utterly compelling.

Total Recall is an excellent film and this Blu-ray edition does it proud.  Definitely worth revisiting and re-appraising.