Tag / film criticism

by Jonathan M

Some Thoughts On… Cell 211 (2009)

Based on a novel by Francisco Pérez Gandul, Daniel Monzon’s prison drama Celda 211 hits the ground running.  Without wasting a single shot or line of dialogue, Monzon introduces us to the film’s setting and many of its principle characters: Juan (Alberto Ammann) is the new guard at a prison where violent offenders are kept separated from the general population. Malamadre (Luis Tosar) is one of these violent offenders, a violent offender who orchestrates a riot in order to bring attention to the failures of the current prison regime.  As alarms sound and roofs collapse, Juan finds himself abandoned in an empty cell by his new colleagues.  Aware that the rioting inmates will kill him if they find out that he is a guard, Juan decides to pass himself off as a newly arrived prisoner.

Boasting some of the most elegantly simple and unadorned storytelling I have ever seen, Cell 211 starts by building up an incredible amount of tension in very little time. Not only does Juan have to convince Malamadre’s gang that he is a prisoner, he also has to guide Malamadre’s actions so as to both minimise bloodshed and maximise his own chances of getting out alive. While tensions build inside the prison, they also begin to build outside as prison administrators find themselves trapped between the desire to cover up Juan’s capture and the desire to get him out safely. In what slowly emerges as one of the film’s recurring visual motifs, black-clad SWAT teams swarm over roof-tops and stand poised to storm the building before a compromise is reached and mass slaughter is averted.

Half an hour into this film, I was convinced that I was seeing a work of real vision. Aside from building tension like a master, Monzon also reveals himself to be a dab hand at actor wrangling as Juan emerges as an intriguing character with an intense relationship with both his wife and the charismatic sociopath Malamadre. However, having introduced us to all of these fascinating balls and thrown them gracefully up into the air, Monzon promptly forgets how to juggle and they all come crashing down on the ground.  Indeed, the first act complete, Cell 211 loses focus horribly as plot lines unravel in all directions, spilling tension as they go. Needless to say, my heart sank.

Then Monzon begins the process all over again as something dreadful happens on the outside and Juan decides to throw his lot in with the prisoners.  Suddenly aware both that Juan may not be in his right mind and that he might be a guard, Malamadre finds himself trapped between his loyalty to Juan, his convict’s hatred of guards and his suspicion that Juan is right when he says that all this is going to end badly.  Again, Monzon does a brilliant job of stoking up the tension and again, he allows it all to slip away as the film resolves in an ugly and unsatisfying mess.

The problem is that, while Monzon knows how to build tension, his commitment to the film’s characters is such that he is unwilling to simplify their arcs for the sake of the over-arching narrative.  As a result, tension builds and builds until denouement at which point the film switches to a melodramatic register in which characters respond in great depth to everything that has just happened and, like a river flowing into a vast set of swamps, all urgency is lost forever in the murky heat of soap-operatic swampland.  Of course, this is not to say that the melodrama is boring to watch… far from it.  Luis Tosar’s Malamadre is a wonderful combination of outer toughness and inner softness mediated by a keen mind.  Similarly, Alberto Ammann does a great job of presenting a character so skilled at thinking on his feet that he cannot stop plotting even when his world starts to come apart. With so many conflicting agendas and competing factions at work, Cell 211 also works as a commentary upon the Spanish prison system and public attitudes to prisoners.  However, while there is no denying that this film is smart and possesses some brilliant moments of tension and character-based drama, I cannot help but feel that co-writers Daniel Monzon and Jorge Guerricaechevarria failed to make the sorts of tough decisions you need to make in order to adapt a novel for the screen. I suspect that Cell 211’s changes of pace and register work quite nicely in a novelistic context as the increased time of consumption means that characters have more space to bloom and changes in register are less sudden and jarring.  However, reduced to a 113 minute running time, Cell 211 needed to be either a character-based melodrama or a thriller set in a prison as, while Monzon handles both elements with equal panache, his attempts to force the two together are distracting to say the least.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Night and Fog (1955)

Videovista have my review of Alain Resnais’ sublime holocaust documentary Nuit et Brouillard.

Reminiscent in both its imagery and intent to Billy Wilder’s post-War propaganda film Death Mills (1945), Night and Fog is only 32-minutes long but each and every one of those 32 minutes packs a hefty punch.  Not content with directly addressing the somewhat thorny issue of France’s involvement in the deportation of Jews, Resnais attempts to universalise the cultural significance of the Holocaust in a number of ways.  Firstly, (like many films) he suggests that Jewish people do not in any sense own the Holocaust and that the stain of the atrocity marks each and every one of us.  Secondly, (somewhat more controversially) he suggests that many of the people inside the camps were far from innocent victims:

Between this and his continued insistence upon ‘denunciations’ and ‘thievery’, Resnais suggests that concentration camp inmates were far from blameless in the construction of some of the worst living conditions imaginable to man. While the film in no way lets the Nazis off the hook, it does suggest that the capacity for inhuman violence is present in all of us and that all the Nazis really did was create an environment in which man’s inhumanity to man could express itself fully. So detailed is Resnais’ accounting of social dynamics that one could almost watch Night And Fog as a sort of time and motion study. Given the film’s almost academic tone, the horrific imagery serves as a means of grounding the film and of reminding us what it is that we are discussing.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, this review touches on many of the same issues as my recent review of Gilles Paquet-Brenner’s disappointing Sarah’s Key (2010), which is out this weekend.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – 5150 Elm’s Way (2009)

Videovista have my review of Eric Tessier’s slightly disappointing 5150, Rue des Ormes.

Based on a novel by the Canadian Horror writer Daniel Grou, 5150 tells the story of a young man who finds himself caught up in the internal struggles of a family dominated by a father who has decided to act as God’s instrument and in order to punish the unrighteous.  As a series of interlocking character studies, the film works quite nicely and boasts some creepy ideas and some nice performances but step back from the melodrama of zealots interacting with psychos and you have a film that really struggles to find a point:

Lacking a clear focus or the sort of directorial discipline that might allow the visuals to cut a swathe through a dense thicket of plotlines, 5150 Elm’s Way comes very close to being genuinely interesting only to fall apart in the final stretch. Lacking both the clarity required of genuine insight and the technical flair that’s required to be genuinely thrilling, this Canadian thriller is more like a game of Hungry Hungry Hippos than it is a game of chess.

That chess comparison is there for a reason by the way… it’s not just terrible writing and an excuse to mention Hungry Hungry Hippos.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Super 8 (2011)

FilmJuice have my review of J.J. Abrams’ Super 8.

The film is intended as an homage to the sorts of family action adventure movies that Spielberg used to dominate the cinematic landscape in the 1980s.  Think ET and Goonies. As I explain in the review, the film adopts the traditional Hollywood template of having two distinct narratives that interweave and feed off of each other.  Traditionally, in these types of films, one narrative is very mundane and all about kids growing up, while the other is more fantastical. These two plot lines then intersect in such a way that the fantastical elements of the film help the kids to confront issues in their everyday life such as divorce, the death of a parent or simply growing up.  Knowing a good template when he sees one, Abrams uses the same trick in Super 8 but, because this is a J.J. Abrams film, he tries to add a postmodern flourish to the film by making it all about a bunch of kids running away from aliens whilst trying to make a film:

Unfortunately, while all of these themes and narratives work superbly on their own, they never quite manage to link up and feed into each other meaning that Super 8 is never more than the sum of its parts. The failure of the film’s various subplots to connect with each other is particularly noticeable in the film’s conclusion when what should have been a moment of heart-rending reconciliation falls completely flat because all of the journeys undertaken by the characters were undertaken alone.

Though unlikely to prove as memorable as any of the films from the 80s genre boom, Super 8 is nonetheless an entertaining soufflet of a film that contains some real spectacle and some real heart.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Pigs & Battleships (1961)

Videovista have my review of Shohei Imamura’s fifth film Pigs & Battleships.

Released as part of Eureka’s Masters of Cinema series, Pigs & Battleships comes with Imamura’s first film Stolden Desire as an added extra.  As I said in my review of the earlier film, despite the fact that Pigs & Battleships is the ‘main feature’ on the disc, Stolen Desire is probably a better film to start with at it serves as a lovely introduction to some of Imamura’s concerns and techniques.  In particular, both films share a similarly frantic and grubby atmosphere of desperate people who are trapped between idealism and realism and are forever making the wrong decisions:

Pigs & Battleships is a film of moments and atmospheres rather than plots and characters. Its characters, although complex and beautifully acted, are seldom allowed much room to breathe in a film that is positively teeming with plot. In fact, this film has so much plot that it can, at times, be difficult to follow. Better then to take a step back from faces and events and focus instead on Imamura’s depiction of Japanese society as a vast ocean that teems with life but whose ceaseless churn can kill in a second. Aside from its beautifully frenzied atmosphere, Pigs & Battleships is littered with lovely cinematic moments and camera movements so beautiful that they’ll melt your face.

On a side note: it has come to my attention that Eureka have got into something of a barney with the book publisher Phaidon over Phaidon’s series of books about directors entitled ‘The Masters of Cinema’. As Eureka point out on their website, their DVD and Blu-ray label pre-dates Phaidon’s book series by a number of years and given how well-known and well-respected Eureka’s MOC label is among European cinephiles, Phaidon’s decision to use the same name for their series of books can only cause confusion.  Eureka have said that they’d be willing to license the name but Phaidon are insisting that the names do not cause confusion. Which is bollocks obviously. If I walked into a bookshop and saw a series of books about famous directors entitled ‘The Criterion Collection’ I would naturally think that it was affiliated with the American DVD label.

What makes this sordid story even more bizarre is the fact that Phaidon are currently the owners of the venerable French film magazine Les Cahiers du Cinema and their Masters of Cinema books come with Cahiers branding on them.  While Cahiers has not been a decent magazine for a number of years now, the name Cahiers du Cinema still means something.  In fact, it means quite a bit more to European cinephilia than Masters of Cinema so why are Phaidon trading on someone else’s brand when they have an even more valuable brand of their own that they could trade on? A series of books released under the Cahiers du Cinema brand would be a great idea but instead, Phaidon have decided to borrow someone else’s name.  Unfortunate.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Stolen Desire (1958)

Videovista have my review of Shohei Imamura’s first film Stolen Desire.

Given that Imamura is perhaps best known for his later films including the Cannes-winning The Ballad of Narayama (1983) and The Eel (1997) it is perhaps unsurprising that this seldom-seen remake of Ozu’s A Story of Floating Weeds (1934) should have been overlooked. However, released by Eureka alongside his fifth film Pigs & Battleships (1961) as part of their Masters of Cinema series, Stolen Desire actually constitutes a fascinating introduction to some of Imamura’s methods and concerns, it also gives us some insight into Imamura’s attitude towards his former master Yasujiro Ozu:

Stolen Desire is a film that is full of rage not only at the old guard who refuse to let go of the past but also at the young turks who doff their caps and pay their dues like good little citizens. Stolen Desire is the film of a young man who is angry with not just his generation and his society, but also with himself. The question is: if Kunida is Imamura, does that mean that Yamamura is Ozu?

When I say that this film was re-released alongside Pigs & Battleships I mean it quite literally as it comes as a DVD extra when you buy the film! Bargain!

by Jonathan M

Tree of Life (2011) – Cheese is Bad for You

Tree of Life begins with both a question and a tentative answer.  The question comes from the Book of Job:

Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation…while the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?

The context of this line is slightly peculiar but, for the moment, we can interpret it as being existential in nature: It is a demand for explanation. Where were you? Where am I? Who am I? Teasingly, Malick provides an initial answer in the form of a voice-over.  There are, we are told, two paths in life: a path of Grace and a path of Nature. The path of Grace, the voice-over explains, is fearless, rewarding and free from self-doubt and self-awareness.  It is a path that one walks seemingly without being aware that one is walking a path. Tellingly, Malick neither tightens his question nor the concept of Grace that he offers as a potential solution.  Nor does he ever bother to explain what the path of Nature might entail. One way of reading this hand-waving is by assuming that Malick is challenging his audience: What is Grace? What is Nature? How do you walk these paths? How does walking these paths answer the fundamental existential questions of being? All will be revealed in the film that follows. However, I will argue that Malick’s evasiveness is the entire point of the film. In life, answers are fleeting and all attempts to seek clear answers are doomed to end merely in more questions. Tree of Life suggests that no matter which type of cheese (be it ‘happiness’, ‘enlightenment’, ‘Grace’ or ‘union with the Godhead’) we seek, life will always be a maze.

Continue reading →

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Arirang (2011)

The Bright Lights Film Journal have my piece on KIM Ki-duk’s Arirang, winner of the Un Certain Regard prize at this year’s Cannes film festival.

Back in the late 90s and early 00s, KIM was one of Korean cinema’s golden boys.  Hugely productive and critically acclaimed the world over, he was held up as an example by a generation of young Korean filmmakers busy taking their first steps on the international stage.  Then, in 2008, KIM suddenly stopped working and dropped out of sight.  Arirang is an autobiographical documentary made by KIM in an effort to work out why it is that he cannot make films.  Now before you dismiss this as one of those self-indulgent ‘I’m writing a song about not being able to write a song!’ stunts, you should know that Arirang is not a straight film.  In fact, it ends with an outright lie. This suggests that KIM knows that many of his ‘reasons’ for not working are fictitious and so Arirang can be seen as being about a man intent upon confronting the lies that plague his life:

Much like the suggestion that he might be acting, the use of a song as generically miserable as “Arirang” serves to question the authenticity of Kim’s self-diagnosis. “Arirang” can be sung at any time because while it articulates, it does not deconstruct. Its diagnosis is so general that it applies to all ills, and the same might well be said of Kim’s diagnoses of his own miseries. Is he really unable to work because two assistants failed to follow his example? Or because he cannot come to terms with the fact that death may well be the end of life? These seem less like insightful diagnoses than convenient tragedies that can be draped across Kim’s problems in order to allow him to vocalise his misery without actually analysing it — convenient fictions that smell of untruth.

Arirang is a delicate, moving and intensely personal film about grief, depression and creative block.  However, while it may be breathtakingly honest, I wouldn’t believe a word of it.

by Jonathan M

Some Thoughts On… The Big Picture (2010)

Before I share my thoughts on L’Homme Qui Voulait Vivre Sa Vie, I feel under the obligation to point and laugh at the film’s British trailer. Watching the trailer, one could be forgiven for thinking that this is yet another film in the great art house/indie tradition of stories about middle-class French people who are a bit unhappy until they encounter a life-changing event that forces them to question who they are and what they do. See Romain Duris cry!  See Catherine Deneuve pout with disapproval!  See a wealthy French man fleeing responsibility in search of his true self.  Oh the terrible pathos! Mais ou est mon Cesar? While it is fair to say that this narrative is present in Eric Lartigau’s The Big Picture, the trailer completely fails to convey the fact that this bog-standard existential narrative is presented in the form of a thriller… and a deliciously odd one at that.

Paul Exben (Romain Duris) is a wealthy and successful lawyer living in the suburbs.  His wife Sarah (Marina Fois) is beautiful and his kids are charming.  His professional practice is thriving and his partner (Catherine Deneuve) has just announced that she is dying and that she is intending to sign the practice entirely over to him.  Exben has everything he needs to make him happy and yet he is miserable and he is miserable because his life is a lie.  He never wanted to become a lawyer, he never wanted to marry his wife and he never wanted to settle down in the suburbs and have kids.  He wanted to be a photographer and all the high-priced gadgets and art books in the world are not going to turn him into one.  Paul is living a lie and he hates himself for it.

Painfully aware of the deep vein of misery lurking beneath her husband’s outward shows of manic happiness, Sarah knows that Paul hates himself and so she has started an affair with a local man who did decide to pursue the dream of becoming a professional photographer.  Aware that something is wrong at home, Paul begins sniping at his wife until she leaves with the kids.  Playing a hunch, Paul visits his neighbour and winds up getting into a struggle that leaves the man dead.  Refusing to panic, Paul starts to draw up plans that will allow him to get away not only with murder but also with living the life of another person.

Lartigau treats this first act as a straightforward thriller. Full of sneaking and plotting, the scenes pop with tension as Duris uses a horrific accident as a springboard to construct a new life.  Having successfully stolen his neighbour’s identity and faked his own death, Duris flees to Hungary where he starts to build a career as a professional photographer. Once the action is transferred to Hungary, The Big Picture shifts from Highsmithian thriller to traditional art house as Duris attempts to find himself amidst the shipyards and mountain views of Eastern Europe.  Freed from the burden of his old li(f)e, Exben finds himself labouring under a somewhat different one.

As a Parisian lawyer, Exben fooled himself into thinking that he had no choice but to live the life he had. Terrified by the possibility of failure, Exben buried his dreams beneath a veneer of self-confident professionalism where they rotted into a form of self-loathing so intense that it destroyed his marriage and claimed the life of a neighbour.  As a French photographer in Hungary, Exben may well be living under an assumed identity but his real fear is that people will discover that the gifted photographer really is nothing more than a bluffer.  A chancer who bullshitted his way in the door and then used the opportunity to carve out a slice of fame and fortune. Far from being unique to Exben, these are the sorts of lies that fuel the anxieties of millions of people every day: Do we really love our partners or did we just settle? Are we really happy in our jobs? Are we deluding ourselves into thinking we can make it? When will they realise that we don’t really know what we are doing?  It is not the unique character of these lies that make The Big Picture a memorable film but rather the different ways in which Lartigau forces Exben to confront them.

When Exben first realises that he is living a lie, he reacts to a catastrophic event with astonishing calm and competence.  Masking his inner turmoil from his wife, he plans his escape and swings into action: problem solved. His escape made, he then finds himself on the receiving end of a problem that demands an entirely different approach.  While Exben can escape his first lie by becoming an action hero, his second lie cannot be solved in so straightforward a manner.  Indeed, in order to overcome the lie that he is just not good enough to work as a professional photographer, Exben has to resort to emotional exile and the slow but sure payment of dues.  As the months tick past, he slowly builds a new life for himself, a life that not only allows him to work as a professional photographer but also to look at himself in the mirror and know that he is a talented artist.

What I adore about The Big Picture is the fact that, while it shows a man overcoming self-delusion in two completely different ways, it also makes the point that self-delusion is not something that can ultimately be solved.  Not by sneaking around and not by exile and therapeutic introspection.  Indeed, having created a new life for himself as a photographer and escaped two toxic lies, Exben finds himself having to escape from a third lie, that of the assumed identity.  Again, the film shifts register.  This time from introspective art house drama to mad psychotropic Horror film.

The Big Picture’s final act finds Exben alone on an oil tanker on his way to South America.  Having fled two different li(v)es, he now finds himself poised to rebuild again.  However, one night he is locked in his room by the crew. Upon sneaking out and grabbing his camera, Exben discovers the crew about to chuck a pair of stowaways overboard in the middle of the ocean.  After snapping a few shots and deciding to challenge the captain, Exben is chucked overboard too.

The film ends with Exben having successfully faked his own death twice. No longer either a Parisian lawyer or a Parisian photographer working in Hungary, he looks across at his fellow dumpee and smiles the first unself-conscious smile of the film.  He is free… he has escaped three lives and three lies and worked his way through three separate genres… but for how long is he free?  Are lies really the sorts of thing that can be escaped or are they instead the things that make up our lives?  Exben has had more than his fair share of lives and both of them have been good ones.  Why does he think that the next one will be any better?

Given its conspicuous lack of a clear ‘take home’ message and its bewildering shifts in tone, it would have been easy for The Big Picture to come across as a muddle and a mess. While Lartigau’s direction is creditable and the film’s photography is impressive, what really holds the film together is Romain Duris’ performance.  Duris, let it be said, is not a handsome man.  He is a short man with spindly legs, a lantern jaw and hair that looks like matted pubes.  As a lawyer, he seems too young and insouciant.  As a photographer he seems overly steely and serious.  However, it is precisely because of these weird inconsistencies and tensions that Duris is perfect in this role.  As with his international breakthrough performance in Jacques Audiard’s The Beat With My Heart Skipped (2005), Duris plays a man who is at war with himself.  In both films, Duris’ character is trapped between a real life and a dream life and, in both films, there is the distinct possibility that he fits into neither.  The Big Picture raises the question that there is no single path that we ought to be walking. Lives are not things that we deny ourselves but things that we live.  Yes, life demands that we lie but so what? Duris’ brittle fragility and manic excesses make him the perfect choice for the role of a man who peels back lie after lie after lie only to realise that, deep down, there is nothing there.  Humans, it turns out, are lies all the way down.

by Jonathan M

Some Thoughts On… Beginners (2010)

Let me begin by saying that I went in to Beginners with an open heart. Mike Mills’ semi-autobiographical story of a man groping towards a sense of identity and a reliable source of happiness in the wake of parental death is pretty much where I have been living for the last twelve months. However, rather than seeing elements of my own experience in Mills’ gently affecting comedy-drama, I was struck only by the grinding mediocrity of his insights, the laziness of his exposition and the shameful over-reliance on art house narrative techniques to pad out a story that involves far too much hand-waving and not nearly enough heart-tugging or head-scratching.

Writer/director Mike Mills projects himself onto Oliver (Ewan McGregor), a professional illustrator who is struggling to put his life back together after the death of first his mother and then his father.

As Oliver cleans out his father’s house, he comes across a personal ad drawn up by his dad in the wake of his mother’s death, a personal ad written in hope of attracting some younger male lovers. Indeed, though Oliver’s parents Hal (Christopher Plummer) and Georgia (Mary Page Keller) were married for decades without a hint of either separation or divorce, Hal was actually gay. His wife buried, Hal comes out of the closet aged seventy-three and spends three years living the sort of life that he should have been living all along.  A life filled with sex, socialising, clubbing and political activism.

Oliver’s experiences nursing his father through grief, self-realisation and terminal illness are laid bare in a narrative that is inter-cut with scenes from Oliver’s present, a present in which he has embarked upon a relationship with a French actress named Anna (Melanie Laurent). By interweaving elements from Oliver’s past and his present, the film slowly points out the similarities between Oliver’s life and that of his father:

Hal grew up at a time when being gay was treated as both a mental illness and a moral failing. In the hope of living something approaching a ‘normal’ life, Hal decided to marry a woman he could not love in the hope that happiness might come to him by osmosis.  We later see Hal repeating this pattern with his younger boyfriend Andy (Goran Visnjic), whose desire to sleep with other men clearly hurts the naturally monogamous Hal. Oliver, by contrast finds himself unwilling to make any concessions to the women he dates.  Easily trapped in love’s initial dizzying updraft, Oliver soon finds himself getting bored and restless with his relationships. Incapable of understanding why he should tolerate anything other than perfect happiness, Oliver sinks his relationships and winds up alone again and again. Beginners is essentially the story of Oliver’s realisation that happiness and love are born of compromise and realism rather than rare passion and emotional perfectionism. Neither of Hal’s relationships were perfect and yet he lived a happy life.  Oliver is unwilling to put up with anything short of absolute happiness and is unwilling to compromise or work at being happy and so he winds up being far more miserable and alone than a man who was gay in the 1950s.  In other words, Oliver is as spoiled and narcissistic as he is self-involved.  This is ultimately why the film fails to convince.

Beginners’ root problem is the fact that it really does not have very much to say.  The fact that Oliver is utterly self-involved is obvious in almost every beat of the film.  We can see it in the fact that the film’s most insightful comments emerge during Oliver’s one-sided conversations with his dog, we can see it in the fact that he initially falls for Anna because she literally cannot speak and we see it in the fact that Hal’s story is used largely as a prop for Oliver’s generic brand of soul-searching. Indeed, it turns out that when a gay man spends fifty years living a lie only to snatch a few years of happiness in the shadow of terminal cancer, it really is all about the straight guy. By choosing to focus not upon Hal’s story but upon what Oliver learns from Hal’s story, Beginners reduces the social history of an entire generation of gay men to the status of props in the on-going indulgence of a generation of white, middle-class straight people whose dull and shallow problems already form the backbone of the indie canon. Worse still is the fact that, despite plundering the lives of a generation of gay men, Mills still struggles to come up with anything to say.  Oliver begins the film as a sad, self-involved narcissist and he ends the film as a sad, self-involved narcissist without budging an inch or generating a single spark of insight in the process.

Aside from the dubious treatment of homosexuality and the general lack of insight into the human condition, what most annoys about Beginners are its rare flashes of complexity. For example, Mills occasionally transports us beyond the two interweaving narratives to Oliver’s relationship with his mother. Intriguingly, despite Hal and Georgia’s marriage coming at Georgia’s insistence, Georgia is presented as the victim of Hal’s dishonesty.  Witty, wise and spunky in the best traditions of mid-century femininity, Georgia is endless lovely and this loveliness filters through into Oliver’s present in a decidedly Oedipal way. Indeed, while the foreground of the film suggests that Oliver’s unhappiness may be due to his similarity to his father, the film’s background subtly hints that Oliver’s failure to find love may be due to a lingering and yet intense sexual longing for his own mother. We see this in the way that Oliver’s seduction of Anna allows him to replay moments shared with his mother and we see it in the fact that Oliver meets Anna at a costume party where he is dressed as Sigmund Freud. The truth of Oliver’s emotional dysfunction is further hinted at in the fact that, when Oliver first meets Anna, she is dressed as a man.  Sadly, while Beginners may hint at some real emotional complexity, the hints are never connected to anything in the film’s foreground and so remain nothing more than free-floating suggestions that could just as easily be the product of a starving critical brain in desperate search of insight.

Mills’ potential as a writer/director is also evident in his willingness to play tricks with the genre.  For example, one of the most popular genre templates for romantic comedies is the story of a depressed man who learns to love again thanks to the life-changing ministrations of a quirky female love interest whose vivacity cuts straight through his emotional exile.  These quirky female love interests are generally known as Manic Pixie Dream Girls. Initially, Beginners suggests that Anna may well be such a dream girl but, as the film progresses, it rapidly becomes clear that Anna is nothing of the sort.  In fact, she is just as moody and self-involved as Oliver. In fact, if Beginners can be said to possess a Manic Pixie then the Manic Pixie in question is Andy, Hal’s Manic Pixie Dream Boy. However, while it is undeniably good news that American film has progressed to the point where it can happily transform heterosexual clichés into homosexual ones, it is frustrating to note that none of Wills’ genre-bending exertions serve any wider purpose.

Aside from being frustrating and stupid, Beginners is also a crushingly boring film.  Billed as a comedy-drama, Beginners contains few laughs and little drama. What drama it does have is stretched to breaking point by the sort of long, drawn-out silences and palate-cleansing interludes that one would normally associate with art house film. Recent months have seen numerous critics rallying to the cause of cinematic boredom as a response to the on-rushing tide of cinematic spectacle that is the Hollywood blockbuster. Critics routinely cite the work of directors such as Yasujiro Ozu, Kelly Reichardt and Andrei Tarkovsky as proof that you can make beautiful films which, because of their lack of plot, are boring. However, while I agree that slow-paced films in which nothing happens can be superb, I do feel the need to point out that none of Ozu, Reichardt or Tarkovsky’s films are actually boring, they simply rely upon a suite of visual and atmospheric storytelling techniques that require lengthy pauses to allow the audience to assimilate what they have seen.  Beginners is a boring film, not because it contains numerous pauses, but because it lacks the sort of visual, atmospheric and emotional complexity that requires careful assimilation and reflection. While Tarkovsky’s pauses allow us to realise the depth of his thinking, Wills’ pauses reveal only a lack of insight and a series of wasted opportunities.