The Deep Blue Sea

This is a film adaptation by Terence Davies of Terence Rattigan's well known play. Davies has removed some scenes and added others that he wrote himself.

It is my opinion that Davies is Britain's best film-maker and I approached this film wanting it to be good and wanting it to succeed. I am familiar with the play, having seen it on stage, and having seen the 1994 television production directed by Karel Reisz, with Penelope Wilton, Colin Firth and Ian Holm. That production followed very closely the text of the play, even to the point of using titles to introduce the three acts.

The play is set in the fifties; Davies' formative years, and the period with which he is most comfortable. Davies has used images that are dark and sepia-coloured. Also the image is soft, as it might be in an 'old master'. Some scenes take place in a pool of light in the centre of the frame, surrounded by blackness; other scenes darken towards the edges and corners of the frame.

i have a high regard for Terence Rattigan but I don't think that his texts are sacred and should not be changed; nevertheless it takes some courage to write dialogue to put next to Rattigan's. In this some critics have said that Davies has been successful. I don't think that it is appropriate to compare the film and the play simply to criticise the film for being different. Nevertheless, it is interesting to see what changes Davies has made.

The play starts when the main character, Hester, has just attempted suicide by unlit gas fire. Davies has written scenes painting in her back story, particularly showing her relationship with her mother-in-law. Hester is married to a titled judge, Sir William Collyer, and has left him to live in a modest flat with the man she has fallen in love with, Freddie Page, a raffish fighter pilot who's heydays were the war years and who is now directionless and going to seed. Page was played by Kenneth More in the first production of the play and by Colin Firth in the 1994 TV production. Here Sir William is played by Simon Russell Beale, Freddie by Tom Hiddleston and Hester by Rachel Weisz.

The actors are all good in their parts, although I think that Simon Russell Beale makes the strongest contribution. The casting is slightly more variable. Rachel Weisz is very good but is maybe too beautiful for the part. She is also the least fifties-looking thing in the film. I have come to admire Tom Hiddleston for the work he has done for Joanna Hogg, particularly in Archipelago, but here he doesn't seem so appealing or raffish, with his very short hair, tight buttoned cardigans and bony features. Interestingly, Davies is quoted as saying he cast Hiddleston because he is good at throwing himself onto sofas. Simon Russell Beale is excellent, although maybe a little old for Hester. When he says he occasionally plays tennis I found it hard to imagine.

The neighbours who found Hester unconscious have been removed (we hear only their voices) and the part of the doctor who treats Hester has been reduced. I preferred his sagacity, comments and advice to Hester, which have been removed, to the mother-in-law's spitefulness, which has been added.

Davies is very musical and music is important to him. Here, apart from the popular songs, he has used Barber's violin concerto, played by Hilary Hahn, which is wonderful. I was disturbed as people hurried from the cinema during the credits while this music was playing.

After The House Of Mirth this film is a return to the look and feel of Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes, with the mean brick tenement where Hester and Freddie live, with a sepia-coloured look, and with communal singing in pubs. There is a wonderful flashback to a wartime scene of people singing as they bed down in an Underground station - a flashback to Hester's memories. There is also a wonderful scene of the type we look forward to in Davies's films - a shot down from the ceiling of slowly rotating entwined bodies on a bed, initially naked and then slightly clothed, sketching in time passing in the relationship. The film finishes with a marvelous scene when Hester, alone, goes to her gas fire and lights it and, in close-up, the flames fill the frame, telling us that Hester has decided to live.

I don't think the added dialogue is entirely successful, being a little clunky and with a slight whiff of cliché, and I'm not sure that the added scenes are better than the removed ones. But, then, Davies is a film-maker, not a play-write, so what were we to expect?

All of Davies' initial films (except The Neon Bible) were autobiographical, and there was a time when I was worried that when that vein dried up he would have nowhere to go. Then he made The House of Mirth and I stopped worrying. That film saw him address new challenges and it was a triumph, forcing Davies' growth as a film maker yet being rich with evidence of his particular gift.

The Deep Blue Sea is a return to previous form and a retrenchment. It is a moving, interesting and satisfying film but I thought that the gloominess of the images was pushed a little too far, maybe to the point of affectation and, during the first half-hour of the film, the softness of the image was causing me to wonder whether the projectionist was asleep at the wheel, or whether it was deliberate. I'm still not sure. I found it frustrating no to be able to find anywhere in the image fine detail that was sharp, such as eyes or hair. The added scenes were not entirely successful and I think that Davies, Edith Wharton and Gillian Anderson made a more successful cocktail than we find here.

Oslo, 31st August

This is the second film adaptation of the Novel Le Feu follet, written by Drieu Rochelle. The first adaptation was made by Louis Malle in 1963 and starred Maurice Ronet in what is now considered to be Ronet's best part. This film, made in 2011 in Oslo, is about a man in his mid-thirties. At the beginning of the film he is in the last week of a period in a drug rehabilitation clinic. He has a day of liberty when he visits his old friends in Oslo and tries to make contact with an old girlfriend.

He visits a friend, now married with a daughter and adjusting to a life of domesticity, and is taken to a party. He has a job interview. As the day progresses his belief in his ability to re-engage with life slips away and, as we see the world through his eyes, we feel strongly his unhappiness and understand how just being in his skin is intolerable to him. Anders is educated and intellectual and there are long dialogue sequences where he discusses with friends the difficulties that he sees. These scenes are reverberant and impeccably judged. The powerful and persuasive performance of Anders Borchgrevink in the main part succeeds in enabling us to see the impossibility of his future. The job interview, which Anders walks out on, is truly painful to watch, and there is an exquisite scene where he sits in a cafe, eavesdropping on conversations at adjacent tables, showing us his separation from the current of social life.

The final scenes can stand comparison with the memorable endings of some Antonioni films, showing the beginning of a new day in Oslo as life returns returns to the streets, the sun rises and touches roofs, buses start their daily routine; and we know that Anders' body lies lifeless and this is a day he will never see.

This is a deeply moving film and, I am tempted to say, a perfect film; skilfully written, acted and directed. 

Elena

This a a film made by Andrey Zvyagintsev, who made The Return. It is a very gripping and persuasive film about a couple who have been together for ten years or so and married for two. He, Vladimir, is elderly and comfortably prosperous and she, Katerina, was previously a nurse. They both separately have children. He has an estranged daughter and she has a married son with a wife and children. The camera starts by following their daily routine in the spacious and fairly luxurious flat. Clearly he has made some money and is now retired, and she waits on him. There is mutual respect and affection.  

The destabilising in influence is Katerina's son, who is an unemployed wastrel with a wife and two children, and Katerina feels obliged to ask Vladimir for handouts for them. Vladimir is not unreasonable, but feels that this can't go on indefinitely, and there is some tension between him and Katerina.

In the opening section of the film the camera quietly observes the couple in their daily routine; the cinematography being one of the strengths of this film. The four main characters, Katerina, Vladimir, his daughter and her son are vividly realised, as is the urban environment, and the film leads to a gut-wrenching conclusion. In the course of the film we are shown a section through Russian society, seeing how it is stratified from gated communities down to poor tenements haunted by threatening yobs. There is good health care for those who can pay. This is a stunningly well made film, keenly judged, well acted, finely scripted, perfectly paced and with outstanding cinematography.

Tyrranosaur

This is the first feature film directed by Paddy Considine. It is a riveting showcase for Peter Mullen's commanding screen presence. Mullen plays a no-hoper; drinking, fighting and hungry for redemption, and in the course of the film we discover the sources of his unhappiness. Mullen plays Joseph who meets Hannah, a woman slightly higher than him in the British class hierarchy, and in the film she goes down a snake and he goes up a ladder. Yes, this is a British film and it is about class.

Eddie Marsan is among the usual suspects to be found in the cast while the woman who gives some purpose to Joseph's life, Hannah, is played excellently by Olivia Colman. I think those who are fond of dogs should probably avoid this film, because in the course of the film Joseph finds it necessary to kill two of them.

This is a moving and effective film which quietly reveals its depth as it progresses.

Contagion

I read somewhere that Stephen Soderbergh intends to stop directing films. I hope this isn't true. Here, he has made an engaging and intelligent film about an epidemic of an unknown disease that kills millions of people throughout the world and triggers social instability.

There is an excellent cast including Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Laurence Fishburne, Marion Cotillard, Kate Winslet, Jude Law and Elliot Gould. Some sequences of the film, including the opening five minutes or so, play almost like a music video, with strong rhythmic music accompanying a sequence of wordless images. It is as though Soderbergh assumes we know how epidemic movies play out and all he needs to do is to sketch in how this one will be. The cinematography is amazing, with dark and shadowy images, some almost in grey-blue monochrome. Most of the cast play medical figures, while Jude Law plays a dissenting blogger and Matt Damon a layman whose wife and step-son die, and who is trying to protect his daughter.

This film eschews the usual Hollywood mayhem of disaster movies and takes a cool, clinical and analytical view of the events, rather as he did in his recent film Che.

Elisa, vida mia

Geraldine Chaplin, daughter of Oona and Charlie and granddaughter of Eugene O'neill, has been making a bigger spot on my radar recently since I saw her in Carlos Saura's undoubted masterpiece Cria Cuervos, playing the frail, pianist mother with health failing as she copes with the philandering cruelty of her uncaring husband. Then I saw her in Alan Rudolph's Remember My Name playing a woman, fresh out of jail from a twelve-year sentence for murder, barely stable and pestering her remarried ex-husband back into her arms. Now this film, where she plays a strong woman remaking her relationship with her father during a stay with him, while slowly realising that she can never return to her partner of seven years. Previously, to me, she was just the unfortunate who fetched up with that stupid and irritating part in Nashville. Nashville was made one year before Cria Cuervos. She was Suara's long-time partner, and they have a child. In this film, Elisa, vida mia, Saura's fascination with Chaplin is as apparent as is Godard's with Anna Karina in Godard's early films.

Cria Cuervos played fast and loose with reality, navigating with uncanny sureness between an account of events in a houshold and a child's misconstrued perception of them. This film is more ambitious in playing with reality and as a result is more obscure and opaque. I can't explain everything in the film.

It starts as Elisa (Chaplin), her sister and her sister's husband arriving by car at the remote farmhouse where Elisa's father lives, to celebrate the father's birthday. The father is played by Fernando Rey. We hear in voice-over Elisa's account of that time - her intermittent contact with her father who had abandoned the family, and her doubts about her relationship with her partner, but read by a male voice. The final scene of the film is the same arrival with the account again in voice-over, but this time read by her voice. What happens in between - - ? There are many scenes of her being warm and bonding with her father. There are confusing scenes to do with a woman who's dead body was found on a path near the father's house. There are industrial noises, shots of skinned horses' heads, scenes with the mother, also played by Chaplin (as was the case in Cria Cuervos).

I came across this summary of the film and it is as good as anything I might write:-

In ELISA, VIDA MIA, Fernando Rey stars as Luis, a contemplative writer, now in his sixties, who years ago moved to an isolated cottage in rural Spain to escape everything he hates about modern life. He is visited by his daughter, Elisa (Geraldine Chaplin), who he had abandoned years ago when he decided to leave her mother and become a writer. As the film opens Luis is reading from a memoir he is writing, but the story he's telling is written from the point of view of Elisa. Carlos Saura uses the full range of narrative possibilities in this film, including internal monologues, dreams, fantasies, wish fulfillment, and multiple view points. Sometimes Saura switches the narrative from Elisa's point of view to her father's internal imagining of what she's telling him. When she tells her father the story of her husband having an affair with her best friend, Sophia, it ends in a wildly unbelievable fashion. Is this story a wish fulfillment of hers? Or was the fantasy in the mind of her father as he writes the story of her visit? The film presents a stream of consciousness narrative that allows the characters to take shape not just through their words and actions, but actually through the progression of their thoughts.

Taipei Story

This film was made my Edward Yang in 1985. Yang is widely thought of as a gifted film-maker, but very few of his films are accessible because they are rarely shown and they are not available on DVD. The Exception is Yi-Yi (aka A One And A Two), which won too many awards to be listed here and was named by the magazine Sight and Sound in 2002 as one of the greatest films of the previous twenty-five years.

Pretty well all of Yang's films are of high quality and that includes the film here under consideration, Taipei Story.

It has often been remarked that one of Yang's talents is to maintain two planes of focus in his films: The socio-political-cultural plane, and the personal plane, and that is evident in this film that, in telling the story of a couple who have been together since childhood but who are growing apart, presents a panorama of life in Taipei in 1984. Chin, played by Chin Tsai (who subsequently became Yang's wife) has an executive desk-bound job, wears sharp suits to work, and is becoming yuppified; while Lung, played by Hou Hsiao Hsien, stays closer to his traditional roots. Edward Yang, who died of cancer (he was a heavy smoker) in 2007, aged 60, was an exponent of the Taiwanese New Wave, that sought to reject the previous light-weight Taiwanese cinema. Yang's reputation was slightly eclipsed by that of Hou Hsiao Hsien, who took the lead role in this film as a favour to a friend. Hou became much more prolific and acquired a wider reputation as an exceptional film-maker (not in the UK, unfortunately!). Hou Hsiao Hsien and Edward Yang have currently the two biggest reputations in Taiwanese cinema.

Yang assembles his narrative from several threads in a way that is not so dissimilar to Altman's. Chin loses her job and and Lung, between his work with Chin's father and his interest in baseball, considers emigrating to the USA. Yang does not often use close-up shots and is not afraid to hold a stationary wide-angle shot for the duration of a scene. He paints a picture of a society coping with change and modernity.

Remember My Name

This is a film made my Alan Rudoph and released in 1978. It stars Geraldine Chaplin and Anthony Perkins. Emily (Chaplin) is recently out of a twelve-year jail term for murder and she is pestering ex-husband Neil (Perkins), who has a hard-hat job and a good relationship with his current wife, Barbara, played by Berry Berenson, Perkin's real-life wife. It is of some interest to note that Berenson was Perkin's wife until he died of AIDS aged sixty in 1992. She died on American Airlines flight 11 in the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11th 2001, one day before the ninth anniversary of Perkin's death.

Remember My Name was the film Ruldolph made after Welcome to LA. The film was produced by Rudolph's long-time mentor, Robert Altman, and Altman's influence can be seen thoughout the film in its shooting and narrative methods. There are many slowly panning zoom shots following the narrative, and the narrative is not causally driven like many Hollywood films but slowly 'comes together' from a series of seemingly disparate scenes. There is a strong blues soundtrack that significantly adds to the pleasure in viewing the film.

The film is a strong outing for Chaplin, who had never impressed me until I saw recently Carlos Saura's Cria Cuervos. Here she is attractive, and plausibly malign and intelligent. She plays a chain-smoking and manipulative person intent on making contact with her ex-husband initially by hanging around his house and later by invading it. Perkins, as thin as a skeleton, also makes a strong contribution as a straight, working-class guy.

I was very pleased to see this film at the Cine Lumiere in London. The print was in fair condition, although the colour had very much deteriorated.

Floating Clouds

This film was made by Mikio Naruse in 1955. It is the story of a couple who met in Indo-China before the war, before the film started, and we seem them resume their relationship in postwar Japan.

He, Kengo, played very persuasively by Masayuki Mori, is a married man who uses women for what he can get and he uses Yukiko, played very movingly by Hideko Takamine, for occasional distractions and to borrow money from her, but he never cares for her any more than he has cared for any woman. She becomes addicted to him and is always forgiving and is unable to give him up. She understands him well and, very movingly, she smiles as she broaches the topics that must be most hurtful to her and discusses with him his adventures with other women.

Their entanglement continues in an on-and-off way in the devastation of post-war Japan. He is a forester and is unable to find work and she, a secretary, can find no work. Finally she follows him, almost literally, to the end of the earth when he finally finds a job as a forester, and the film ends tragically.

This is a bleak and pessimistic film. The couple are dragged down by their own weaknesses and by the social and economic circumstance of Japan in the post-war period. She is attractive, kind and sympathetic; he is good-looking (a bit like an orientally-inflected Gregory Peck!), uncaring, womanising and self-interested.

Naruse, considered in many quarters as one of the Japanese masters alongside Ozu and Mizoguchi, was at the same studio as Ozu, was promoted more slowly. He has a less idiosyncratic narrative style veering, with its use of background music slightly more to our expectations in viewing a melodrama, but it remains a starkly realist and moving film.

A Separation

This is one of the best films I've seen recently. It starts with a straightforward situation. A wife leaves her husband and he, left with the eleven-year-old daughter, and having an elderly father to look after, engages a housekeeper.

From this simple beginning the plot just thickens and thickens. The people in it don't seem like actors, they seem like real people. It is as though one is staying in the husband's flat and all these events break out around one.

The film is Iranian and it is set among middle class people in Iran. Some commentators have remarked that it is about the religious and class structure in Iran. Of course we see these things, but really it is about people like US, and the sort of strife we can all run into. We have religious and class structures here, don't forget, and other bizarre ways of doing things that are particular to us, just as they do in Iran.

The film was directed by Asghar Farhadi, and the eleven-year-old daughter of the couple is played by Farhadi's daughter. She looks a little more that eleven years old, but she is amazing and moving.

The Big Picture

This is an enjoyable and entertaining page-turner of a film based on a page-turning novel by Douglas Kennedy. It stars the charismatic Romain Duris (of The Beat That My Heart Skipped) who plays a frustrated photographer and successful but dissatisfied lawyer, Paul Exben, who accidentally kills his wife's lover and runs away on a life-changing odyssey. All sorts of things happen to him, which the film struggles to fit in.

The film get bogged down with some unecessary plot at the beginning about the legal practice he works for,  involving Catherine Deneuve . But I excuse this as a way of working Deneuve into the film for obvious reasons. Once the film gets under way it is fine.

I was bowled over by Duris in The Beat That My Heart Skipped and I don't ever expect him to find a part or director who suit his as well as that did, but here he is fine.

Blue Valentine

This is a film about the disintegration of a marriage for no particular reason. It tells the story of Dean (Ryan Gosling) and Cindy (Michelle Williams), of how they met and fell in love, got married and had a daughter. Then Cindy fell out of love and there was no turning back.

Dean is sincere and very much in love with Cindy, yet she is fed up with it all and can't go on. We don't really see what it is that turns Cindy against Dean. OK. he smokes and drinks a bit, but they don't seem to be the reasons. In fact we don't see the reasons.

Gosling and Williams are very good. The present Dean is hardly recognizable, with his little beard and moustache, as the young Dean.

The latter part of the film takes place in a bizarre and cheesy hotel where they've gone to have a good time, and they fetch up in strange futuristic suite with blue light (hence maybe the title of the film).

This is a good quality indie film that left me a little unsatisfied.

Beginners

This film, directed and written by Mike Mills, is his second feature film, the first being Thumbsucker in 2007.

The film tells the story of Oliver, played by Ewan McGregor, who is learning to live with his recently widowed father, Hal, played by Christopher Plumber, who has revealed himself to be homosexual after many years of marriage and has now come out and found a boyfriend who is much younger than him. Hal is diagnosed with cancer and oliver becomes his carer. Oliver drifts into a relationship with French Anna (Melanie Laurent) and, just as they drifted together, they drift apart.

McGregor, Plumber and Laurent are excellent.

One leaves the cinema knowing that one has seen a good and interesting film and wondering 'what was all that about?' and 'what really was going on in that film?' Why is Oliver at a loose end and vaguely dissatisfied? Why can't he make an enduring relationship? Is he latently a homosexual like his father?

I urge any reader to see Beginners.

Sarah's Key

This is a middle-of-the-road film about the dreadful treatment of Jews in Paris in 1942. It may contribute to awareness in France and elsewhere of events that are still not adequately addressed.

The story combines two narratives and is set in the present as a journalist, Julia, played by Kristin Scott Thomas, tries to discover the history of a flat in Paris owned by her husband's family, which was confiscated from a Jewish family. These two narratives, one, in the present, is a trivial romance narrative about Julia's marriage and the other, told in flashback, relates some of the most dreadful events in the history of humanity. Of course combining two such contrasting stories cannot work successfully, as several critics have commented.

Kristin Scott Thomas is excellent in her part and the film inevitably has several very moving moments in relating these terrible and shameful events, but it is nevertheless related with too many ponderous and cliched cinematic moments.

The Light Thief

This film is from Kyrgyzstan and it gives the viewer a bit of an overview of how the society there works and fits together. The story is quite successful in combining the personal and political planes of society.

The story relates some shenanigans about a 'little man', an electrician who, in Robin Hood style, arranges for poor people to be connected illicitly to the electricity supply, and a slick wheeler-dealer who wants to muscle in in the politics of the village. All this is related charmingly but without subtlety.  The little guy is modest and unemployed and he has a nice wife who believes in him. the wheeler-dealer, the film's baddy, sucks him into affairs that have a tragic end. We first see the baddy, wearing sunglasses, brandishing a fist-full of money to gamble on some sport involving fighting animals. He is immediately labelled as a baddy by the sunglasses and the money that he is brandishing.

This is an enjoyable film.

The Tree of Life

These are a few comments after seeing this film just once. I do plan to see it again. The first thing to say is that it is genuinely different from most other films, mixing sequences of images of the cosmos and the natural world, and even pre-historic creatures, with a narrative set in the 1950s in the USA. It made me think slightly of 2001, A Space Odyssey.

 The question is 'how well does this work?'.

The narrative is about a family with three sons, and at the beginning of the film one of them dies. We see the functioning of the family, with a disciplinarian father (Brad Pitt) and an angelic mother (Jessica Chastain). This for Malick is partly autobiographical and is also a generalized and idealized world. We also have scenes in the present in which one of the sons, now an architect, played by be-suited Sean Penn, moves through aggressively modern environments looking angsty and unsmiling.

Interspersed there are images of the cosmos, showing sunspots, deep-sea creatures, birds and the natural environment. We even see prehistoric creatures, digitally rendered. This is an attempt, in two and a quarter hours, to embrace the whole of life, the universe and everything.

I have seen some very good films recently, which fire strongly on all the important cylinders of film-making: acting, screenplay, cinematography, direction, rhythm, editing, etc.

I am not sure this film works because the ideas have not been imaginatively turned into an artistic whole. The components are all there but they are still disparate. The cosmic and narrative parts do not become more than their sum. The narrative is slightly week, in the sense that it is not very dramatic, although there are times when one feels for the characters. Jessica Chastain has the right sort of frail beauty to suit her perfect-mother role, and Brad Pitt is good as the tough father. The boys are excellent as they get up to boy-like escapades. Much of this narrative is shown as flashes and snapshots, interspersed with sequences of 'cosmos' shots. I think Malick has realised well here what he intended, although I might not see the USA of President Eisenhower as a lost nirvana. It is just that what he intended is simplistic, and he wanted to reach out and include the whole of the cosmos, but couldn't really find a way to do it. I'm sure it's really hard to do.

Apocalypse Now

This film has just been re-released by the BFI and looks wonderful up on the screen of NFT1.

This is a road film (river variation), and like many road films it proceeds as a sequence of set pieces, some more successful than others. It excels in spectacle and there are amazing scenes. In one I counted eleven helicopters, followed immediately by a scene with three jet fighters. Whole swathes of jungle are set on fire, and simulation Vietnamese villages were constructed to be destroyed in seconds. The purpose of the film is to embody and express the madness of America at the time of the Vietnamese war and as it was emerging from the revolutionary sixties. In this it is very successful. It is imaginative, hallucinatory and mad, and stands as a document of those times.

It nevertheless has deficiencies. It is famously based on Joseph Conrad's novel Heart Of Darkness, in that a man goes up a river, and has a screenplay written by John Milius and Coppola, the director. Milius has writing credits in 28 films, and these contain some solid films but no pinnacles of cinema. This being an American film it is the action that counts, and the few scenes with dialogue, acting and exchanges (one with Harrison Ford!) are somewhat wooden and cliched, but do transport the narrative to the next action-filled scene. Robert Duvall, soon after his legal duties in The Godfather, is amazing in his cowboy hat.

Martin Sheen plays Willard, whose job it is to chase down and confront Curtz. Sheen looks fresh from school via a bad period of drugs and alcohol, all bad attitude, disconnection, and bemusement at what is going on around him. As he travels up the river towards Curtz he studies Curtz's file and a voice-over drills into us the exemplary nature of Curtz's career until he went astray.

When Willard finally confronts Curtz, played by Marlon Brando, there are a few exchanges between them, although I'm not sure they were ever both in the same room, and Willard kills Curtz at the same time as an ox is being ritually slaughtered in Curtz' community. I looked away.

Brando already at this time had a reputation of poor behaviour and I had the impression that Coppola was grateful for anything Brando would do in front of the camera, and his appearance in this film is as helpful as a sighting of the Loch Ness monster. All we can do is stare and wonder.

I would have liked Willard to be older and more near to being Curtz's peer in experience and status, so that the confrontation between them may have been more interesting (screenwriting skills permitting) but, as I said, this being an American film, it is the action that counts.

I didn't understand why the voice-over, which became tedious and repetitive, told us so often and in so many ways what a good career Curtz had had because he was just the bogey man up the river and the exemplariness of his career didn't bring much to the story.

Not too many films have tackled America's trauma at the time of the Vietnam war, and I'm not sure this has the best crack at it. I'm thinking particularly of Karel Reisz' Dog Soldiers (aka Who'll Stop The Rain) in Which ex-Vet Nick Nolte freaks out and goes up a mountain and wires it for sound; a better-written drama, but with less madness and spectacle.

After Willard has killed Curtz the community that had followed Curtz turned to Willard as a leader and stared at him silently, but he was having none of it, and they parted for him as he walked back to the river (I'm not sure if he'd booked a boat), and I think they forgot to ask him his name.

Cria Cuervos

This film was made by the prolific Carlos Saura in 1976. Saura was born in 1932 and at the time of writing has made about 43 films, starting in 1956, and he has four film projects in progress. Cria Cuervos is his masterpiece. He wrote the screenplay and directed the film, and one has a strong sense of his confidence and sureness as he navigates a complicated narrative.

The story concerns a household of three children, the housekeeper, Rosa, played by Florinda Chico,  their mother and their aunt, Paulina, played excellently by Mónica Randall. One of the children, Ana, is played by the wonderful Ana Torrent, who's first film was Spirit of the Beehive. The mother is played by Geraldine Chaplin (who also plays grown-up Ana), and this must surely be her best film. Chaplin was, when this film was made, Saura's partner. She made Nashville in the same year as this film. Saura's mother was a pianist who gave up a professional career for her family, which is also the case of the Chaplin character in Cria Cuervos.

The narrative navigates between the events in this household and the imaginative construction of them by Ana, as she tries to cope with her mother's mistreatment by her father. Some scenes are 'real', and some are Ana's construction of them. Saura conjures deeply moving and evocative scenes from mundane events, such at the scene where the children play a game in the garden during a weekend visit. Torrent's sad eyes and wise-beyond-her-years appearance persuaded me that Ana, while misconstruing the events of the household, was also seeing them more clearly than the adults; a wonderful achievement. Most striking was the assured confidence with which Suara moved between the different realities of the film, as though an unseen hand were on his shoulder, guiding him, at a time of powerful inspiration.

this film was made in the dying days of the Franco regime in Spain, and it is not difficult to read the film as an analogy of the politics at the time.

Love Like Poison (Un Poison Violent)

This is the first film made by Katell Quillévéré. It is an extremely good coming of age film about Anna, played by Clara Augarde. She lives in a small French town, or even a village, and participates in the religious life of the community, She would not rule out a future of religious devotion and lives with her slightly unstable divorced mother and her grandfather. She misses her absent father who does visit her in the course of the film.

The prominent people in her life are her mother, her father, her grandfather, her possible boyfriend, and the village priest (shown in the image). We see her preoccupied by the ethical and moral issues provoked by the church, her emerging sexuality, and her relationships with her family and possible boyfriend.

There are some marvellous musical moments when the camera pauses in the narrative and a lovely song plays on the soundtrack, and we are allowed to stare at the texture of this village and way of life. The strongest parts are Marie's and the priest's, played by Stefano Cassetti. There is a marvellous scene when Pere Francois briefly relinquishes his priestly demeanour and plays football, very presentably, with the children, expressing economically the issues she is facing in confronting her emerging sense of the otherness of males and her attraction by the church.

I thought that some of the casting was slightly less than perfect (for perfect casting I still think of the similar in many ways Of Gods And Men). I thought the mother, with her black hair and bright lipstick didn't look much either like an inhabitant of this community or Marie's mother, and I thought the grandfather was a bit too quirky, like a comedian playing a straight part; but this is nevertheless a sublime film.

Heartbeats (Les amours imaginaires)

This is a Candian film made in French by the 21-year-old Canadian Xavier Dolan. It is his second film. He made his first film, I Killed My Mother, when he was 20 years old.

Dolan also has a prominent role in the film (he is on the left in the image). This film is about style and coolness, or is is about very little. It is about two friends who both fall in love with an Adonis who comes into their lives (centre in the image). The strongest impression I had while watching this film was the enjoyable feeling that Dolan was having fun with the camera and loving it. He is particularly good at the jerky zoom, giving the impression of abruptly changing attention, implying the short attention span of these narcissistic characters. There is some nice slow motion, too, and whole scenes shot in monochrome, one in red and one in blue. There are extra characters who comment tangentially on the narrative, but are not a part of it. The film treads a fine line between mocking these characters and drawing us into the dramas of their lives. Marie (on the right, played by Monia Chokri) is a not terribly beautiful and slightly intellectual person wanting something more in her life. She dresses in 1950s and 1960s fashions. Dolan plays a stylish gay man drifting through his life. They both compete for the affection of Nicolas, played by Niels Schneider, when he drifts into their social circle, and the bulk of the film shows them socializing (and occasionally going to bed) as a threesome, with all the underlying tension of their competitive insecurity. The soundtrack music is diverse and enjoyable, particularly the use of Bang Bang, sung by Dalida.

This film gave me a very enjoyable two hours in the cinema.

Animal Kingdom

This is an Australian gangster film, although it is not made in the style that we expect for a gangster film. It concerns a family of brothers, all gangsters, ladied over by their mother, a plausibly appealing person, the moral part of who's psyche is missing. These guys don't wear suits, Godfather style, but lounge around the family bungalow seedily flaunting their tattoos, or in casual clothes. The story develops into a vendetta between them and the Melbourne police, after one of the brothers is shot by a policeman, and they shoot a couple of policemen in revenge. We see all this through the eyes of a young cousin who is sent to live with them after his mother dies of a drug overdose.

The film reminds me of Robert Aldrich's The Grissom Gang in that it is about a family gang run by the mother. Animal Kingdom is a very well-made film, with the camera frequently tracking slowly along the floor, or by a wall, as though peeping into the events of this family. These movements are accompanied by blocks of atonal music on the soundtrack. The brothers are not wild-eyed crazies like those in, say, Ride The High Country or The Grissom Gang, but one remains aware that they are capable of anything, although one, Pope, at first appearing unremarkable, emerges as the worst of them all.

Source Code

This is a ridiculous and entertaining film. It is ridiculous because it has a story that doesn't bear examination and it is entertaining because it sweeps one along on an enjoyable ride. In the story some futuristic technology enables an eight-minute chunk of the past to be revisited and this is used to investigate a train that has been blown up to try to discover the bomber before he or she does something worse. So poor Jake Gyllenhaal, a military man fresh from Afghanistan, is sent back to the time of the bombing of the train to try to discover who did it. Having only eight minutes per try he needs a few goes, and, drawing on his Hollywood antecedents, he displays courage, resourcefulness and quickwittedness to nail the bomber.

The film, while being set in Chicago, was made largely in Montreal, and many of the names in the credits are French. It is however not short of Hollywood-style action, and has a Hollywood star, while seeming to he made on a fairly limited budget, with about three simple sets. Thankfully, he train crash is shown minimally, as though recreated in somone's firegrate. There is a woman, Michelle Monaghan, to provide romantic interest, and Gyllenhaal, although understandably pressed for time during his eight-minute visits, finds time to chat her up. There is also Vera Farmiga, who I fell in love with while watching Up In The Air, here playing his controller. Gyllenhall, I think, was on the train and is already dead (pleased don't ask me too many questions about this), and so the events, being in the past, are done and dusted. But again drawing on its Hollywood roots, the laws of physics are not permitted to stand between hero and fair maiden, and the girl, dead at the beginning of the film is alive at the end. Not too many questions, please.


This is the second film directed by Duncan Jones, son of David Bowie (no, I don't know why his name's not Duncan Bowie). His first film was another science fiction film, the well-received Moon. He clearly has a good future as a film director.

Archipelago

This is Joanna Hogg's second film, the first being Unrelated. It has many similarities to Unrelated: it is about a family on holiday and presents in cruel detail the sorts of frictions that family members can experience, especially in a compressed context such as a holiday.

Archipelago is a film made squarely in the European film-making tradition of Tarkovsky, Tarr, Antonioni and many others, requiring the viewer to reach out and engage with the film. It uses a pared-down, static style using carefully-framed tableaux and natural light, drawing heavily on the natural environment and on natural sounds. The cinematography is remarkable: being dark with subdued, almost pastel, colours. I was struck several times by its similarity to watercolour painting. There is no background music but much sound from wind, insects and birds.

There are many difficult silences where we suffer along with the characters as they misunderstand each other and fail to connect, causing me to see strong similarities to Antonioni's L'Avventura, which is also set on an island among people who engage with each other with difficulty. In Antonioni's day we called this disconnection Alienation.

The story concerns six characters, one materially absent but present in other ways. It is the story of a holiday on the island of Tresco, arranged in honour of Edward who has dumped his career to go off to Africa to fight AIDS. He is with his sister, Cynthia and his mother, Patricia. Also present are Rose, who has been employed by them as a cook, and Christopher, who is a painter separately on the island, and is a friend of the family. The father is due to join them but never arrives, but we can speculate on what sort of a person he is as we get to know his wife and children. We see them eat in their rented cottage, eat in a restaurant, go on picnics and go on walks and cycle rides. They have a few rows.

Rose, the cook, was recruited because she is a cook, but Hogg happened on someone who also had studied acting. Christopher is not an actor but a painter and he has in fact given Hogg painting lessons.

In a Q&A someone made the perceptive observation that the film is fueled by female fury, and all the males are in various types of retreat - Edward to go to Africa, Christopher retreats into his painting, and the father wisely never arrives, while Cynthia and Patricia express their anger and frustration directly or in displaced ways.

This film is about a farewell holiday for Edward, and he, played very well by Tom Hiddleston, who was also in Hogg's preceding film, is its central character. On a few occasions he parodies his father's manner, and it is easy to imagine that, being caring and lacking aggression, he fears that he may not be the son his father may have wished for. He irritates his sister, Cynthia, who gives way to outbursts against him. Again, we may speculate about what is really needling Cynthia. Edward turns to Christopher as a sympathetic male and Christopher explains and discusses his understanding of his art, and the road he had to follow to become an artist, touching on issues of courage and self-belief, issues where Edward is assailed by doubts. Also, Christopher may be expressing in a coded way Hogg's approach to film-making.

This is a film that provides plenty of space for the thoughtful and receptive viewer to project his or her own preoccupations and experiences onto the events of the film, bringing their own interpretation and understanding. Those whose sensibilities have been dulled by too much Hollywood will find it slow and boring.

The behaviours of the characters ring true and there is much to enjoy in the images and the soundtrack. Joanna Hogg is someone who has a clear idea of the type of film she wants to make and she is a valuable addition to British cinema. It is a refreshing contrast to such feel-good working class realist films as Made in Dagenham or Calendar Girls.

True Grit (2010)

This is a very good and entertaining film, one of the Coen brothers best, populated with fruity and entertaining characters, bordering on caricatures, apart from Hallee Steinfeld, who plays Mattie.

For those who don't know this is the story of 16-year-old Mattie, who recruits a man to catch her father's killer. The man she recuits, Rooster Gogburn, is played by Geoff Bridges, playing a part very similar to his role in Crazy Heart: a larger-than-life heavy drinker.

This film has wonderful cinematography by Roger Deakins (from Devon!).

Biutiful

This is an impassioned, ambitious and moving film. The central character, Uxbal, played by Javier Bardem, is a metaphor for us all: whilst dying, he is coping with the circumstances of his life. The film is ambitious because it seeks to embody in its few characters the state of the contemporary, globalized world, with diverse ethnicities and nationalities rubbing against each other as they struggle to find a way to survive.

The film, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, is set in Barcelona, although any city would do for the film-maker's purpose. Uxbal wheels and deals among the population of 'illegals', trafficking Chinese workers and working with African street traders, whilst bribing the police to make it all work. He has a bipolar ex-wife and two children, and does his best to be a good father and to deal honestly generally. We are told at the outset that he is dying of cancer and has only a couple of months to live.

His wife, Marambra, played by Maricel Álvarez, is by turns loving, sexy, sluttish and unpredictable, but is incapable of being reliably a mother to their children who seem, particularly his daughter, to look very plausibly the product of these two people. A subversive voice in me wondered what Kiera Knightley might have made of Marambra's role. It is hard to image. This is the wild side of cinema, far removed from the sunny English gardens where Knightley is so comfortable. There are several scenes set at the family's dining table, as Uxbal alone cooks meals and nurtures and relates to his children.

The cinematography is glorious - grainy, contrasty, dynamic and imaginative. This is cinemaphotgraphy with attitude.

It is easy to read this as a political film, depicting the reality of globalization - an ideology driven by the USA for the benefit of the USA, and given the benign, user-friendly name of 'democracy'. It shows people - Africans and Chinese - uprooted and dispersed, and at the limit of desperation, with prosperity all around them, as they are stripped of their dignity in their struggle for survival. In the pursuit of prosperity no morals are required and no-one is to blame.

The perfomances of the two leads, Bardem and Álvarez, are excellent, as are the children.

Black Swan

Someone must have had the idea of making a horror film about ballet. Quite a nifty idea, juxtaposing the high art world of ballet with the baroque world of horror. All that remained was to make the film. Black Swan is Darren Aronofsky's attempt to do it.

It is about a ballerina, Nina, played by Natalie Portman, who wants the lead part in a new production of Swan Lake. The film acknowledges that Swan Lake is the most obvious and hackneyed ballet that might have been chosen, but excuses it when the director, Thomas, played by Vincent Cassell, says that he wants this production to be pared back to basics. He believes that Nina is good on control and perfection, which suits the good white swan, but isn't so good at abandonment, which the bad black swan requires. Cassell brings some authority to his part, which is nevertheless underwritten and two-dimensional, embodying the cliches of ballet-masters we may have met  before in other films; being tyrannical, severe, cruel, unpredictable and heterosexually lecherous.

Nina doesn't fit in so very well with the other people in the dance company, seeming to be more sheltered and naive than them. It soon becomes clear that the stresses in her life are causing Nina to disconnect from reality: she imagines her body failing in strange ways, peeling improbable amounts of skin from her bleeding fingers, finding scars on her back, even her legs collapse under her weight, she discovers webs forming between her toes, she misconstrues or imagines encounters; and soon we realise that we cannot be sure what we are seeing, whether it is reality or the product of her imagination.

Nina lives with her her mother in a small and modest apartment. As soon as we see the mother the casting, makeup and acting tell us what Nina is in for from her. The mother is straight out of Hitchcock by way of Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher. She doesn't disappoint, being overbearing, overcaring and over controlling, and that narrative strand plays out with no surprises.

This is not a film that respects the audience; it doesn't trust us to 'get' things without them being rammed down our throat. All the resources of cinema, particularly sound, hand-held close-up, and fast cutting are used to make sure our attention doesn't wander. The problem with this is that my attention did wander. There is a scene when Nina has a night on the town, doing drink, drugs and guys, and we go to a nightclub. It is the noisiest nightclub in a film that I can remember (thinking of Michael Mann's wonderful nightclub scene in Collateral, and the nightclub in Spike Lee's 25th Hour). The strobes strobe and the noise peels paint. Then there is a scene when, before an audience, Nina falls over as she dances. Now, as this was the first night, we can be sure that Thomas is in the wings watching anxiously and, when his lead ballerina falls over, we may be sure he's concerned and agitated. Aronofsky doesn't trust us to put these particular twos together, so we cut to his agitated face, just to make sure. God, it's so obvious. A better film-maker may have made us wait to see how his anxiety played out, but not here.

I'm sure Natalie Portman worked hard for this film, but even I could see that she's not a normally trained dancer because her shoulders don't have a dancer's mobility. This is not a very important point and it is not her dancing that makes or breaks the film. The part needs someone who can act and dance and she does very well. I was wondering why an actor who can't dance was chosen as opposed to vice versa, if that was the unavoidable choice.

My main problem with this film is that it cheats in setting up a narrative where we don't know what happened and anything is possible, and we get blood and sex and things leaping out of shadows. There is a scene when Thomas unexpectedly kisses Nina and she bites him. There is another scene where he invites her up to his apartment and we expect the terms of their relationship to be negotiated, probably horizontally, but he just asks her three questions and gives her homework. The three questions were 'do you have a boyfriend?', 'have you had many boyfriends?', 'are you a virgin?'. The homework is to go home and masturbate. I suppose this is so that she can practice her abandonment. In the next scene she is in her room at home, obediently masturbating, and we have a good opportunity to admire her teddy-bear collection (this is fortunate because in a later scene she puts them mercilessly down the garbage disposal chute). Then, my God, her mother comes into the room. Isn't this the number one cliche of all time - the child's fear of being interrupted by a parent while masturbating? This film isn't interesting enough to spend much time wondering which of these scenes happened. They are clearly there to make this film the potboiler it wants so much to be.

Winter's Bone

This is a grim film. It is set in the Ozark mountains and is populated by backwoods types who wouldn't look out of place in Night Of The Living Dead. I needed subtitles.

It is about Ree (Jennifer Lawrence), a seventeen-year-old who is mother to her young brother, their mother being incompetent. She learns that because of actions of her absent father their house could be confiscated and she tries to find her father, obstructed at every turn by friends and relatives she turns to for help. Finally, assuming he's dead, she tries to find his body. Spoiler coming up. She is finally led to his body, which is suspended under water. They row out to the spot, she gropes over the side of the boat into the water for his wrists, and is passed a chain saw to remove a hand to use as proof that her father is dead. This is the first time it has occurred to me to wonder whether chain saws are available in waterproof models.

I thought this scene was a step or two too far in grimness.

Jennifer Lawrence has been justifiably praised for her part.

It Happened One Night

Here is a Frank Capra film that won five Oscars and is laden with plenty of other American recognition of its quality. It stars Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert and is about an over-night bus journey to New York.

I have read my Janice Radway and this is a ROMANCE! Girl meets boy- girl misunderstands and dislikes boy - friction and resolution occur - girls starts to like boy - they fall in love - *****. On the way we have fun and laughter and outrageous scenes with two stars at their peak.

Forebidden, a film made by Frank Capra in 1932

Frank Capra has never loomed very large in my radar. I was stunned by this film. Stunned by its rawness, stunned by how by how it never went near to falling into the excesses of melodrama, despite having a story that lent itself to that, and amazed at how it never sought to judge its three main characters, when it might easily have done so.

The story spans more than twenty years and shows many lives blighted by unfulfilled love. Lulu, a librarian (Barbara Stanwyck, looking so YOUNG!) meets and falls for a lawyer, Bob (Adolphe Menjou). After some fun he confesses that he's married and there's no question of him leaving his wife, who is crippled by a car accident he is responsible for. After his confession Lulu rejects him and gives birth alone to his daughter. Some years later, when her daughter is about four years old, they get back together. His career progresses to the point of becoming state governor, and she accepts the role of governess to her own child, which he has 'adopted'. She has always been courted by a journalist, Holland (Ralph Bellamy), who doesn't know of her involvement with Bob but, for his own reasons, wants to 'get' the Bob, who has become well known. Bob has become frustrated and sickened by his hypocrisy but is unable to resolve the conflicts in his life. In a moment of despair Lulu agrees to marry Holland but soon after he learns, from his own research into Bob, of her connection with Bob and sees what a fool he has been. In an argument she shoots Bellamy and goes to prison. Out of prison Bob is on his death bed and Lulu is with him when he dies. She wanders off into the street, alone, an unhappy, unfulfilled and hardened person.

This film is so moving in some places I could hardly take it. Background music was not used. The film refused to adjudicate between Lulu and Bob and never sank into sentimentality. This film was of course made before the Hays code prevented films showing birth out of marriage, etc, etc (although the code was adopted in 1930 it was only enforced from 1934 to 1968). I have always been a fan of Barbara Stanwyck, so it doesn't count for much when I say that she was very good. There is an amazing before-Bob's-confession scene when he arrives at her home for supper wearing the mask of a wolf, with also a mask for her, and they cavort and played together wearing masks for five minutes or so, giving the first intimation of the drama to come.