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.