Month: October 2017

Ingrid Goes West

Posted on by victorfraga

If Ingrid Goes West was not a film, it would be the perfect tweet. Social media expert Gary Vaynerchuk once shared his advice on how to write the perfect tweet. He came up with the following five golden rules.

1. Is it to the point?

There is no doubt about it. Ingrid Goes West goes right to the point and it does not momentum towards the end. Ingrid (Aubrey Plaza) is an unstable young woman with a checkered past of obsessive behaviour. When her mother dies, she inherits some money which allows her to move to Los Angeles. She is determined to get close to Taylor Sloane (Elizabeth Olsen), a foodie photographer. Ingrid wants Taylor’s life. The dialogues are witty and the stalking situations are funny. From the beginning, you get the message that the film is a satire about the use of social media.

2. Is the hashtag unique and memorable?

The narrative is a sequence of events under late Zygmunt Bauman’s influence. The Polish philosopher and sociologist once wrote: “Unlike real relationships, virtual relationships are easy to enter and to exit. They look smart and clean, feel easy to use, when compared with the heavy-slow, messy real stuff.” Ingrid Goes West is the simplest synthesis of Bauman’s thought. When Ingrid finally conquers Taylor’s superficial affection, her life becomes confused and difficult to deal with. Both Ingrid and Taylor are cons, charlatans, much alike to MyAnna Buring’s character in Hot Property (Max McGill, 2016). Real life is far more complicated than a hashtag.

3. Is the image attached high quality?

Spicer chose Los Angeles for his settings. LA attracts people who live out their fantasies and are often perceived as extreme consumers and show-offs. Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001) and La La Land (Damien Chazelle, 2016) also associate the city with consumerism and materialism. It’s hard to maintain your personality intact in a city like Los Angeles. Spicer’s inspiration for the film is Instagram, a social app for boasters and showers.

4. Does the voice sound authentic?

Ingrid Goes West sounds creepy. Ingrid’s voice is so authentic that you begin to question if you have ever behaved like her – and whether likewise you suffer from a mental disorder. You might even feel guilty if you have updated your Facebook status just before entering the cinema. The director uses comedy in order to criticise and reveal the irony of us watching the film. The lightness of the genre leads to an undesired consequence. You tend to forget the film soon. Just like you probably forgot what you posted a week ago on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

5. Will it resonate with the audience?

This is a film reminding us that we live in a world where we get an excessive amount of information about everything and everyone all the time. During last Sundance Film Festival, the film was well-received by regular audiences and it reached its target younger audience. The film is out now at BFI LFF, but it may not reach the visibility it deserves. Ingrid Goes West is a perfect tweet, yet it doesn’t have the strength to go viral.

…

Ingrid Goes West showed at the 61st BFI London Film Festival in October, when this piece was originally written. It’s out in UK cinemas on Friday, November 17th.

Beyond the Breasts (Para Além dos Seios)

Posted on by victorfraga

All humans begin as female. The Y chromosome – which is only present in males – is not activated in the first five to six weeks of embryonic development. This why all men have nipples. Beyond The Breasts is a bold documentary that investigates what it means being a woman in Brazil nowadays. Director Adriano Soares interviewed Brazilian women and some men of various races, creeds and sexualities, and the outcome is delightful, to say the least.

Brazil is teeming with contradictions, despite that clichéd view that it’s a liberal country. Women showing their breasts during Carnival is not necessarily an expression of freedom. In December 2015, a wave of sexism flooded the Brazilian Congress, as legislation making abortion illegal in all circumstances was proposed. Gynaecologist Jefferson Drezett, a vocal pro-choice campaigner and coordinator of a large and exemplary abortion clinic, stated: “Brazil abandons their women”. Beyond The Breasts also spoke to women at the Brazilian SlutWalk. The march was an intense revival of the feminists protests from the 1960s. Except that there were no more bras to be burnt; women protested topless.

The documentary chose an artistic way to expose the deep societal wounds. The director is never didactic, taking a more fragmented approach. He suddenly interviews a blind man about gender and machismo. He reveals the astonishing reaction of a street artist who had a mastectomy. He frames bare breasts while his subject tells she was a victim of rape. He captures a lady talking the pleasures in masturbation. All the characters in Beyond The Breasts are very brave in their testimonies.

Identity is a key aspect in the film. Interviewees establish a bond with viewers while dissecting their own interpretation of self. A secret is not a secret until it is revealed. It’s the disclosure of intimacy that distinguishes each individual. Somehow Beyond The Breasts reminds us of what connects us. It is not the shape of our body. We are all mammals, both males and females have glandular tissue within the breasts. What is it then that makes us different?

DMovies, in a partnership with Infinita Productions held a screening of Beyond The Breasts in East London on October 26th, 2017. It’s available for digital streaming here.

120 BPM (120 Battements par Minute)

Posted on by victorfraga

Looking back at history can be extremely painful, in both a physical and metaphorical sense. Robin Campillo’s 120 Beats per Minute takes a a look at the activists from Act Up in the Paris of the late 1980s/early 1990s, the pinnacle of the Aids crisis. The movie blends passion and resilience with the raw and bleak reality of those infected with HIV, at a time when the disease was almost synonymous with a death sentence.

Act Up (Aids Coalition to Unleash Power) is an international direct action advocacy group promoting awareness of the Aids pandemic, as well as fighting for legislation, medical research and treatment for those infected. The group originated in the US, and it was notoriously active in France – the country had more than twice the number of infections as Germany and the UK (according to the movie). “Direct action” and “fighting” are not euphemisms. These young and energetic activists engaged in extreme activism, including invading a pharma labs and bombarding it with fake blood, handcuffing an executive on stage during a major event, and guerrilla-lecturing schools about safe sex while also handing out condoms to underage boys and girls. The film wraps up with what’s probably the most radical and symbolic militant act that I can think of, but obviously I’m not going to spoil this for you.

The ensemble cast is composed of a closely-knit group of young activists who meet up regularly in order to discuss the next actions. They are very supportive of each other and also extremely organised. They don’t clap in their meetings so that they don’t interrupt the speaker. Instead they snap their fingers in order to express approval of what’s being said. Their mottoes are remarkable. They range from the silly “I am Aids, you are Aids, we are Aids” to the shocking “When I grow up I’m going to be HIV positive”, stamped on a placard alongside the picture of a child. They are fiery and volatile, prone to emotional outbursts – which is quite understandable given their horrific predicament. Yet their stamina and determination stand above everything else. They are truly inspiring. Their heart is beating against all odds, in very good French style of self-determination – as in the last sequence of Marcel Carné’s Les Visiteurs du Soir (1942). The difference is that in Carné film the heart continues to beat despise the Nazi occupation. Here the heart continues to beat despite the HIV virus and the prejudice attached.

Campillo’s film manages to highlight the ambiguity of the agenda of the pharma labs. They never release interim results, and it’s unclear why they refuse to do so. Are they vouching for the quality of medical research or it it entirely about their commercial interests: The film also examines the agenda of insurers, which is far less ambiguous: “they want us dead”, claims Act Up.

Finally, the movie highlights the double-edged reverberations of radical activism. On one hand, they do a wonderful job in raising awareness of the Aids crisis and the plight of the infected. On the other hand, they also increase publicity for the retroviral drugs AZT and DDI, and this could cause their prices to soar, one of the activists deftly notes. Another problem is the apathy of the hedonistic gay scene, who are very reluctant to engage in the fight out of fear of stigmatisation. These young people have to fight on several fronts at the same time, and their predicament is an uphill struggle.

Some critics have condemned the film for being untimely. I beg to differ. Act Up is still active, and while HIV has been demoted from fatal to chronic disease, the struggle goes on. 120 Beats per Minute is both a meditation and a historical register of our lack of preparedness to deal with a new epidemic, and to reconcile personal, political and medical interests. Other epidemics will eventually come and we need to be able to fight them.

I have sung the praises of the film so loudly, so you might be asking why I haven given it our maximum rating: five dirty splats. 120 Beats per Minute has one shortcoming: its duration. At nearly two hours and a half, the film feels too long, and the narrative doesn’t sustain itself throughout. It should have been at least 30 minutes shorter. That’s 3,600 heartbeats.

120 Beats per Minute is showed at the 61st BFI London Film Festival in 2017, when this piece was originally written. Out in cinemas April 6th (2018). On Netflix on Saturday, July 10th (2021).

Looking for Oum Kulthum

Posted on by victorfraga

First and foremost: this is not a documentary about Oum Kulthum. In fact, it’s not even a documentary. Marketed as a “film within a within”, Looking for Oum Kulthum is the fictional story of an Iranian director filming Oum Kalthoum’s biopic in Egypt. The actual movie (not the “film a film”) was made by two Iranian filmmakers: one male (Shoja Azari) and one female (Shirin Neshat).

Sounds extremely promising. Is this some sort of Abbas Kiarostami film with multiple narrative layers, a complex usage of cinematic apparatus plus a delicious Egyptian flavour (or shall I say warble?) to top it all up? This is probably what the film intends to be. But sadly it’s not. This is indeed an ambitious endeavour from both a format and a content perspective, but ultimately the whole thing just doesn’t gel up.

Mitra (Neda Rahmanian) is a young female Iranian filmmaker in Egypt. She’s short-haired with striking black eyes (pictured above). She looks a little bit like Sharleen Spiteri (from the music act Texas), plus a gorgeous olive skin and a lot of eyeliner. She conveys an image of modernity not often associated with Iran and Egypt (at least not for me, but I confess that sadly I haven’t been to either country). She epitomises a lot of the topics discussed in the film, such as looking present-day, feminine, and foreign in an Arabic country. To top it all up, she doesn’t speak any Arabic, even if she can understand a little. To many Egyptians, it’s an affront that a film about their most important singer should be made by a foreigner. A foreign woman.

In a way, her predicament is similar to Oum Kulthum’s, the subject of the film she’s making. Both are going through a bumpy journey in a deeply conservative society where women often have to sacrifice a lot in order to achieve professional recognition. These difficulties appear everywhere, from the casting to actual filming of the movie. Males want to interfere on every step. Commercial priorities must prevail over female sensitivity.

The problem with the film is that the script is too loose and the ends never tie together. Mitra is facing personal problems, but it’s never entirely clear what these are. And the narrative isn’t entirely coherent, and it isn’t always possible to make out exactly what’s happening. Plus Rahmanian’s performance isn’t always entirely convincing.

You don’t get to see/ hear much of the real Oum Kulthum perform, which is a pity. And you don’t learn much about the diva, either. For example, a boy sings appears in the beginning of the movie, and I assume that’s Oum Kulthum. That’s because I already knew Oum Kulthum was forced to cross-dress as a child (otherwise she wouldn’t be able allowed to perform). The film does not shed any light on this or many other facts.

In a nutshell, Looking for Oum Kulthum has a very interesting premise and valuable bits of social commentary. Yet it lacks both the grandiosity of Oum Kulthum bigger-than-life persona and disembodied voice, as well as deeply human sensitivity of Iranian filmmakers such as Abbas Kiarostami, Asghar Farhadi, Mohsen and Samira Makhmalbaf.

Looking for Oum Kulthum is showing in the 61st BFI London Film festival taking place right now.

Memoir Of A Murderer (Sal-In-Ja-Eu Ki-Eok-Beob)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

At the start of Memoir of a Murderer, Kim Byung-su (Sul Kyoung-gu) walks dazedly out of a dark tunnel into a white, wintry landscape. Like so much in this convoluted South Korean thriller, that might be highly significant or symbolic, a metaphor, a journey, a state of mind. Or it might not. It’s undeniably a visually striking and arresting starting point. In the manner of frame stories or flashbacks in so many films, we return to this sequence towards the end. But it’s not clear at the start that this is a flashback, and it’s no clearer at the end when this scene recurs.

That’s indicative of some of the games screenwriter Hwang Jo-yoon (co-screenwriter of Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy, 2003) and director Won Shin-yun want to play with their audience. They’re plugging into a long cinematic tradition of films dealing with impossible memory and that peculiar subset thereof most notably represented by Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000) in which a main character suffers from amnesia or memory loss. Just as the protagonist of Memento suffers from short term memory loss and must therefore physically record events so as to have a record of them to which he can refer before taking appropriate action, so too Alzheimer’s sufferer Kim needs a means of recording events so that he can recall them by some method other than his increasingly unreliable memory. Doting daughter Eun-hee (Kim Seol-hyun) gives him a mobile phone on which he can record messages with his voice as a means of recording important events in his recent past.

Like Memento, Memoir of a Murderer takes place in the subjective experience of a memory-unreliable protagonist. Unlike Memento, Memoir of a Murderer‘s dramatic structure is not rigorously ordered and indeed can be quite disorientating and confusing at times. For example, a flashback early on has the ageing Kim recall his many murders. As he tells it, he only ever killed for a good reason, only people who deserved to die. His first victim was his father who horribly abused his own wife and family, his second a woman who came to his veterinary practice wanting him to cut open the pet dog she’d killed to extract the jewellery it had swallowed. As Kim sees it, he’s preventing pain and possibly murder being inflicted on other people by killing his chosen victims. But there’s at least one point in the narrative where you wonder momentarily if these memories are actually true and whether he really is a serial killer at all. And there are flashbacks to things in his past which have got jumbled up inside his head and may in fact misrepresent his true personal history. This is not a man upon whose memory, short or long term, we can rely.

So Kim spends time pondering his life at Bamboo Grave, the rural site well away from the city in which he resides and where he claims to have buried his victims. And he recalls his violent car accident 17 years earlier which is where all his memory problems started. Then, driving his black jeep, he runs into the back of a white car and, whilst going to check that the other driver is ok, finds blood leaking from the white car’s boot and takes a sample of it using some tissue paper. He then finds himself face to face with the unhurt Min Tae-joo (Kim Nam-gil) and immediately knows that this man is like himself: another serial killer. Min’s behaviour is certainly suspect: he claims the leaking body is that of a deer he hit and he won’t give Kim his driver details for insurance purposes, even though Kim insists it was his Kim’s fault and will happily pay for any repairs.

The narrative plays some neat tricks on the audience. When Kim forgets who his daughter is, he tries to strangle her. Later, having forgotten this episode, he sees red marks on her neck and assumes rival killer and her boyfriend Min to be responsible. And because his memory is less than reliable, we’re not quite sure who or what to believe.

The ante is upped via a series of initially believable but increasingly less plausible plot developments. Kim learns through his mate the local cop (Oh Dal-su) who runs a check on the car number plate for him as a favour that owner Min is a cop. Later on, Min, running into Eun-hee outside Kim’s veterinary practice, starts dating the girl. By the time we reach the revelation of a particular death, credibility has stretched well beyond breaking point. Which is a shame, because before the proceedings topple into silliness, the way they keep you guessing is highly effective while the overall narrative delivers more than its share of suspense, shocks and surprises. And the whole thing is based on such a memorable premise.

Memoir Of A Murderer showed at the BFI London Film Festival in 2017, when this piece was originally written. It shows on Monday, May 21st (2018), in London and Cambridge as part of the London Korean Film Festival.

My Friend Dahmer

Posted on by victorfraga

Jreffrey Dahmer killed 17 young man, dismembered and dissolved their bodies. He is the most prolific gay serial killer in history, and he also practised necrophilia and cannibalism with some of his victims. This is not the type of friendship you would boast about. Yet John “Derf” Backderf wrote a graphic novel about his amicable relationship to Dahmer during their teenage years. And now the graphic novel has bee turned into the film My Friend Dahmer.

Obviously, this is not a feel-good movie. It’s a study of a very disturbed mind and what drove Dahmer to his horrific deeds. Yet it’s not a graphic film. Dahmer hadn’t started killing people then. Instead the movie focuses on his strange personality, his sexual attraction to men and his growing fascination with cutting animals open during his late adolescence. At that stage, such obsession was limited to non-humans: a dead cat, a possum, mostly roadkill. Dahmer was still honing his morbid skills, and the movie ends just before he claims his first victim.

Ross Lynch, previously known for various roles on the Disney Channel, does a terrific job as Dahmer in high school in the 1970s. Derf was concerned that Lynch’s familiar face would make viewers uncomfortable, but I don’t think the audience of My Friend Dahmer will overlap enormously with the Disney Channel. Obviously this is not a movie for children, it’s not light entertainment. Dahmer finds enjoyment in throwing fits and “spasming” around, in a way very similar to the “spassing” of the characters in Lars von Trier’s The Idiots (1998). Of course people around him are not having fun; instead they are freaked out. Dahmer antics are definitely not entertainment for the Disney Channel.

Derf (Alex Wolff) and his small group, unlike other students, actively spur Dahmer’s morbid demeanour. The good-looking yet socially inept Dahmer is delighted to gain acceptance in this small circle in exchange for delivering the bizarre performances. Derf et al develop some sort of friendly affection for the strange man, yet they remain very uncomfortable with his animal experiments. The blond and bespectacled teen is mysterious and ambiguous. His motives for killing are never entirely clear, apart from an inherent curiosity “to see the insides” of living creatures (as he puts it). All we know is that his behaviour was symptomatic of something far more dangerous yet to come.

The movie does not propose that oppressed homosexuality and bullying are triggers for serial killing sprees. It would be absurd to do so. If that was the case, the world be indeed a very dangerous place with mass murderers in just about every corner. It does not propose that his family are the cause, either. His mother and father are portrayed as a little clownish, but not far more than the average traditional family. Meyers does not provide answers. Instead he exposes the fragmented pieces of a very disjointed mind.

My Friend Dahmer is showed the 61st BFI London Film Festival in 2017, when this piece was originally written. It’s out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, June 1st, and then available for digital streaming on Monday, June 4th.

Blade Runner 2049

Posted on by victorfraga

Science fiction hasn’t always been dystopia fiction wrapped with moral ambiguity. After the impact of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), combined with the art house aesthetics of Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) the future was never the idealistic alluring it once was, now there was only sadness and decay. Following in the style of Scott, Denis Villeneuve brings an astute eye to the paradoxically beautiful yet unforgiving futuristic Los Angeles. Working in the same genre as Arrival, that film’s vast scope for sci-fi proved only the surface to its non-linear narrative and emotive core. Villeneuve’s next step was always going to be interesting, but nobody expected it to be Blade Runner 2049.

Adopting the 30 years later template of Star Wars etc, Villeneuve’s work takes place in the exact same space as the original, only humanity has driven itself into a deeper state of pollution and overpopulation. Not only are have the replicants been modified to be the perfect foot soldiers of the human race, the subsequent years have seen an electro-magnetic pulse blackout, worm farms installed as protein alternatives and the rise of The Wallace Corporation, replacing Tyrell as masters of AI manufacturing.

Evolving technologies of holograms, humanity has created a climate that leaves little room for actual human interaction. Granted these themes have been discussed numerous times in poignant films like Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2014) and Her (Spike Jonze, same year) Blade Runner 2049 somehow manages to find new room in which to illustrate and debate this topical debate – visually and narratively. The logic behind this evolution in human technology and interaction is highly plausible, giving emotional gravitas to K and the relationship he holds with his sex hologram, Joi (Ana de Armas). Commoditised and marketed as the ultimate female pleasure across the city in gigantic neo size, Armas’ beauty is reminiscent of Sean Young’s Rachel.

Part of Wallace’s replicant army is K (Ryan Gosling) works for the LAPD as a blade runner. Unlike Deckard before him, it is made crystal clear from the opening moments that K is not human. The clarity that instantly introducing this character as a replicant frees the film up, leaving the is-he-or-is-he-not debate of Deckard and Blade Runner trailing behind. After an opening encounter with an older replicant model named Sapper Morton (David Bautista), K must track down a further target, leading him to a discover the chiselled Deckard (Harrison Ford). Like the great films of Hitchcock, so much of the film’s plot lies in mystery.

The small-scale models of the original are works of art, helping to create some of the most vivid science fiction world-building from figures the size of a thumbnail. Still, with Rogen Deakins as DoP, Villeneuve imbues a grander scale, with help from Dennis Gassner’s production design. Amalgamating with the sounds of Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch, sight and sound form together intrinsically, demonstrating cinema’s visual excellence, in ways that cannot be achieved in other arts.

Adopting harsher synth than Vangelis’ score, the diegetic and non-diegetic sounds of dystopian Los Angeles could be found in any ominous Berlin-based nightclub such as Berghain. As in Sicario (Denis Villeneuve, 2015), Deakins’ uses the natural darkness of the frame to illicit chiaroscuro, creating some of the most powerful vistas of 2017.

An extension of the numerous self-assured protagonists he has portrayed over decades, it’s in this performance as Deckard that Harrison Ford gives one his finest, most tender portrayals. Eliciting melancholy in a form some, including myself, thought we would never be seen from Ford again, his Deckard feels tactile and nuanced without feeling overplayed.

Akin to the unicorn referenced in Blade Runner, Blade Runner 2049 is truly a rare breed of a film; it is original without destroying any of the achievements of its predecessor. Villeneuve crafts a true modern blockbuster that will survive in an era of formulaic superhero flicks. Flourishing with a glimmering moment of emotion, Villeneuve closes with an emotive core – comparable to Arrival. As the screen turned to black, I was thankful to emote overwhelming sensations of joy and sadness. Pinching myself, I was reminded of my humanity – this cannot be said of those replicants, who have seen so many things, such as starships burning off the shoulder of Orion…

Blade Runner 2049 is out in cinemas across the UK and the world right now.

A Moment in the Reeds (Tämä Ketki Kaislikossa)

Posted on by victorfraga

This is a movie with its heart in the right place. It pictures the short-lived and yet intense affair between a young Finn (Jaane Puustinen) and the equally young and good-looking Syrian asylum seeker Tareq (Boodi Kabbani). Tareq is polite and educated: he used to be an architect in Syria. He’s an affront to the prejudiced view that refugees are unschooled and dangerous. He’s the type the immigrant that xenophobes shudder to think about: he’s far more intelligent than most bigots. A Moment in the Reeds is successful at conveying a message of tolerance and diversity, reminding us discrimination is plain wrong.

Unfortunately it fails in many other aspects. Firstly, it’s riddled with cliches. All of the action takes place in the idyllic Finnish countryside in the Summer. Leevi has moved back from Paris in order to help his estranged father renovate the family lake house so it can be sold. His folk has hired Tareq in order to help them out with the manly work. One night the father leaves the two men alone and… tah dah!!! You can work out the rest: naked swimming, steamy Finnish sauna and… LOADS OF BANGING!!! Banging nails on planks of wood, of course, an instrumental element of the renovation work.

They also get intimate in the reeds for a short moment, as the title of the film suggests. I wonder what naughty Theresa May would make of this. Well, I would hazard a guess she won’t be watching this movie. Anyway, back to the film. Not only the “twists” are extremely stereotypical and predictable, but also the script is very poor. Tariq’s voice is very sexy and deep, and he has a killer Colgate smile. As a result, most of the film feels like soft porn that never comes to fruition. The acting is quite iffy, and the photography isn’t particularly moving. Maybe the shaky camera is a reference to the wind moving the reeds. Just maybe.

The director tries to add an intellectual veneer by referring to the gay literature of Finnish poet Kaarlo Sarkia and French Arthur Rimbaud, but the whole thing just doesn’t gel together. The fact that the father begins to suspect the relationship between the boys upon finding out that Tariq is into arts only serves to perpetuate the stale cliche of “intellectual gays”.

A Moment in the Reeds is likely to please LGBT pundits looking for steamy homosexual fun, but it’s unlikely to engage a large number of human rights activists fighting for the refugee cause. The film showed at the 61st BFI London Film Festival 2017, when this piece was originally written. It’s out on VoD on Monday, October 15th (2018)

Faithfull

Posted on by victorfraga

Marianne Faithfull fell into the trap. In order to celebrate a 40-year career, one of the most original singer-songwriters of all times agreed to reveal her secrets to French actor-director Sandrine Bonnaire, only to be disrespected. Faithfull gives it all but Bonnaire wants more. The camera is too invasive. At a certain point, shooting in a car, Marianne commands to stop filming. She begs in vain. The French filmmaker goes on and on, adjusting the focus to a closer frame, until Marianne gives up. What Have I Done Wrong?

The documentary remembers many interviews in which Faithfull had to justify her personal choices through her life. In the 1960s, British TV presenters didn’t forgive her for insisting in her career as a singer and actor rather than being a full-time mother. Her lifestyle was a threat to the status quo. What are we Fighting for? Bonnaire neither challenges these journalists nor provides a more magnanimous take on the subject. She is as manipulative as Shirley Clarke in Portrait of Jason (1966).

Fortunately Faithfull, the woman, is stronger than Faithfull, the film. She may sing “I am not that strong” (as in the song Sister Morphine), but in fact she is. After her relationship with Mick Jagger – the two were together for four or five years – Falling in Love Again was never her business. At a very young age, Faithfull repressed her desire to sing so Mick could reign. She started acting and stopped singing. At 19, she had a miscarriage. The event contributed to their break-up. Mick wanted so badly to become a parent, and he eventually got what he wanted. He is father to eight, none of them with Marianne Faithfull. Why D’Ya Do It????

Marianne wanted another life. She preferred the Vagabond Ways. Inspired by the cult William Burroughs’s book Naked Lunch, she moved to the US. She soon became illegal, penniless, homeless and addicted to heavy drugs. As Faithfull reveals her anonymous life on the streets of New York, Bonnaire lost a good chance to explore more the richness of her subject. The filmmaker was only interested if Faithfull had ever become a prostitute. Truth, Bitter Truth

Faithfull often looks like a formulaic documentary for television, but it still has some intense moments. The way Faithfull selects a track to play, for instance, and then she surrenders into emotion. The viewers can’t help but sit and watch As Tears Go By.

There were oh so many ways for her to spend her days. She could clean the house for hours, or rearrange the flowers. Instead she chose to spend time with her band, a new generation of musicians influenced by her work. Maybe she did not have Great Expectations at first, but this is where she found the real love she always poured into poems.

Faithfull is showing at the BFI London Film festival taking place right now.

Wrath Of Silence (Bao Lie Wu Sheng)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

The young boy Zhang Liu tends sheep on a hillside in Northern China not far from a mine where lorries come and go. One day he doesn’t come home. His mother, already in debt for various medical treatments for her swollen legs, is at her wits’ end. The boy’s mute father, the miner Zhang Baomin (Song Yang), has a way of solving problems. Fisticuffs. He beats up people in the local mine. In the village restaurant he plunges a broken meat bone into the eye of the local organiser of signatures to sign away the village mining rights for which he’s holding out but everyone else in the village has signed. He goes around showing a picture of the missing Liu in the hope that someone has seen the boy.

This takes him to a local mining site where he’s inside eating with the foreman when thugs turn up in vans and jeeps to tell the miners a new company has bought out the mine and their service are no longer required. Drawn into the fight, Baomin bests several men and breaks the jeep’s windscreen before being taken by the thugs’ leader to see his boss Chang (Jiang Wu), who promises to have his employees look out for the boy. But in the car park, Chang’s number two has Baomin beaten up anyway. Meanwhile, a lawyer named Xu (Yuan Wenkang) finds that Chang has kidnapped his daughter. “You’re a lawyer, you know what I want in exchange,” he’s told. The fates of these three men and their disappeared offspring will become inextricably entwined.

One one level, this film is an extraordinary social commentary – rural areas decimated by mining, poor miners struggling to survive in a village while lawyers and businessmen live lavishly in the city. Elsewhere, it trades less successfully in caricature. While the urban lawyer Xu looks flash and well-dressed, the even more stylish Chang is a cut above him. The obscenely rich Chang is obsessed with meat and has his own slicer, piling sliced meat high on numerous plates on a vast dining table, and is perfectly happy to torture a vegetarian who has crossed him by having minions stuff handfuls of sliced meat into the man’s mouth.

The proceedings suffer further from the generic action movie demands: as the brawling Baomin charges headlong into one fight or another, the film seems to move from storytelling mode into action stunt mode without any good reason. While the fight scenes are impressive in themselves, they somehow just don’t seem to fit into the wider idea of what the film is about. Compare this to classic Hong Kong Chinese auteurs like Jackie Chan or John Woo where the integration of action into the whole is seamless.

That said, the narrative whole is pretty coherent and director Xin has a nice sense of pacing, telling his story by piling images one on another in a way that slowly develops what the audience knows and can quite suddenly pull an unexpected plot development out of the bag. So one powerful set of images involving mines, lorries and slag heaps gives way to another, a man with a customised bow and arrow he uses to shoot deer targets in his shooting range deep in his vast, labyrinthine house, which in turn gives way to the missing boy and the kidnapped girl – who may or may not be alive at this point – wandering together through the landscape to gaze at the town from the top of a ridge. Apparently one of the images which originally inspired the writer-director was that as a child he saw a mountain exploding then collapsing.

The three leads are good value for money. Song takes the audience with him as the son-seeking miner and pretty much carries the film, but Jiang’s Chang is equally compelling as the villain and lights up the screen while Yuan’s Lawyer Xu is more complex, alternately trafficking in dirty deals and reading bedtime stories to his daughter, his position in the scheme of things shifting as the plot’s tectonic plates and his allegiances slide around. It all charges along at a frenetic pace but you can’t help but feel it could have worked much better as either a pure action movie built around the fights or an art movie looking at miners’ lives, mineral exploitation and business ethics. Or, indeed, had it somehow managed to marry these two elements rather than clumsily juxtaposing them to unintentionally jarring effect.

Wrath Of Silence is playing at BFI London Film Festival on October 5th, 6th and 14th. Book your tickets now right here. This is not the only film showing at the Festival and dealing with the subject of a missing child.

78/52

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

When Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock) first came out in 1960, no one knew about the shower scene. These days it’s been so referenced in films, television and popular culture that everyone, it seems, does so. If you’ve never actually seen Psycho, treat yourself to watching it before seeing 78/52.

This documentary is called 78/52 after the shower scene’s number of set-ups (78) and cuts (52). Psycho was shot in four weeks; one of the four was dedicated to shooting that one scene.

In some ways, 78/52 doesn’t do what it says on the tin. It talks a little about the context of the film in Hitch’s career, a lot about Psycho the film and the cultural phenomenon – much more than this writer expected, actually, given that it purports to be a film about the shower scene – and then, quite some way in, gets round to talking in great depth about the shower scene. Which, for the Hitchcock nerd like myself or the Psycho admirer is fine.

Hitch himself and numerous key cast and crew members have long since passed away, among them leading lady Janet Leigh, leading man Anthony Perkins, designer Saul Bass and composer Bernard Herrmann. Despite these obstacles, Philippe has assembled an extraordinary cast of interviewees including numerous directors, editors, technicians, writers and actors as well as descendants of Hitch (granddaughter Tere Carrubba), Leigh (actor-daughter Jamie Lee Curtis) and Perkins (director-son Oz Perkins II).

In something of a coup, he also has Janet Leigh’s body double from Psycho Marli Renfro and there are alumni of the 1998 shot for shot Psycho remake too, not to mention Stephen Rebello whose excellent book Alfred Hitchcock And The Making Of Psycho sits on my shelf. As if that wasn’t enough, their number also includes both Guillermo del Toro and the directing duo Aaron Moorhead & Justin Benson whose respective latest films The Shape Of Water and The Endless are to be found elsewhere in this year’s LFF.

The interview material is wide-ranging and often revelatory. I consider myself a Hitchcock buff and heard or saw things here I’ve never heard or seen before. The only real problem is that in editing the documentary down to a taut 91 minutes, there must inevitably be a lot of material that had to be either left out or taken out. This results in the occasional anomaly, such as for example the implication that all Hitch’s films in the fifties were colour while Psycho was in black and white when the geek will know that Stage Fright (1950), Strangers On A Train (1951), I Confess (1952) and – most importantly because it breaks Hitch’s run of colour films from Dial M For Murder (1953) to North By NorthWest (1959) – The Wrong Man (1956) were also black and white. But such minor blips scarcely detract from 78/52’s monumental achievement of presenting afresh a film that many of us thought we already knew intimately, inside and out.

Speaking of minor elements in the film, for those audience members who can bear not to get up out of their seat the moment the credits roll, there’s a nice little something at the very end of the credits. Hitch, who on Psycho’s first run insisted no-one would be admitted after the film had started, would I think have heartily approved. Although he had such a strong understanding of audiences that he would also know that most punters wouldn’t possess the necessary patience.

78/52 is playing at BFI London Film Festival on 13th and 15th October, and a week later in the Cambridge Film Festival. The movie is out in cinemas on Friday, November 3rd, and then on DVD on December 11th, and BFI Player in the new year.