Month: September 2018

A Crimson Star (Makka Na Hoshi)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Y[/dropcap[o (Miku Komatsu), 14, soon to leave hospital, tells Yayoi (Yuki Sakurai) that the latter is her favourite nurse. “Even though I made you cry when I stuck that needle in your foot?,” comes the questioning reply. When Yo checks out a day or so later, she learns that Yayoi is no longer working at the hospital.

Given to sneaking out via her bedroom window at any time of the day or night, some time later Yo is out walking at night when she sees two people having sex in a car. They get out. She’s sure she’s seen Yayoi and for confirmation takes Daisuke, a friend her own age, to see. Later, she leaves home and moves in with Yayoi. Who tries to put her off doing so.

In the course of working as a prostitute, Yayoi has struck up a relationship with a married man who loves taking her paragliding. But their spiritual connection seems at odds with their physical one. While Yayoi lets Yo stay with her out of a sense of protection, Yo is slowly developing a crush on Yayoi. There’s an idea about distance and attainability with Yo glimpsing a crimson paraglider unaware it might be Yayoi.

On her occasional return visits home, in and out through her bedroom window, Yo runs into trouble when she encounters her mother’s partner who is both violent towards and attempts to sexually abuse her.

Yayoi and subsequently Yo take refuge from their lives in a small observatory where they can open the telescope doors and gaze at the stars for long periods of time. It’s a place Yo and Daisuke have long admired but been unable to access.

If Yo and Yayoi are a sometime dysfunctional mother and daughter or occasional dysfunctional lovers – and Yo’s own family an example of an emotionally distant mother protecting a child-abusive partner – at least Daisuke’s family are offered as proof that some families provide a nurturing and caring environment. So much so, in fact, that when at one point his family takes her in it turns out a pleasant experience.

Female Japanese director Aya Igashi has an extraordinary way of expressing emotions and feelings on screen. She has also found some very effective ways of shooting sex scenes. For instance in silhouette, so even though you know (and hear) exactly what’s happening, you can see virtually nothing. A Crimson Star is neither exploitative nor titillating, yet it absolutely gets to the heart of the matter. The female gaze, perhaps?

This accomplished and highly original first feature is unlike any other movie this writer has ever seen. Hopefully, we’ve not heard the last of Aya Igashi who, at a mere 22 years old, is surely a talent to watch.

A Crimson Star plays in the Raindance Film Festival. Watch the film trailer below:

Major Arcana

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Dink (Ujon Tokarski) parks his pickup outside a deserted shack in the middle of the woods. Inside, it’s a mess – old clothes strewn all over the floor, utter chaos. He takes some six packs out of the fridge and empties the contents down the sink. He checks inside of one of the walls and, sure enough, the expected stash of dollar bills is there. He pitches a basic tent outside the place.

Next day, he dons a hard hat and gets to work chainsawing some trees to make a clearing. He is purposeful and seems to be a skilled carpenter judging by the way, over the next days and weeks, he puts together his own wood cabin. His hard bitten mother Jean (Lane Bradbury) turns up and berates him for not being in touch. When he later visits her home, it’s visibly untidy in the same way as the shack, if not quite as bad.

Various forays into town bring him into contact with Sierra (Tara Summers) who wants to know what he’s been doing with himself since he left all those years ago. She doesn’t seem too keen on seeing him again. When he catches her chatting to a friend outside of a bar, she invites him over and slaps him hard. But then before long, she’s visiting the shack to see him. It turns out he’s inherited 52 acres and a sum of money from his late father. And it also turns out that she does Tarot readings as a sideline – the title refers to the picture cards in a Tarot deck. So he wants her to read his fortune.

This is a nicely judged, low budget character study which makes great use of what little resources it has. There’s a certain pleasure and fascination in watching someone actually build a house single-handed and it certainly feels as if Tokarski is doing that for real before the camera, giving parts of the proceedings an almost documentary feel. The only thing I can think of that’s anything like this part of the film in a movie is the much bigger barn raising sequence in the Hollywood production Witness (Peter Weir, 1985) which involves a considerable number of people and is a montage sequence with a rousing orchestral score rather than a major plot thread running through a narrative.

But what really makes the piece tick is the interplay between Tokarski and Summers with the film being constructed around the former first time actor while the latter, boasting a considerable string of credits mostly in TV series, turns in a tough, no-nonsense performance. Lane Bradbury as the mother is striking too, but her role is very much on the fringes of what is basically a two-handed narrative. The whole thing is surprisingly watchable and has the virtue of a minimal 82 minute running time.

Major Arcana had its world premier in the Raindance Film Festival on Thursday, September 27th and played again at 13.00 on Friday, September 28th. Watch the film trailer below:

Michael Haneke’s happy weekend in Britain

Posted on by victorfraga

An incredibly rare treat as part of the Picturing Austrian Cinema Symposium in Cambridge this past weekend: the appearance of double Palme D’or winner Michael Haneke for a post-screening Q&A alongside his most recent film, the divisive Happy End (2017). The crowd, eager for a glimpse of Austria’s most celebrated filmmaker, is abuzz. How will the man present himself? Will he be shy? Hostile? Bemused by his audience?

Confounding expectations, Haneke appears after the screening to be relaxed, casual even. Frederick Baker, Laura McMahon and J.D. Rhodes (University of Cambridge) provide a conversational atmosphere, while Dr Martin Brady (King’s College London) interprets for Haneke at an Olympian pace. Haneke complains of the cold as he removes his scarf, reclining into his chair to field audience questions, his face searching into the eyes of each questioner, while he jovially laughs off the more ridiculous assertions about his work. He isn’t afraid to give one word answers. He doesn’t want to talk too much about the political context of the film. But when someone grabs him, he’s off.

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The beginning of the End

I first saw Happy End (pictured above) last Christmas day with my family, a domestic mistake that we have all agreed not to speak of again. I only bring that up in the interest of full disclosure. Watching it on a big screen, however, is an entirely different, undeniably better experience. Haneke teases his TV project ‘If it happens,’ (rumours are he asked for too high a budget), when asked about stretching out a narrative over 10 hours, he calls it ‘not difficult, for me it is a return. I made my first film at 47 and before then I worked in TV.’ But from the sheer level of detail that he packs into his frames, I hope that we don’t see Haneke leave the big screen entirely.

Happy End rankled critics. In his review last year, our editor Victor Fraga called it ‘a little trite if you are familiar with Haneke’s filmography and cinematic trademarks…too ambitious and not fresh enough.’ For sure, it isn’t as neat as some of his other works. Happy End isn’t an ‘anti-crowd pleaser’ like The Piano Teacher and Amour (2001 and 2012, both pictured below, respectively), which can be read fairly easily (while still being intensely detailed), but with some more distance between the hype machine and the film, its pleasures rise closer to the surface.

The sidelining of the refugee context, which sits in the background of every scene until it comes crashing in like a wave on the Calais coast has, in the last year, become more chilling, as the British media in particular seems to have entirely forgotten the crisis in favour of distraction by the Brexit games. For Haneke, who conceived of the film 2-3 years before he shot it, the film is ‘not about a specific nation. It could as well have been set in England or Germany. It is not about migration as much as ego-centrism.’

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The man without a movie method

To a question that his films are full of scenes that are both seen and not seen, leaving out vital parts of the narrative, Haneke says that film is framed by the audience: this is usual for literature but not in film. When he writes he ‘describes the action itself, the exact object that will be depicted on camera, rather than ascribing any feeling or attempt at meaning to it.’ He says it is a question of how to show a feeling, rather than writing a script based on emotion. His next answer, about how he directs actors, also feeds into this Bressonian approach to filmmaking. Haneke calls acting reactive, about hard work, then pauses and says in English: “No method”. This is almost a sanding down of performance, which, in Happy End results in performances where the famous faces often do part of the work for us. The mere presence of Huppert brings a certain psychology to it, filling in the blanks that her few scenes hint toward.

His answer to a question about Facebook and social media is interesting. Is it all bad? “Idiotic. You cannot classify the medium itself as good or bad, only its use or misuse.” Haneke doesn’t use social media himself, but “you don’t need to have murdered someone to know how to depict it.” I wonder how this will impact his work going forward. Haneke’s famous use of the long shot, a surveillance camera aesthetic, is suited for the intrusive nature of social media. But Vine and Instagram promote shorter videos. Will his shot length begin to replicate this? Haneke repeatedly states that he ‘won’t skin the bear before he has shot it’ with regard to future projects, so only time will tell.

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It’s alright, he moves in mysterious ways

Haneke also confirms a reading that his horizontal camera pans, from right to left, are an intentional device to unsettle an audience used to a left to right movement. After Haneke refuses to clarify his comments on #MeToo, another audience member questions the potentially eroticised gaze in Happy End toward Eve, the sociopathic 13 year old protagonist played by Fantine Harduin. “I didn’t see her myself as an erotic figure in any particular way. But the interesting thing about her story, the story of her poisoning her mother. I of course leave it open as to whether that’s accidental or deliberate, but what’s interesting about that storyline is its the only part that is not fictional, that is based on real events.

The continues: “Some years ago I read about this, it’s a real case that had taken place in Japan where a 14-year-old girl had begun poisoning her mother, and put the details of this activity onto the internet. Everything else in the film is more or less fictional, but this isn’t of course. And to that extent I also leave this open as to whether that is an accident. Or whether she is simply trying to calm her mother down who is being rather irritating, and has simply overdone it. Either way, it is not a particularly nice situation, but what it does deal with is the generation conflict and thus is also addressing questions of puberty. So sexuality certainly plays a part in that but I didn’t perceive her as being specifically an erotic figure. At least, its not intentional that way, but if you felt it, then that’s fine by me.’

By answering the question in this way, is Haneke suggesting that we read into the psycho-sexual aspects of the storyline here? For a filmmaker who is often reticent to comment on the meaning of his own work, this is a big clue. He responds to a question about whether there are bad readings of his work in kind: “there are none. The work exists for the audience. Only a professional audience [critics] get it wrong. Discussion with an audience is better than critics; newspapers only sell ideology.”

After the Q&A Haneke is happy to chat with audience members (those who can speak German or French, at least!) and pose for photos. Far from the image of the grump, Haneke (pictured above, alongside our writer Ben Flanagan) is a sweet, attentive man, whose presence offered us the opportunity to reassess one of his most undervalued films.

A deep-dive into Austrian Cinema

Posted on by victorfraga

Away from the punting and tourists that characterise the surroundings of Cambridge, within the Gothic Revivalist buildings of Queens College, a cabal of academics spent the last weekend sharing, debating, and interrogating the 112 years of Austrian cinema.

The Picturing Austrian Cinema symposium has been taking place bi-annually since 2014. Founded by University of Cambridge’s Dr Frederick Baker, prominent filmmaker, journalist, and academic, along with co-convener Dr. Annie Ring (Lecturer in the School of European Languages, Culture and Society at University College London), they have pieced together a programme that covers a breadth of cinema concerns, and assembled a team of speakers with the rigour and expertise to really burrow into what constitutes Austrian cinema.

While most academic conferences can seem like closed off, exclusive affairs, Picturing Austrian Cinema takes pains to allow alternate entry points into film. This means that the floor is open to speakers beyond academia: practitioners, directors, and your humble film critic – they all share ideas, creating a sense of an Austrian canon beyond the accepted wisdom. I’m now desperate to seek out Die Migrantigen (Riahi, 2017; pictured below), for example, a commercial satire on hipsterdom that is yet to find a UK release. This all makes the event more inclusive, and holds it back from the quagmire of heavy theory which might detract from the question at hand, ‘What is the essence of Austrian cinema?’

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Framing the picture

Dr. Baker’s and Dr Ring’s method of asking participants to bring a single film frame to speak on for 12-15 minutes is intriguing. It whittles away the waffle and forces the speaker to concentrate on one specific moment of a film that the audience can zone in on. The most successful speakers exploit this, while some others give a more general talk on their chosen film. For a novice such as myself (Haneke obsession and a love of exiled Classic Hollywood auteurs aside), the single frame format enables a real injection of information, nurturing an environment of intense debate. You can hardly blame the crowd for a few in-jokes told in Austrian German. The panels include ‘Dreams and Walls’, which looks at theatricality, including topics like how costuming can depersonalise characters just as they teach us about the time and place (Dr. Rachel Palfreyman, University of Nottingham).

Another panel, ‘Contemporary and Future’, enters into ethical concerns about futurism through two films by Ulrich Seidl, and other contemporary Science Fiction such as Ruth Mader’s Life Guidance (2017, pictured below). A significant part of the event is the Austrian Film Institute Essay Prize, presented by Michael Haneke himself, won this year by Raphael Dernbach, whose essay on Homosapiens (Geyrhalter, 2017) is remarkable. Homosapiens is a chilling, ephemeral documentary-cum-Science Fiction film that imagines a world without humans. His essay cunningly places the film’s ‘anticipatory realism’ within an Austrian canon of detachment, alienation, and inherited trauma. Other panels include The Third Reich And Its Legacy, and Avant-garde.

The Heimatfilm of the 1950s is the tradition to which the speakers keep on returning. This was a welcome surprise – I had expected all the talk to focus on the ‘Feel-bad cinema’ schema assigned to Austrian cinema by American critics only familiar with the work of Haneke and Seidl. But the Austrian cinema contains multitudes.

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Happy closure with Haneke

On the Michael Haneke panel, papers include The Topography of the Apartment in Haneke’s Amour (2012, pictured at the top of tjhis article) by Dr. John David Rhodes, and The Uneasy Depiction of Race in Code Unknown (2001) by Dr. Leila Mukhida, both from the University of Cambridge. These speakers cover entirely different sides of a filmmaker who is often reduced to a single view of alienation, but placing these different viewpoints side by side allows for new ways of seeing the director. I talked on this panel about seeing and violence in Fritz Lang’s You Only Live Once (1937), offering a link between Haneke and film history. Haneke himself made a rare Q&A appearance after a screening of his divisive Happy End (2016). He was in fine, fiery spirit, which I’ll go into more detail on in another article.

Because it’s not just Haneke. Christiana Perschon presents an early cut of her funny, heartfelt new feature, Sie Ist Der Andere Blick (She is The Other Gaze, 2018), which gets to the heart of some of the topics discussed over the weekend through interviews with five women artists, and will premiere at The Viennale this October. Later, Dr. Claus Philipp presented behind the scenes footage from Die Kinder der Toten (The Children of the Dead), a zany, folkloric Horror shot on 8mm, based on the novel by the Austrian Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek.

With events such as this, I always wonder about accessibility – who is invited, why? I was in a privileged position as a writer for this website to be invited, and appreciate an insight into a corner of European cinema that I don’t usually get exposed to. Maybe the next step for an event as rich and bursting with potential as this is to open the floor to more public screenings. Introductions by speakers to Austrian cinema gems may be a way to enrich the cinema culture in Cambridge. One step towards this has been taken: with an opening of the gates beyond academics to practitioners, filmmakers, and critics. That cross-platform knowledge is a way to burrow into the essence of Austrian cinema. The next distinctive step will be a way to share these experiences with a larger audience. The interest is there, and so is the knowledge, so I hope this exceptional event continues to find ways of reconciling the two.

Meet the man behind the Black Divaz

Posted on by victorfraga

[dropcap]D[/dropcap]o you know what it feels like to be an Aboriginal drag queen? Well, you are about to find out. In the documentary Black Divaz, which opens the upcoming Native Spirit Film Festival (taking place between October 11th and 21st), six fantastic Aboriginal drag queens compete for the title of Miss First Nation pageant in Australia. The new queens of the desert are called Nova Gina, Isla Fuk Yah, Crystal Love, Josie Baker, Jojo and Shaniqua.

We have taken the opportunity to chat to the film director Adrian Russell Wills, an LGBTI Aboriginal man himself. He talks about the prejudice that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders people face (sadly, he argues that it’s increasing), challenging taboos, how cinema has helped to voice and to liberate a marginalised community, and why every single one of us should live out our lives at full throttle and full volume!

Don’t forget to click here and get your ticket right now!

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Victor Fraga – How was Black Divaz born? Where did the idea/impetus come from?

Adrian Wills Russell – Black Divaz was born from an initial call out on Facebook for expressions of interest to compete in the inaugural Miss First Nations Competition being held in Darwin in September 2017. Created by Queens The Ultimate Drag Crown, this event was the brainchild of Miss Ellaneous, aka Ben Graetz, and business partners Marzi Panne and Adriana Andrews. My understanding was that the impetus came from the “want” and the “need” for First Nations Drag queens to be seen and honoured in the same way mainstream drag culture is here in Australia and around the world. With the film Priscilla – The Queen of the Desert drag (Stephan Elliot, 1994) culture from down under had played a major role in the art from of drag becoming part of popular culture, this and then years later the onset of the television show Ru Paul’s Drag Race and Ru Paul’s career, people were starting to realise how drag queens reflected all of us, the way we want to see ourselves and the way we astre never brave enough to project outwardly for the rest of the world to receive.

Personally, I have also felt over my years on the gay scene that in Australia we still had a big problem with racism in the LGBTQI community and the fact that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders were seen as good for business (for bars, clubs and pubs) but behind our back we were ridiculed and ostrisised, often being made fun of by other non-indigenous drag artists. That is why for me Black Divaz was an opportunity I could not and would not pass up. Also, in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities there was and still can be a huge issue around homophobia, and transphobia. The suicide rate for Indigenous Australians are among the highest in the world, and in fact for some age groups it’s the highest. Now, how many of those statistics represent or are connected to homophobia / transphobia is difficult to say, but I feel like it is much higher than we even think. We needed to have the conversation in our communities, and in our families and a film like Black Divaz, hopefully can break down some of the barriers for that conversation and understanding to take place.

VF – Please tell us a bit more about the research with the Aboriginal communities, and how did you engage with them?

This was about a competition, and a group of drag artists / queens. I am also a gay Aboriginal man who has lived within and around the drag / trans community for many years. I felt like I knew and understood this film having researched it through my experiences, a lived experience. As with all our filmmaking, we sought permissions to film on the country in which we were filming, from speaking with the local Aboriginal land council, and the elders within those communities. But also, it’s important to state that the queens themselves spoke for their communities, and families by engaging in the competition and the film. Every single one of us, be it filmmakers or participants were making the film and competing for the same reasons, for the same goal. To bring more awareness and understanding and to celebrate and honour First Nations LGBTQI people, and the incredible struggle they endure in order to live their authentic selves, and their truth. And in this I refer to past, present and future generations of First Nation LGBTQI people.

VF – What was the most satisfying part of this cinematic journey for you as an artist?

ARW – The most satisfying part of the cinematic journey for me was the moment I took my seat at the Premiere Screening in Sydney, as part of the Sydney Queer Film Festival. Ask anyone who was in that room that night, there was something else happening in that cinema. It was like every single person in there had been destined to be there in that moment, to give the queens their love, their hearts and their endurance. The energy was unlike any other screening I have been a part of, and there were filmmakers in the room whose films have screened at the most prestigious festivals in the world and they too made particular mention of the audience and the screening.

Every single one of us was overwhelmed, so much so I still am processing the love in that room that night. We received two standing ovations, and for me as a gay Aboriginal man, I couldn’t have been prouder of the queens in our film. Their courage and rawness was a gift that had taken a lot from each of them to be in that place to give in and of that moment. And their gift will hopefully be a light in the dark for generations to come after we are long gone. But also, hopefully things change for the better and as they should.

VF – Did you encounter any resistance from the more conservative members of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait islanders community?

ARW – I didn’t encounter any resistance from anyone about our film, in fact quite the contrary. If there was any I didn’t hear it, and to be honest anything negative that people may have had to say was drowned out by the noise of thank you and appreciation for the queens courage in telling and sharing themselves in the film. if anything there was a sense of “about time”.

VF – What was the most challenging part of the experience?

ARW – The most challenging part of the experience, and in any filmmaking experience is what you learn about yourself. Particularly I find as a director. Being in the director’s seat, in my experience, illuminates all your strengths and weaknesses at once. What you are most best at is just as visible as your weakest parts. For some reason it takes the best of you and the worst of you to do this job. It’s something that I hope to get better at, or at least manage better but it’s also something that (I believe) is part of being an artist and pursuing something so unique in vision and in form. The artists that I admire in the world, and who have passed I feel this is obvious in their process as well.

VF – Aboriginal people still suffer from discrimination. Is crossdressing a tool for liberation and social integration?

ARW – I don’t really subscribe to the crossdressing part of this question, because for me that is too limiting and potentially diminishes what is happening within the art of drag. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders continue to suffer discrimination at an unacceptable level, and if anything it seems only to be getting worse. Whilst roads have been built between black and white in this country, the patronising manner in which First Nations people’s lives are managed and politicised is very concerning, and I don’t know if I can see a resolution coming in the near future.

These girls in our film highlight what courage looks like, and how it’s vital you don’t wait for an invitation to your life, you get out there and live it at full volume. You can see the vulnerability and self evaluation that is going on with the characters in the film, but what comes through strongest is endurance, resilience, and courage. The best social integration aspect to this film is it’s existence, and is it’s message. Fuck being asked to sit at the table, sit the fuck down and start the conversation! For me this film is a story about my hero’s, and that liberates me, my friends, my family and hopefully my community. Great question.

VF – What are you working on next?

ARW – I am very excited to be working on the screenplay for my feature debut (drama), which has been a long time coming, as it should. Again, it’s a story about another hero of mine. I don’t know what it is, but being Indigenous and Queer is like having a super power, and with that power comes this vision, and I can’t wait to share that vision with the world.

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Eoghan Lyng contributed to this interview.

The Comfort of Strangers

Posted on by victorfraga

It’s a profusion of talent: Paul Schrader directs a script penned by Harold Pinter, based on a novella written by Ian McEwan. The stellar cast includes Christopher Walken, Helen Mirren, Natasha Richardson and Everett. The sound score was created by David Lynch’s regular Angelo Badalamenti. To boot, the cinematography is signed by Dante Spinotti, who would go on to work on Michael Mann’s Heat and The Insider (1995 and 1999). Now you can catch the outcome on a shining Blu-ray reissue.

What could rightly have been a case of too many cooks spoiling the broth is instead a glorious atmospheric mystery, teeming with malice. If “foreigners in Venice getting more than they bargained for” was a subgenre with Don’t Look Now (Nicolas Roeg) and Death in Venice (Luchino Visconti, 1971) as its most recognisable champions, then The Comfort of Strangers would sit triumphantly next to them. This is a Venice drenched in decaying sunlight, internecine shadows and crooked buildings.

The plot is quite straightforward. A couple, Colin and Mary (Everett and Richardson) go to Venice in the hope of adding some spice into their hackneyed relationship. One late evening as they are seeking a snack, they bump into Robert (Walken), who invites them to his restaurant/bar. Later, they end up sleeping in his apartment overlooking the city, where they meet his strange and angst-ridden wife Caroline (Mirren). Robert circles the two visitors by stalking them and making up excuses to meet, always aided by his loyal and mostly housebound Caroline.

Walken’s performance is responsible for the film’s sense of mystery. Obsessed with his father, he repeats a strange monologue about his old man three times. He frequently mentions twhere his father and grandfather were buried. His apartment is littered with antique. Walken imbues his characters with a lingering sense of malice. He is charming, yet dangerous. He regards himself as intellectually superior, and therefore entitled to horrific deeds, expressed mostly through his obsessive relationship with the past.

His presence and patriarchal attitude towards both his wife and the visiting couple are stultifying. The collapse of the traditional power structures could trigger violence. Frustrated at his lack of influence in the modern world, he lashes out at whoever he can still hurt. He has contradictory feelings about sexuality. He expresses his profound hate of his homosexual tendencies at dinner, and yet seems to be entirely comfortable at the local gay bar.

The final denouement is very abrupt, borderline anti-climactic. The Comfort of Strangers sustains a remarkable sense of brooding evil throughout. The superb cinematography and art direction lend a helping hand: the contours of Venice with its never-ending alleyways and dark corners envelop and confound our protagonists. At one point, Robert gazes at people under a smoky neon-green light as he explains his relationship to his father to the couple. These visuals are repeated throughput the film, and they play a fundamental role in fleshing out our the creepy protagonist.

Pinter’s script is deeply cinematic, in no way inferior to his other films. He’s now firmly established as one of the most influential British playwrights of the last century. The director Schrader, on the other hand, has often received a bum rap from film critics. At times, he deserved it, as with the disjointed and lame The Canyons (2013). This is not the case with The Comfort of Strangers, which is on a par with the Marxist masterpiece Blue Collar (1978), the exquisite horror Cat People (1982) and the reflection on existentialism First Reformed (2017).

It’s lamentable that The Comfort of Strangers has been overlooked for nearly three decades, as it only achieved very limited distribution. Thankfully, the time to fix this has come. A dual-format reedition of the film is out on Monday, September 24th. The special features is a brand new commentary by Paul Schrader, recorded just last month exclusively for the BFI, and cinematographer Dante Spinotti has specially written a piece for the accompanying booklet.

The year of 2018 marks the 10th anniversary of the death of Harold Pinter, one of the most important and influential British playwrights of the last century.

Mandy

Posted on by victorfraga

WARNING: THIS REVIEW MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS

Around half way through Mandy, the sophomore feature film from visionary Italian-Canadian director Panos Cosmatos, the reclusive Caruthers (Bill Duke) explains to vengeful Red Miller (Nicolas Cage) that the people he intends to hunt down and kill for brutally murdering his girlfriend have had their minds warped and twisted by some powerful LSD. There is no humanity in these sick souls. One might be thinking that as this scene plays out and Caruthers gives us the only tidbit of expedition the film offers that the ticket purchased from the kiosk to watch Mandy has also been laced with some bad acid.

Mandy exists as a headfuck, a hallucinatory trip, but it’s one worth taking and experiencing in all its lucid glory. The action takes place in 1983 in the Pacific Northwest of America that seems devoid of people, at least normal people. But we know this is no alternate reality, however much Mandy believes in the supernatural or the otherworldly. President Ronald Reagan appears on the radio rallying against drugs and pornography. If Mandy had been released at the time of Reagan, the moral majority would have flipped at its bent vision of religion and God. Still, the woods, mountains, and lakes are bathed in a fog of dreamy light and aura that offers a sense that weirdness is a norm in these parts.

Red and his girlfriend Mandy Bloom (a bewitching Andrea Riseborough) live in a rural retreat, a secluded cabin by Crystal Lake. Red works as a lumberjack whilst Mandy mostly hangs around the house drawing and reading wild novels of fantasy and as we later learn works in a local roadside store. Mandy is a doomed character. She seems to sense this and carries the knowledge that she will suffer an inevitable gruesome death with her. A scar under her eye hangs like a permanent streak from a lifetime of cried tears. A freakish cult, known as the Children of the New Dawn travels though the wilderness and when their alluring leader Jeremiah Sand (played to wicked and perverted perfection by Linus Roache) spots Mandy on the roadside he becomes instantly intrigued by her. He orders his minions to kidnap and bring her before him to be initiated within the cult as a servant and witness to his greatness.

Up to this point the film has unfolded in a slow and delicate pace. Conversations between characters have hung in the air and attributed nothing to the direction of the narrative accept to act as backdrops for the film’s genuinely gorgeous use of colour and cinematography. But the summoning of a weird convert of mutated bikers – think Hellraiser (Clive Barker, 1987) on wheels – by the cult’s henchmen to kidnap Mandy and dish out a beating to Red begins the film’s ascent towards its weirdo high. Mandy is brought before Jeremiah whom. He plays a folky recording of his own making to her Manson-esque fashion. It turns out Jeremiah was once a promising singer/songwriter. Anything sound familiar?

Although succumbing to the bad acid (and an odd wasp sting) that she is given by the converts, Mandy laughs in his face (and at his flaccid penis) and rejects his cult and his sexual advances. Jeremiah runs out of the room humiliated. Instead of further urging, the cult decide to burn Mandy alive and in front of a chained up Red. The scene is genuinely disturbing as the bagged up body of Mandy sways and writhes as the flames take hold as Red looks on. As the cult members leave Red is left to die chained up and gagged. Red frees himself by allowing the wire’s to cut into his wrists and once he crawls back to the house he stares at the television as a creepy commercial for Goblin Macaroni and Cheese plays. His life has fallen apart yet he still can’t pull away from a good commercial spot.

He then necks a bottle of vodka he finds in the bathroom and pours it over his wounds to stifle and cleanse the bleeding wounds. His soul however is shattered beyond repair.

This scene in the bathroom is a hard watch, though not for the reasons you might think. Shot from a single camera and a fixed wide shot, we watch in gruesome voyeuristic detail as Red moves from sobbing to shouting to screaming and back in only a matter of seconds. The scene is fraught with emotion, yet this scene is also played out with Cage wearing a tiger emblazoned t-shirt and a pair of soiled tighty whites. Any other actor might have found the nexus of emotion and seriousness in the characters situation to play it straight, but with Cage as Red it is played out with delirious lunacy.

We enter in the half of the film in which Red seeks revenge on those that have wronged him. He locates an old friend, the aforementioned Caruthers, who loads him up with a crossbow and an assortment of swords and blades.

Unlike the ethereal first half of the film that moves at a snail’s pace, the last half shifts briskly and features some bloody horror tropes that are reminiscent of the Hellraiser franchise and Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead trilogy, especially the chainsaw dual between Red and a Children of the New Dawn thug which pulls heavily from Army of Darkness (1992) and of course Dennis Hopper’s maniac avenger in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (Tobe Hooper, 1986). Red is victorious and his revenge against Jeremiah is complete when he tracks the leader down to his church and crushes his skull with his bare hands. With his mission over Red imagines his Mandy sitting beside him as he drives away from the horror. The maniacal grin on Red’s blood soaked face indicates that his mind has fully gone to the dogs.

Mandy is a blood soaked revenge caper, but its exquisite palette of colour and trippy use of lens flare takes it far beyond the b-movie shock horror it might have become. Lens flare, also known as panaflares refers to the process of aiming small LED lights into the barrel of the lens, The aesthetic is truly pleasing and immersive, conjuring a kind of hypnosis that draws the viewer in slowy and subtly. The trashing violence and destabilising, sometimes comedic performance from Cage shocks the viewer out of the fever dream for a moment, but the pauses of calm bring you back in easily.

Nonetheless, there is an otherworldly quality to the film that grounds it in the weird sci-fi novels that Mandy reads and the Heavy Metal genre and Dungeon and Dragons influences that bestow the film. Reviewers have commented on the idea that the film is akin to an Iron Maiden record sleeve coming to life. I’d like to picture something more modern such as King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’s recent concept records coming to life. King Crimson’s beautiful Starless opens the film as well as a title card of the last statement from death row inmate Douglas Roberts: “When I die, bury me deep, lay two speakers at my feet, put some headphones on my head and rock and roll me when I’m dead.”

The mutant biker gang might’ve added to this supernatural quality. When they are first summoned to do the dirty work of the cult they arrive in a red mist of dew and exhaust fumes. They appear to be from another dimension. When Red sets out on his killing spree he invades the gang’s domain. Except their domain is an abandoned house with discarded takeaway boxes and beer bottles littering the floors and tables. One gang member sits admiring the rhythms of seventies soft-core pornography. The bikers are clearly human, but so perverse and drug addled that the form no longer seems familiar. Their biker leathers seem fused to their skin. They are an odd bunch.

Speaking of odd, let’s take a moment to appreciate Nicolas Cage. His performance has been described as “wild” and “feral” and “overblown”. This is a fair assessment. Cage employs his most riotous tendencies here. We’ve seen only glimpses of this madness in films such as Drive Angry (Patrick Lussier, 2011), The Wicker Man (Neil Labute, 2006), and most recently in the comedy horror Mom and Dad (Brian taylor, 2017) and Paul Schrader’s gonzo Dog Eat Dog (2016), but in Mandy we see it come to fruition and it’s glorious. Cage is wrathful and yet incorporates intricate moments of subtle humour to elevate the insanity. Take for example the moment Red brutally dispatches a member of the mutant biker gang. He slashes away at his enemy and after coming out victorious, scoops a wad of cocaine up in his hand and gleefully snorts the lot. The performance is pure gonzo theatrics. Does it steal the film away from his co-stars and the importance of the narrative? Yes, no, and maybe.

It is also worth noting that Red actually has very few lines of dialogue. His conversations with Mandy mostly has him sleepily responding, whilst the conveying of emotion and his hack and slash revenge trip is mostly a bunch of hoots, groans, laughs, and cries. He’s given a few off kilter one-liners (“You ripped my favourite shirt!”) and any monologue (“Only one I believe”) is a stunted and jilted mess of incoherence.

There is another character in the film that you won’t find in the casting credits: the soundtrack. The last film score entry in composer Jóhann Jóhannsson’s incredible discography is a fitting, though sad end to a career that placed the soundtrack back in its rightful place as a vital component of a films aura. The music used in Mandy is a symphony of simmering ethereal synth and booming, decaying electric guitar. It literally shakes the screen. It’s a masterpiece that plays brilliantly by itself, yet take it away from the film and suddenly Mandy loses its unearthly quality. The soundtrack is a solid movement that pushes and prods the emotion within the film. If not accompanied by the film, it’s best experienced alone and in absolute darkness with a decent set of headphones.

Mandy is a very dirty and highly effective movie due to many factors: Cage’s performance, the outstanding soundtrack, the eeriness and dread of the first half, and the rage and madness of the second half. Yet as a whole it clearly belongs to director Panos Cosmatos. Cosmatos has created a vision that, while inspired by grimy VHS nastiness and late night sci-fi oddities, is truly singular. Cosmatos’s masterful approach aligns him with Kubrick and Lynch in delivering perfectly believable and fully realised worlds and characters that operate within their own laws of physics.

Mandy shows as part of the BFI London Film Festival taking place between October 10th and 21st – click here for our top 10 dirty picks from the event. It’s out in cinemas on Friday, October 12th. Out on DVD, Blu-ray and VoD on Monday, October 29th.

Blindspotting

Posted on by victorfraga

This a film that has a lot to say, with detail, subtlety and poetic wit. It made me laugh out loud and also flinch with alarm. The central spine is the relationship between best friends since childhood Colin (Daveed Diggs) and Miles (Rafael Casal). This relationship sits within a story of the changing neighbourhood of Oakland, California and the lethal relationship the police have with black men in America.

The first thing that draws you into this story is the visual and vocal panache of a style that realises this tightly wound genius of a script (Daveed Diggs/Rafael Casal). The editor (Gabriel Fleming) deserves a special mention here. Scenes are beautifully cut through with tight cut away shots of doors slamming, feet on truck pedals, faces on wall murals and the juxtaposition of regular and ‘hipster gentrified’ housing.

It is impossible to define a ‘type’ for this movie, we have a touch of’ buddy movie’ with a generous helping of ‘right of passage’, via social commentary that happens without us being aware of it.

The action is framed around the final three days that Colin has on probation, in a bail hostel and confined inside a postcode and a curfew. We watch a long poem akin to Greek mythology, where the hero must overcome obstacles and challenges in order to make it out of the Labyrinth. Miles is Theseus. The everyday conversations had by the two friends in rhyming ‘bars’ are wonderful and fit into the flow of the story succinctly. The jump cuts and visual effects during Miles’ morning runs give us a deep down picture of his internal battles.

His first personal battle relates to the fear of authorities that prevents him from interfering when a police officer murders a running unarmed man. The macro battle of black men facing the daily possibility of being gunned down by an officer of the ‘law’ while going about their regular business. This second struggle is highlighted as Miles partner Ashley (Jasmine Cephas Jones) watches her small son Sean (Ziggy Baitinger) on the couch while the newsreel of the same police murder plays on TV and the horror of the moment when Sean picks up something his father thought was hidden.

Colin’s realisation that although Miles has always been there for him, his friend’s violent tendencies are also a barrier to him moving forward in his life. Miles and Val (Janina Gavankar) still love each other deeply and their rift remains while he continues to make wrong choices. The normal family life of Miles, Ashley and Sean and how Colin’s place within this family are a joy to watch. The wisdom and beauty of Colin’s Mama Liz (Tisha Campbell-Martin) and the banter of the workers at the removal firm are all things we want to see on-screen. A regular urban community getting along in the way that all city dwellers understand, where difference rubs along together in the daily grind. The scene where Miles and Colin box up art dealer Wayne Knight’s (Patrick) pictures is a joy.

Colin’s final dilemma is told in a tour de force rap speech which has the viewer on the edge of their seat. We (viewers) want justice but not at the expense of the freedom of our hero. The struggle in this scene is real here: we see it on Colin’s face and we experience it viscerally through his poetry. As he explains to Officer Molina (Ethan Embry) ‘You used to hearing a nigger rapping’. This film has brought us right up and personal with a struggle that is real for people on this planet each day of their lives. Our ‘blindspotting’ as an audience is challenged. Should we remain instinctively blind or should we challenge our preconceptions of the world and the people we meet?

Blindspotting is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, October 5th. Out on DVD and Blu-ray on Monday, February 4th (2019)

Tehran Taboo

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Here’s a thing. Packed with political, sexual and social subject matter, this is a live action film shot in Tehran. Only it’s neither live action nor shot in Tehran. The content rendered shooting on location pretty much impossible. The live action is actors shot against green screen with a view to building the location into the film later on. Then it’s treated by a process called rotoscoping which, despite having been around for the best part of a century, is not that well known outside of animation and movie special effects circles.

Rotoscoping is basically tracing images of e.g. actors off sequential single frames of film to retreat them as drawings in animation – think of the Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds sequence in Yellow Submarine (Geroge Dunning, 1968). It was invented and patented by legendary animator Max Fleischer for his Out Of the Inkwell trick film shorts (1918-27) featuring Koko the Clown. More recently, Richard Linklater employed a computer enhanced version of the technique on Waking Life (2001) and Philip K. Dick adaptation A Scanner Darkly (2006).

In Tehran Taboo, the locations are provided by a combination of drawn images and 3D elements which have been composited with the rotoscoped cast within the computer. Not only is the overall effect thoroughly convincing, the film has a hyperreal aesthetic which straight live action doesn’t. There’s a compelling, almost hypnotic quality to it.

A snowbound, midwinter opening with a car kerb-crawling lines of prostitutes sets the scene. Life under fundamentalist Islamic rule seems to regard women as inferior citizens who must get their husband’s written permission to be allowed to do anything. No such bureaucratic checks exist for the men, although as suggested by the scene where a man is taken away by police from a park where he’s been holding hands with a woman, everyday life can be far from easy for them, too.

The three-handed plot concerns three women. Pari (Elmira Rafizadeh) is a prostitute doing her best to raise her young boy as a single mum. She dispenses sexual favours to an aging judge as a means of getting her son past an officious, low level female bureaucrat who is refusing him admission to the school in the area into which Pari and son have just moved.

The judge puts Pari up in a vacant flat he happens to own where she makes friends with respectable housewife and mum-to-be Sara (Zar Amir Ebrahimi) whose hardline husband is refusing to sign the form to allow his wife to work during her pregnancy. One evening, larking about with Sara and slightly drunk, Pari undertakes as a prank call to the building’s caretaker and suggest a rendezvous. She does this on Sara’s phone which will eventually have dire consequences for the latter.

Meanwhile, a third woman Donya (Negar Mona Alizadeh) visits an underground dance club where she has sex with a musician Babak (Arash Mirandi) in the men’s room. However, she’s due to get married very soon and needs to prove her virginity to her husband. This requires an expensive operation for which she insists Babak must pay. So he sets about finding out about either this operation or possible alternatives to it.

Like Pari’s son taking delight in dropping water bombs from his balcony onto unsuspecting innocents below, the men here mostly game the system and have everything their own way. The women, however, have a much harder time of it, wherever they fit (or don’t fit) in the social spectrum. Ironically for a system that purports to uphold sexual abstinence or monogamous relationship, the woman that fares best here is the worldly-wise prostitute while the respectable, faithful housewife who makes one accidental minor slip finds herself in an ever worsening, no win situation culminating in a devastating rooftop finale involving a phoenix costume and a camera held by Pari’s astonished son.

If the rotoscoping process adds anything, it ups the visual ante producing the movie equivalent to reading a graphic novel. But the film stands on the merit of its writing and strong performances from its highly effective cast. See it – and be reminded of the freedoms we in the West have that are all too easily taken for granted.

Tehran Taboo is out in the UK on Friday, October 5th. Out on VoD on Monday, January 7th (2018).

Burkinabé Rising 

Posted on by victorfraga

Politics and art mix in Burkinabè Rising, a deep dive into the way culture informs, comments upon and even provokes societal change. Looking at how Burkina Faso has changed since the popular uprising of 2014, it is a sprawling mosaic of a movie that seems to take in the whole country in its generous, inquisitive approach.

The key event is the 2014 ousting of Blaise Compaoré, considered by many to have led the country over the past 27 years in an undemocratic fashion. He took over from the pan-African revolutionary Thomas Sankara, who is widely considered to be Africa’s answer to Che Guevara (for one thing, he sells as many T-shirts in that region). More an African icon than a mere Burkinabé mortal, the spirit of Sankara is constantly evoked in this restless look at the country’s contemporary art and culture.

Using the ousting of Compaoré as a pivotal event, Burkinabè Rising shows how the surrounding art world helped to articulate the resistance, taking in everything from contemporary dance to reggae music to clandestine film festivals. From famous rap artists on the front lines of the protest, to woodworkers using traditional methods to create masks for tribes, no stone is left unturned in its all-encompassing approach.

By not really focusing on any one person or movement, Burkinabè Rising argues that everyone played a part in the country’s social change, showing that although leaders may point the way, it is up to all people to stand up and make a difference. With a remarkable 27 different ethnic groups existing within the country — many sharing similarities with surrounding countries such as Mali and Ghana — Burkina Faso is a model of how to bridge divides in search of a common purpose.

At first the movie seems like it is entirely content to depict a man’s world, but the women step in halfway through to give their version of events. There are feminist activists in the country who smartly see the revolution as a chance to gain larger equality, speaking about the need for contraception, women’s education, and entering the workforce, giving the film a contemporary urgency beyond its primary artistic concerns.

Most importantly, Korean-Brazilian director Iara Lee — who considers herself not just a director but an activist –doesn’t editorialise at all, allowing the people of Burkina Faso to speak for themselves. So many visions of African culture are seen through the lens of the (usually, white) director’s own personal experience — by avoiding narration, the Burkinabè people can actually tell their own stories, making the movie that much stronger for it. Perhaps more editing is needed to give the movie more narrative bite, but as an introduction on how to resist, and how to use art as a primary vehicle for change, Burkinabé Rising more than exceeds its aims.

At the end of the film we see that the struggle for true freedom continues, only now they must contend with transnational companies such as Bayer Monsanto — wanting to inject locally produced crops with GMO products, thus destroying local industries— instead of ruthless leaders like Compaoré. As this film and 2014’s Poverty, Inc (Michael Matheson Miller) show, African countries want to do it for themselves; now is the time for the West to step back and allow nations to work by themselves, something reflected in the film’s unobtrusive narrative approach, which perhaps stylistically limiting is the far more ethical approach to these types of subjects. Ultimately, it’s a true inspiration to countries that have languished under poor leadership for far too long, in the process laying out the blueprint for further resistance.

Burkinabé Rising shows at the Native Spirit Film Festival, taking place in London between October 10th and 21st. Click here for more information and also in order to book your ticket now!

The Captain (Der Hauptmann)

Posted on by victorfraga

The sounds of laboured breathing disrupt the peaceful image of an empty field. From the opening of Robert Schwentke’s The Captain, we are introduced to a man facing desperate circumstances. We witness the film’s protagonist Willi Herold (Max Hubacher), pursued by his compatriots, the sound of a horn striking up the parallels of blood sport, the jeep and bullets in place of the horses and hounds. In this moment the contemplation of the violence man has brought upon God’s garden is evoked.

Set in the final two weeks of World War II, Herold, a young German soldier fleeing for his life comes across an abandoned vehicle on the roadside, inside of which is a Nazi captain’s uniform. Presented with this opportunity, our protagonist begins his impersonation of an officer that soon sees him take on a monstrous persona. It is a choice that brings him closer to those he is trying to flee, than an escape from his plight.

Schwentke uses the surrounding peril to immerse us in his character’s desperation, and even in the guise of a captain, the tension is ratcheted up. Glances and subtle gestures of other characters spark that feeling of dread that they have seen behind the impersonation, to that truth that bonds us to Herold. While our sympathy is almost immediately granted to this stranger trying to outrun death, in the shadow of war and who can conquer whose violence, the potency of this narrative is fittingly the conflict of an individual’s morality versus his survival instinct.

The Captain is a troubling film, owing to its moral vacuum in which the imperative for us to make moral judgements is not absent, but is significantly diminished. We see our projection of sympathy not reciprocated by Herold towards other deserters, his fear conquering any moral resolve he may possess. In all likelihood the director is critiquing the world the individual inhabits as an influential force, but the events in the film are of the inhumane selfishness and the drive of self-preservation. What is striking is the way in which perilous desperation evolves into entrapment. It is the act of keeping intact the legitimacy of his impersonation that therein prevents exposure, yet that inevitably requires the fear-riddled youth trying to outrun death to transform into the monstrous.

The troubling aspect of the drama is our passivity to his immoral choices that claims the lives of many, who come to represent the murder of the self – that fearful youth we first met. If we look back on the barbarous chapters of history, of war, and the casualty of innocence, then Herold is representative of the metaphorical versus the literal death. This echoes the belief of a pause in existence, in which a country, Germany for example under The Third Reich, ceased to exist. By its conclusion however, The Captain itself evolves to look at how we are authors of our own identity, Herold an example of rebirth or rather rediscovery of old selves as much as he is symbolic of a type of metaphorical death.

What the director has crafted is an example of that visceral juxtaposition of beauty and the monstrous. While its soul may be ugly, the monochrome image brings to the horror, the madness and the slaughter a crisp clean look that casts it with an aesthetic beauty. This appeal only compounds those troubling feelings of moral passivity, yet there is a skill in Schwentke’s pictorial orchestration. For example, the way Herold occupies the car, from first sitting in the backseat to standing recalls archival footage of Adolf Hitler. The car communicates the theme of the metaphorical death, contrasting so starkly to that first image of him in peril.

The term ugly is a misappropriation, rather what the drama depicts is the tragedy of one’s loss of humanity. By retaining a composition of striking beauty in its aesthetic execution, this creates a visceral friction with our moral conscience that is almost almost silenced. Of course, it is nigh impossible to wholly remove an audience’s moral inclinations as the heritage of storytelling has been structured around morality, going back to the ancient world. The fact that we do question the character’s choices, or rather our own moral passivity as a response, lends a disconcerting feeling of having lost touch with oneself.

The Captain is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, September 21st. On VoD from Monday, October 1st.