It can’t be easy living as Simon Pegg’s brother, so fair play to Mike Beckingham for choosing a genre nowhere to be found in his sibling’s wheelhouse. He plays the affable Robert Atkinson, a prosperous banker battling a broken heart. In a moment that eerily recalls the opening moments of Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), Robert walks away with a large sum of the bank’s money.
He lives in a world of borrowed goods, none of them belonging to or depending on him. He shares his bed with a married woman, he borrows from a brother who belittles him and gambles away the money he has worked so hard to steal. Drowning in his own self pity, Robert stumbles upon an unlikely aide (played by Togo Igawa). He’s told that if he flies from London to Amsterdam with a mystery briefcase, he will be rewarded with more money than he can spend. Just as Robert leaves to accomplish this seemingly simple crusade, he’s told his life will be on the line.
Beckingham is magnetic, even cutting through some embarrassingly written dialogue with grace. Apropos to convention, Robert doesn’t find his adulterous affair as romantically rewarding as he might have expected. Like many young men, he tries to hide the pain away with the light of a fiery cigarette. The Brit is a more solid actor than his better known brother, but the word-heavy script could have done with one of Simon Pegg’s zesty re-writes. Nigel Barber, co-starring as a garrulous American security man, stumbles through some needlessly over-written exposition as he details the potential terrorists who could be sitting on the plane to Amsterdam. Elsewhere, the scene implements the lame “loud mouthed American” gag that prohibits Robert from falling asleep.
Yet there are moments of genuine paranoia. Robert, unaware of what he might be carrying in his briefcase, searches all over the Dutch airport for any sign of immediate danger. While catching a taxi, he speaks with a DEA agent chasing down heroin smugglers. And when he drinks a glass of wine, gifted to him by his hotelier, the effects knock him completely unconscious. That’s Vera (Maryam Hassouni), the titular host, a complex woman with a taste for danger. She’s kooky, crazy, a little contrived. She cuts cheese and bread with a battle knife, while we the audiences ask if it’s the bread or Robert’s neck she intends to cut. Yet behind this veneer is another damaged character, caught in her own trapped world. Ideally, as a feminist apotheosis, the film should about her, not Robert, but Hassouni is very good nonetheless.
Which can’t be said of the film’s uneven tone. There’s one torture scene, that I won’t be committing to print, that feels nauseatingly out of place. Vera spuriously finds a dagger sickeningly close to her eyeballs in one of the film’s most sensationalist moments. Amidst all these gratuitous moments, the film suddenly remembers it’s a drugs caper and the action returns to London.
So, it’s hard to say if this is either a good or even a focused movie, but it does have an extraordinarily focused lead performance. Mike Beckhingham has proven he’s very much his own man, and should now be judged on his talents, not his family’s, alone.
The comparison to Hitchcock’s 1960 classic in the first paragraph of this review was a random one. The Host is a reversed and twisted version of Psycho, but I can’t tell you more without spoiling the plot.
The Host is available on all major VoD platforms from Friday, April 17th.
How do you sell a fragrance in movies? Moving pictures have occasionally dabbled with sense of smell over the years. At the tackier end of the market is so-called ‘scratch and sniff’ technology, famously exploited by US schlockmeister John Waters to film Polyester (1981) in ‘Odorama’. European director Tom Tykwer made a film about fragrances with his arthouse crime movie Perfume: The Story Of A Murderer (2006) in which the central character is blessed with a superb olfactory sense and spends his life searching for the ultimate scent.
And then there are the Brothers Quay whose short film Wonderwood (2010) is ostensibly a commissioned ad for Comme des Garçons’ eponymous fragrance but to all intents and purposes a bona fide Quay Brothers short that sits happily with their wider body of work.
Although they’ve made two live action feature films – Institute Benjaminta, or This Dream People Call Human Life (1995) and The Piano Tuner of EarthQuakes (2005) – the Quay Brothers are best known for their numerous short films. Essentially made using stop-motion animation, these are a far cry from the character-driven films that generally characterise that medium (think: Nick Park’s Wallace And Gromit films or, going further back, the animated beasts and mythical creatures that populate the live action special effects films of Ray Harryhausen such as Jason And The Argonauts, 1963).
Exploring character through animation isn’t really the Quays’ thing; their interest lies in taking the viewer into strange, dark and magical environments. In The Cabinet Of Jan Švankmajer (1984; pictured below; originally commissioned as sizeable inserts for a documentary about the eponymous Czech surrealist and animator) they animate a feather quill dancing around on its nib point like a skater on ice and a four section, folding wooden ruler rotating a map of Praha (Prague) as if the ruler were a pair of arms belonging to an unseen reader of the map.
Elsewhere the same film also features a doll child laying his head on a table so that when his wig comes off to reveal an empty cranium, all its contents – a series of objects including stuffing, a comb and a simple toy motorbike – can be examined by a mechanical figure representing the inquisitive Švankmajer. The twins’ imagery isn’t macabre, exactly, but there is about it a definite dark edge.
Street Of Crocodiles (1986; pictured at the bottom) may well be their highest profile short. Back in the 1980s it played London cinemas as support to a feature film which is today forgotten in the mists of time. Spittle from the lips of a live action actor’s sets in motion a system of pulleys and mechanisms while the actor cuts a thread with an ancient pair of scissors to release a tailcoat-clad puppet into a rundown and threatening, off-coloured, urban world.
It’s a place where screws reverse out of the ground and wilfully roll away picking up the dust as they go and pocket watches open to reveal themselves as containers of raw red meat. Both a sense of physical corruption and decay and an undeniable Eastern European sensibility pervade the whole thing, as they do all their films.
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Crossing the pond
The Quay twins grew up in Norristown, Pennsylvania, a town near Philadelphia with a large European immigrant population. Their resultant interest in European culture was boosted at Philadelphia’s College of the Arts where Stephen studied film and Timothy illustration. Here they were exposed to the world of Polish poster art in general and the work of Jan Lenica and Walerian Borowczyk in particular.
Just as these two Polish artists used that medium as a springboard to animated filmmaking (and, in the case of Borowczyk, live action), so did the US-born Quays by way of London’s prestigious Royal College Of Art. Other influences, all European, included writers Franz Kafka, Bruno Schulz and Robert Walser, composers Leszek Jankowski, Zdeněk Liška and Karlheinz Stockhausen, artists Giuseppe Archimbaldo and Honoré & Jean-Honoré Fragonard, and animators Wladislaw Starewich and the aforementioned Jan Švankmajer.
Despite the twins’ protests that their artistic sensibilities were pretty much fully formed by the time they discovered Švankmajer in the early 1980s, he is probably the artist with which more than any other they’re most readily associated.
Towards the end of the 1970s following a brief period of living in the Netherlands, the Quays joined with former fellow RCA student Keith Griffiths who has continuously acted as their producer under his Koninck Studios banner ever since, with the Brothers setting up and operating out of their studio production space in Southwark, London.
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The world of publicity
This was the latter part of the British commercials boom that aided the early careers of film directors Adrian Lyne, Ridley Scott and others. To pay the rent and allow them to make their more personal short films, the Quays too took on commercials work, chalking up such clients as Doritos, Dulux Wood Protection, Fox Sports, Honeywell, ICI, Murphy’s Instant Stout, Nikon, Rice Krispies, Walkers Crisps and the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. Alongside Bristol’s Aardman Animations, they also contributed a section to the widely-seen pop video for Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer.
Ad agencies who commission commercials on behalf of clients usually take a fairly hands-on approach to film production companies, with imagery locked down at script and/or storyboard stage to make sure the client is happy with what they’re getting. Recognising the twins’ highly idiosyncratic, creative leanings, Rei Kawakubo and Adrian Joffe of Comme des Garçons opted for a very different tack. In 2010, prior to launching Wonderwood, a new fragrance for men which featured among other things sandalwood, Virginia cedar and cypress, they contacted the Quays to make a commercial for the fragrance. The brief was – well, you know about the kingdom of wood… run with it. Unsurprisingly, the twins took up this generous offer since it basically commissioned them to make a Quay Brothers short.
As part of their daily production ritual, the brothers sprayed and walked into the perfume to get a feel of what it was about. Further inspiration came from past or present pieces of wood some of which they’d kept under their beds for the best part of a quarter of a century. If there was a kingdom of wood, the issue then was, how should they approach it?
The brothers fell back on the well-worn cinematic device of the observer or onlooker who looks through a peephole to access a mysterious, secret world. Because their filmic medium is stop-frame animation, that means the character had to be a three-dimensional stop-motion puppet. All we ever see of him, however, is his eyes and nose and occasionally his mouth cropped by the edge of frame, his head sometimes moving before we’ve even got a good look at those facial features (although we do momentarily see the full face a couple of times, including right at the end of the film).
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Smells of secret spirit
This observer figure is never more than that: there is no attempt whatsoever to develop him as a character: he’s no more than a furtive, barely glimpsed presence – and only a face at that. However, since he represents us, the viewer, this person looking at the strange world and wanting to know more about the scents associated with it, he scarcely needs to be any more than that. The real show is elsewhere, in the forest itself.
The mysterious, secret world of the forest is itself to all intents and purposes a character. The term ‘forest’ is misleading, for the viewed environment is broken up into various smaller sections by the twins’ mise-en-scène.
A sheet of cloth is pulled back as if by invisible hands to reveal a surface strewn with pinecones out of which grow strong, green plant forms. A strangely curved, four-sided frame contains patterns that move away like theatrical curtains to reveal fruits, pinecone stems topped by rounded cones like an all-wooden equivalent of a tree complete with full-blown foliage. The segmented surfaces of the cones undulate as the images are manipulated via some sort of visual trickery. Red and cream coloured, lengthy forms fall through dark space to land on an area like leafless tree stumps shorn of branches covering a patch of ground.
Those familiar with the work of Czech Surrealist animator Jan Švankmajer will recognise a borrowed editing trope. In many of his shorts, Švankmajer will show rapid fire, serial close-ups of an object such as, say, a piece of hessian to both give an impression of that object and make its presence felt within the filmic flow. In Wonderwood, the Quays treat the flat elements functioning like a screen within the curved, four-sided frame in much the same way.
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Unorthodox format
It’s tempting to use the word ‘narrative’ rather than flow, but like those of the Quays Švankmajer’s films themselves sometimes deal in non-narrative episodes and/or ideas. That said, the Quays’ films often have about them the element of the wilfully obscure, an element in which they seem to take a perverse delight, far more so than the rather more narratively-inclined Švankmajer.
Around the upright pine cone constructed ‘trees’ and other vegetation hover birds somewhere between a hummingbird with its hovering motion and a woodpecker with its beak periodically hammering repeatedly into wood to make segments fall to the ground below, the hammering reinforced on the soundtrack by rat-tat-tat-tat-tat rhythms in composer Timothy Nelson’s delicate yet lush, accompanying soundtrack music.
Finally, the various wood fruits and forms turn into flat shapes which move around to form a parquet floor- already glimpsed as a pulsating pattern – with the different coloured wood types going to make the geometrical pattern thereupon, over which rolls a green comb as if on some strange journey of discovery. The orange-y red and yellow curtain falls and the puppet head, which has been watching all this throughout, basks as if in the glow of what it has just been watching.
You might not get all this out of a single viewing of Wonderwood, but then the Quay’s works aren’t conceived so much as single viewing pieces as films to be watched again and again over a long period. To do that, your best bet is to get hold of the superb UK Blu-ray that the BFI released in 2016 entitled Inner Sanctums – Quay Brothers: The Collected Animated Films 1979 – 2013 which contains all the shorts, Wonderwood included. (An earlier BFI release on DVD, whilst also excellent, only goes up to 2003.)
The UK Blu-ray also contains numerous other essential filmic and written bits and pieces including the short documentary Quay (2015) by Christopher Nolan (feted director of Memento, 2000, The Dark Knight, 2008, Inception, 2010 and Dunkirk, 2017) which provides an excellent introduction to the Quays’ work.
Wonderwood is a commercial for the perfume of that name by Comme des Garçons:
The title of this film – and the novel it’s based on – refers to a moment in which a peasant catches a bird, covers it with paint and releases it to the flock circling above. When the bird rejoins them, its altered appearance causes the group to swipe it to death. Meanwhile, the peasant observes with a gruff chuckle, amused by his casual sadism. This is the grim metaphor of The Painted Bird, a Holocaust film that meditates on prejudice, cruelty and just about every negative human instinct one can think of.
The story, allegedly autobiographical, follows a young boy leading a nomadic existence in a slew of Eastern European backwaters during the Second World War. Separated from his parents, he meanders from village to village, hissed at and beaten by almost everyone he encounters. Whether he’s cursed as a gypsy, a Jew or even a vampire – the boy is always a painted bird.
For Czech filmmaker Vaclav Marhoul, this relentlessly harsh story has been an 11-year passion project, and this shows in the quality of his grueling three-hour adaptation, which he wrote, directed and produced. It is a work of genuine auteurship that brushes shoulders with the likes of Ivan’s Childhood (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1962) and Come and See (Elem Klimov, 1985).
What is most impressive about Marhoul’s film is how it captures the novel’s pace and brooding tone. The reticent first-person narrative has been adapted into a film of visuals and diegetic sound rather than dialogue, absorbing you with Vladimir Smutny’s stark, monochromatic camerawork. Indeed, it is quite uncanny how Marhoul presents Kosinski’s imagery just as you imagined it, capturing the sense of wilderness and base instinct that makes the novel so engrossing.
The narrative is chaptered according to whose guardianship the boy falls into: Marta, Olga, Miller, Lekh & Ludmila, et al. He experiences some mercy with these people, but it proves fleeting as wicked ulterior motives emerge. After all, he is traversing a war-ravaged landscape with little centralised authority, where the mob rules and order is maintained with arbitrary beatings.
Naturally, this violence begets violence, and there are shades of Bad Boy Bubby (Rolph de Heer, 1992) in how the young boy vents his anger. He is bottom of the totem pole wherever he goes, but with animals – namely a goat – he can exact savage revenge against his miserable existence. Soon, the boy graduates to humans, following the only moral instruction he is given during this hellish odyssey, “Remember… an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” This commentary on the cyclical nature of violence is one of the most interesting features of Marhaul’s film and Kosinski’s book. It is the most twisted coming of age tale imaginable, depicting how abusers have often themselves been abused. After the litany of sadism and death the boy endures, it doesn’t bear thinking about what sort of man he will become.
It’s been 55 years since Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird was published in the United States. Kosinski would go on to befriend Peter Sellers, write the screenplay for Being There (Hal Ashby, 1979) and give a memorable supporting turn in Reds (Warren Beatty, 1981). But it is only now, thanks to Vaclav Marhaul’s dogged passion, that the late writer’s Goldingesque morality tale has been realised on the big screen.
The Painted Bird is out in cinemas on Friday, September 11th.
Mothers give birth, nurture and provide unconditional affection. That’s more or less the fundamental law of nature, and an essential requirement for the nuclear family and traditional society. The reality, of course, is a little different. Mothers aren’t always this caring and benevolent. Many females reject their offspring. Some kill. Sometimes the offspring turns him or herself against the creature that gave birth. The negative repercussions are everywhere: in the demeanour of the child, in the romantic relationships of both the mother and grow-up son/daughter, and all sorts of social interactions. It’s often the disregard for human life, compassion and altruism that prevails.
Cinema has found a myriad of ways of representing the breakdown of the motherly bond and its the devastating impact. Typically, it all begins with the collapse of the female per se. Our society is still profoundly misogynistic, and this is broadly reflected on the silver screen. The woman is associated with hysteria (a word historically and controversially concocted exclusively for females). They are more prone to outbursts and all sorts of dysfunctional behaviour. On the positive side, they are perceived as more caring and sensitive, but these qualities are extremely volatile. A woman’s sanity can be easily defenestrated, and she promptly becomes a wicked witch, a vile bitch or an evil-doer. The doting mother morphs into an ugly and murderous creature.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, early genre theory stated that the monster in horror films is always a female. If the monster looked male, it would be described as a “phallic female”, in good ol’ Freudian language. In a nutshell, the grotesque, heinous, disfigured and inhuman is always female. Man are simply to rational and balanced for that. Quite!
The masters of film have found ingenious ways of representing this emotional breakdown of the female and the consequent failure of motherhood. Some have remained a little more Freudian, painting the woman as sick and dysfunctional, while other have challenged the stereotype, creating very different propositions and solutions to the female enygma. Below is a list of 15 very different and diverse movies about dysfunctional females and failed motherhood. They include a few dirty gems you won’t easily come across otherwise. Avoid this list in case you are feeling broody or simply a little romantic!
The films are listed in alphabetical order. Click on the film title in order to accede to our exclusive film review (where available):
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1. The Antichrist (Lars Von Trier, 2009):
This is your most traditional and conventional – and perhaps misogynistic – take on femininity and motherhood. The Danish director is his usual sadistic and misanthropist self. The unnamed female (played by Charlotte Gainsbourg) becomes increasingly erratic and violent after the tragic loss of their child. The man (William Dafoe) has to fend off all the hatred, anguish and resentment vented by his partner. In the end of the movie, we find out the very peculiar reason that drove the woman to insanity.
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2. Audition (Takashi Miike, 1999):
Middle-age widower Shigeharu Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi) sets up a mock “audition” in order to find a new wife, after much insistence from his son Shigehiko that he begins dating again. He becomes infatuated by the mysterious Asami Yamazaki (Eihi Shiina). They make love, and the female demands that Aoyama pledge his love to her and no one else. But there’s nothing loving and caring – let alone motherly – about Asami. The female has a very sinister side that defies all notions of what a nice housewife and lover should be. The outcome is extremely gruesome, including wire saw, needles and the some of the most profoundly sadistic torture you will ever witness in cinema.
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3. The Brood (David Cronenberg, 1979):
A group of mutant children are responsible for a number of gruesome murders. It turns out that they are telepathically controlled by their mother Samantha, and that their deadly actions are nothing but the dark wishes of the deranged female. The final scene is truly memorable, as is the revelation of how Samantha has given birth to these horrific creatures. The graphic “birth” sequence will put you off naked females for a long time. No less significant is the fact that Cronenberg was going through an acrimonious divorce battle with his wife, and Samantha is a fitting “tribute” to his estranged partner.
The Brood is also pictured at the top of this article.
The pain of losing a child can drive a mother to very extreme actions. Sophia (Catherine Walker) is overwhelmed with sadness since the death of her young boy. She is determined to make contact with his soul at all costs. She hires a big mansion in the Irish forests and hires an occultist with experience in black magic called Solomon in order to communicate with her dead son. The outcome, however, isn’t quite what she expected, malign forces being unleashed. Perhaps Sophia should have found a less unorthodox way of coming to terms with her interrupted motherhood experience. This is an intense horror movie and also a trip into Irish occultism.
This bizarre and elegant tale of gore and horror is not for the faint-hearted and squeamish. The helmer torture viewers with plenty of mutilated bodies, sadistic pleasures and – above everything else – deeply dysfunctional and psychotic females. All blended with a little bit of TLC, maternal warmth and lesbian affection,
A mother (Diana Agostini), who was previously an eye surgeon in Portugal, lives with her husband and their young daughter Francisca (Kika Magalhães) in a secluded farm somewhere in the remote American countryside. She gives her daughter anatomy lessons from a very young age, probably unaware that Francisca would soon use her acquired skills in the most unorthodox ways imaginable.
This an unusual, bizarre and, at the same time, extremely tender Brazilian horror movie. It starts out as an awkward domestic drama, as the gorgeous, upper-class, white and pregnant Ana (Marjorie Estiano) hires the black babysitter Clara (Isabél Zuaa). The relationship of the two women slowly morph into something else. And so does the unborn baby!
The subject of interrupted motherhood and isolation from society become central to the story, which takes a very unexpected twist roughly in the middle of the 127-minute narrative. Derivative elements are deftly combined in order to create a film with a singular identity, extraordinarily original in its format. Violence here acquires a fantastic dimension. Blood isn’t repulsive; it’s instead the ultimate maternal link. Meat is not murder.
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7. In The Basement (Ulrich Seidl, 2014):
In this Austrian every bleak and stern documentary, the country’s enfant terrible of the cinema world explores some of the most disturbing obsessions of his countrymen and women. He goes down real people’s basement to reveal a collections deadly guns, Nazi memorabilia, bizarrre sex toys and instruments and… a very eerie woman who coos over a lifesize latex model baby. Or is it a mummified version of her dead child? Her affection seems to be very real. Motherhood, on the other hand, is an elusive concept, while reality is indeed very freakish.
Mother Russia has failed it children. It has neglected and relegated them to a life without hope and love. The latest movie by Andrey Zvyagintsev, possibly the biggest exponent in Russia cinema right now, is a bleak allegory of his home country.
In Loveless, both mother and father disregard their son, who suddenly goes missing without leaving a trace. But it’s the mother Zhenya who has the most graphic and jarring description of parenthood. She despises her son for nearly “cleaving her in twain at birth”, and she simply cannot stand his very sight.
This is as pathologically graphic as motherhood gets. Ayka is an illegal immigrant in Russia, and she has abandoned her newborn baby in hospital because she has to means of looking after it. But then her body plays tricks on her. Blood prevails in the first half of the movie. Due to child labour, Aika is haemorrhaging large amounts of the liquid, which doesn’t prevent her from walking around the city, using public transport and even working. The second half of the film is soaked in maternal milk. Aika stops bleeding after seeing a gynaecologist, but the doctor also tells her that she’s lactating and could develop matitis if she doesn’t breastfeed. Are these signs that Ayka should return to hospital and retrieve her child? The film closure is as shocking as Ayka’s entire predicament.
10. Possession (Andrzej Żuławski, 1981):
A scrawny, pale and neurotic Anna (played by Isabelle Adjani, in a performance of a lifetime) begins a romantic and very sexual relationship with an alien, which slowly replaces her loving husband Mark. This likely is most absurd tale of love and adultery you will ever see, and an often overlooked dirty gem of cinema.
The movie includes a very graphic sex scene with the strange creature, which progressively morphs into a human being. There is also a miscarriage in a subway passage, where Adjani screams and ejects liquids from pretty much every orifice of her body. Once again, we should be grateful this baby was never born.
Akin to Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, Alice Lowe’s directorial and writing debut uses the horror genre as a vice to explore femininity and pregnancy’s isolation. Unlike numerous egotistical star driven directorial debuts, Prevenge is a strange concoction of the slasher horror and comedy – making for a truly original recipe of British independent filmmaking. Mum-to-be Ruth develops a taste for blood, which seems to be related to her unborn child. Her actions culminate in stunningly grotesque murders.
Alice Lowe’s straight-faced performance is all the more impressive when considering the actor/writer/director was seven months pregnant when filming the role. Her ability to create awkwardness in a scene lends itself well to her script-writing.
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12. Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960):
The titular “Oh mother, mother, what have you done?” has become emblematic of the most twisted and psychotic mother-son bond ever. Norman Bates’s mother is possessive, jealous and murderous. Except that mother, of course, isn’t mother at all! Hitchcock’s masterpiece is a dirty ode to all females who – unlike Mrs Bates – do not wish to become a taxiderm.
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13. Repulsion (Roman Polanski, 1965):
Hopefully you won’t meet a female this rabid anytime in your life. Carols Ledoux (played by 22-year-old Catherine Deneuve) is extremely beautiful and attractive. She begins a dalliance with a charming and well-meaning gentleman called Colin (John Fraser). However, the titular repulsion kicks in and Carol becomes deranged before any sort of carnal interaction comes to fruition. Thankfully for her offspring, Carol never becomes a mother!
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14. Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968):
This is the ultimate gaslighting horror tale. Polanski’s masterpiece depicts Rosemary Woodhouse’s (Mia Farrow) descent into panic and neurosis after suspecting that there is something wrong with her pregnancy. She believes that her husband Guy (John Cassavetes) is conspiring with her neighbours, and that her baby isn’t quite what she expects. But is Rosemary going mad or is there something supernatural taking place? In other words, is every impregnated female a little insane? Well, most of us know the film ending and the answer. And it’s not pretty!
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15. Under The Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2014):
In this British science fiction flick set in Scotland, a female alien who perfectly mimics humans and picks us random men, who eventually meet a horrific fate. The otherworldly female is both erotic and scary. The other actors are mostly non-professionals and much of the action was captured with hidden cameras, giving the film a creepy naturalistic feel. This alien does not conceive any children. Instead, she seems to embody the very opposite of motherhood: cold, deceitful and deadly.
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These films were selected by Victor Fraga and Alex Babboni. This article is a published in a partnership with Doesn’t Exist Magazine. It is only available online (not on print).
Praised by none other than Martin Scorsese as a “masterful filmmaker”, Greece’s greatest cinematic storyteller Theodoros Angelopoulos never had the kind of international success his successor, Yorgos Lanthimos, currently enjoys. His work is the very definition of “difficult” – ambitious, ambiguous, epic, standing at a distance. Yet within that difficulty and that refusal to be pinned down is an extraordinary canon, charting what feels like the entire history of Greece in the 20th and 21st centuries, often feeling like all works are part of the same ever-flowing story. With difficulty comes reward, and Angelopoulos offers rewards in spades, a deeply affecting body of work that doubles up as an epic history lesson on the modern construction of his home nation.
Born in 1935, he worked as a journalist and a film critic before becoming a director. This deep, scholarly knowledge of auteurs is evident in his filmmaking. He credits both the use of deep focus in Orson Welles’ films and the dreamlike mise-en-scene of Kenji Mizoguchi as cinematic influences, combining both their styles to create a unique approach to composition. His combination of slow camera movements, textures of fog, rain and mist, and serious inquiry into the meaning of life, prove him a true cinematic sibling of masters such as Andrei Tarkovsky, Michelangelo Antonioni and Bela Tarr.
Angelopoulos’ trademark shot is the panoramic slow pan, a five-minute-plus unbroken take with an astonishing level of group choreography. Often the past and the present are melded together within single dazzling takes, such as in the daring non-linear structure of The Travelling Players (1975) or Bruno Ganz’s character Alexander in Eternity and a Day (1998) remembering and then subsequently entering pleasanter days with his wife. This sense of history encroaching on the margins of ordinary people through well-placed and long-held camerawork can be seen today in Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2018), especially when it comes to the extraordinary depth of field both directors conjure up.
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Not for the masses
Despite his obvious technical brilliance, Angelopoulos failed to reach the critical esteem of his contemporaries, perhaps because he never made a truly accessible hit. The closest he came was Landscape in The Mist (1988; pictured above) – the third film in his Trilogy of Silence – the tender tale of two Greek children who believe their father is in Germany and set off on a perilous quest to find him. Like Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), their intended goal is seen as a metaphor for something bigger, but the meaning of that metaphor is really up to each viewer to figure out for themselves. Yet even here the journey is endlessly circuitous, and full of symbols – such as the huge sculptured hand found in the sea – that are never truly explained. In comparison to Angelopoulos’ obfuscation, a Tarkovsky film plays like a genre exercise.
This refusal to explain is characteristic of Angelopoulos’ work, which can be notoriously difficult to follow. As Derek Malcolm said back in 2000, describing his lack of popularity: “The reasons are obvious. He is a filmmaker who refuses compromise. The slow pace and austere style of his work are utterly against current trends, and the content is invariably as formidably intellectual as it is emotional and poetic. He is, to put it bluntly, not everybody’s idea of a good night out.”
His films are steeped in 20th century Greek history, such as the Second World War and the bitter Civil War that followed – in which his own father was taken hostage – as well as contemporaneous reflections on the West Balkans. You will not see many of those sunny locales that quickly come to mind when thinking of Greece – instead he films in the barren, mountainous, often snow-capped landscapes of the North, often close to Balkan neighbours Albania and Macedonia. References to Greek theatre and myths also abound, with reenactments of plays and old tales – both literal and metaphorical – a frequent occurrence. Even his debut movie, Reconstitution (1970), is based upon the ancient myths of Atrides and Clytemnestra – something Greek audiences may pick up on, but will require the average viewer to do their homework. Soundtracking his films are often travelling bands playing songs on traditional instruments such as the santur, accordion and kemane. These are deeply personal explorations of Greek identity that steadfastly refuse to pander to the audience, to establish their context, or to even reveal character motivation until well into the movie’s runtime.
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History repeating
Often shooting his characters from a reserved distance, and refusing to provide much real interiority, his early works achieve a Brechtian effect. Created under the watchful gaze of the Military Junta who ruled between 1967 and 1974, the first two films of the Trilogy of History, Days of ’36 (1972) and The Travelling Players, may be set in the past, but Angelopoulos used that cover in order to slyly comment on the harshness of the current government. Without a doubt, The Travelling Players is his most famous film, a 230-minute opus that depicts the travails of a travelling acting troupe between 1939 and 1952. Often drifting between time periods without warning, it is a great exploration of why it was so hard for Greece – the land that invented democracy – to establish true democracy in the present day, something that feels especially prescient now with the popularity of Golden Dawn. He considered the past and present to always be bedfellows. As he said in a press conference describing The Dust of Time (2009): “The Dust of Time is a film that treats the past as if it were in the present. It is history written in capital letters and history written in small print. We used to think of ourselves as the subjects of history. Nowadays I can’t say if we are its subjects or objects.”
These prescience is continued in perhaps his most important cycle of films, The Border Trilogy, which take place alongside the Greek-Albanian border. Greece has always had notoriously conservative border policies. Here Angelopoulos counts the brutal cost. Spanning the 1990s, these films feel urgent due to the nearby breakdown of the West Balkans. From The Suspended Step of The Stork (1991), detailing a Greek politician spotted pretending to be a refugee at a border camp, to the excesses of Ulysses’ Gaze (1995), with Harvey Keitel playing a director (a stand-in for Angelopoulos himself) searching for the first film ever shot in the Balkans, and Eternity and a Day, detailing the tender relationship between a writer at the end of his life and the young Albanian refugee he meets in the street and pledges to help, these films are a cry for humanity as well as a bitter indictment against the inhuman border policies Greece pursued during that time. Today, with the grossness of borders leading to refugees dying in the Mediterranean on a daily basis, a filmmaker with Angelopoulos’ vision and humanity would be warmly welcome.
He was cruelly struck down in a car crash filming The Other Sea, the third film of his Modern Greece trilogy. Proceeded by the astonishingly austere yet sweeping The Weeping Meadow (2004; pictured below) and its “sequel”, The Dust of Time (2009; pictured at the top of this article), a passionate blend of the sublime and the absurd, The Other Sea was intended to be set in the present day, leaving the master’s perhaps final statement on modern Greece tragically incomplete. Commenting on his death, Peter Bradshaw found this a fitting way to go, considering “so much of his work is about the unfinished story, the unfinished journey, the unfinished life, and the realisation that to be unfinished is itself part of the human mystery and an essential human birthright and burden.”
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Cinema meets fashion
The influence of Angelopoulos’ work goes beyond cinema, and had a lasting impact in the fashion world – where being “difficult” is not seen as a hindrance but often seen as a virtue. When asked her three favourite movies by Paul Smith, Commes des Garçons designer Rei Kawakubo simply replied: “Films by Theo Angelopoulos”. Her work has been described as “anti-fashion” – that is, completely uninterested in the trends of the day, and focused entirely on developing her own austere style. This is much like how Angelopoulos sticked to the same slow style of filmmaking throughout his entire career without paying any attention to the rise of the blockbuster that occurred around the same time. Kawakubo describes sticking to the same thing over and over it as the kachikan – value system – behind her work. As she says: “I’m the kind of person who decides something and sticks to it. I started with that premise and carried on, and through the doing of it, without wavering from the kachikan.” Conventional techniques are eschewed in favour of personal vision, uniting the two artists both in style and sensibility.
Kawakubo’s 80s fashion garments, with muted colour palettes, composed mostly of greys, blacks and whites, are similar to the Orthodox dress of many of Angelopoulos’ characters. The women she gave black clothes to were described as “the crows”; likewise Peter Bradshaw says that in The Weeping Meadow “black-clad figures move across the horizon like crows.” Additionally, both artists are preoccupied by nothingness, absences. The roving camera of Angelopoulos always hints at something just out or reach while Kawakubo’s pieces, such as her 1982 simple black sweater marked with holes were as famous for what wasn’t there, as what was. They both know that this technique can easily be a strength, and going against conventional techniques can often locate a higher truth. The key difference between them however, is while Angelopoulos’ influence can be found in a handful of directors such as Lav Diaz and Carlos Reygadas, Kawakubo’s designs significantly altered the fashion market for young, independent-minded women. Its a twist of fate that befits one of the most unorthodox directors of all: his steadfast, and seemingly un-copyable style serving as inspiration for one of the most famous fashion designers of all, one who has created a line of work that revolutionised the world of clothing design. If anything, this proves that his legacy is far from finished.
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A short selection of the films by Angelopoulos:
1. Reconstruction (1970):
Angelopoulos’ debut is a remarkably accomplished work, a tale of marital infidelity that doubles up as a documentation of a remote mountain town. Markedly different to its later work, the police procedural elements seem to have played on influence on Nuri Bilge Ceylan.
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2. The Travelling Players (1974):
An epic depiction of both a people and a time, Angelopoulos hails the birth of modern Greece. Perhaps the best summation of his aesthetic; the music hall scene is one of the greatest moments in cinema.
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3. Landscape in the Mist (1988):
This touching tale of two adolescent children travelling to Germany is easily Angelopoulos’ most moving film, containing images of both extraordinary beauty and tenderness. His first film to be distributed in the United States.
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4. The Suspended Step of The Stork (1991):
Depicting one journalists attempts to unmask a former Greek politician hiding in a refugee border town, The Suspended Step of The Stork creates an entire eco-system of stranded Albanians, Kurds and Turks – indicting Greece’s poor immigration policies in the process.
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5. Eternity and a Day (1998):
Bruno Ganz gives one of his greatest performances as a writer nearing the end of his life who decides to help a stranded Albanian refugee boy. Both a fine character study and a savage societal critique, it won the Palme D’or at Cannes.
Initially billed as just another take on The Departed (Martin Scorsese, 2006), in reality Ben Affleck’s second directorial feature only shares Boston as location and character with the Oscar winning Scorsese. Affleck’s love of his home-city had been explored in the pleasant Good Will Hunting (Gus Van Sant, 1997), but this is more sophisticated territory. Behind the machine gun fire, drug pushes and myriad nun masks, comes one of the most sustainably romantic films of the last decade. In one way, it’s easy to forgive Affleck awarding himself the lead role: he lets Jon Hamm and Jeremy Renner have the meatier lines, while he contents himself as the dippy mobster falling intractably in love.
The love in question is Claire Keesey (Rebecca Hall), a liable witness from an armed robbery (led by Affleck’s Doug MacRay). Bursting into tears in a launderette, she comes face to face with Doug, unknowing, unsure and unaware of his crimes. She’s convinced she’d recognise the burglars if she heard their voices – Doug’s not sure. Captured by her susceptible beauty, Doug tries to protect himself with her information, while protecting her from the mortal hands of his unhinged ally Jem (Renner).
The Town is as much a love of brotherhood as it is of the more romantic variety. When Doug informs Jem that they are to go on a mission that he can’t go into details about, Jem’s response is ecstatic. When Doug decides to quit serving Irish crime lord Fergus (the magnanimous Pete Postlethwaite), it is with a packaged gift, not a bomb, that serves as his farewell. And when they decide to steal $3,500,000 together, it is as fraternal Boston cops that Doug and Jem dress as they embrace their latest misdemeanour.
Renner is excellent, strangely excited by the various violent outlets he pursues. If Jem dislikes the lifestyle, he at least loves the life. He could’t be any less different to Doug, a man weary from the opening frame. Claire provides him a shelter, a stability and he in turn provides for her a comforting ear. Forcing their imminent breakup comes FBI Agent Adam Frawley (Hamm), a maverick cop whose use of fists are as effective of getting answers as his effortlessly charming manner.
It’s a terrifically written script, arguably Affleck’s strongest to date. He won an Academy Award for co-writing Good Will Hunting, and another one for making Argo (2013). But he has yet to equal a film with such creativity, mastery and romance as The Town.
Not since Kevin Chu’s Fantasy Mission Force (1983) has Jackie Chan looked ever so muddled in being a part of a movie composed of the following: undead corpses, stereotyped manic amazonians, ghosts playing cards, Japanese Nazis, and Abraham Lincoln as a World War II general. In Oleg Stepchenko’s 3D catastrophic wow of the puerile, Chan plays ‘the master’ in the midst of the continuation of Jonathan Green’s (Jason Fleyming) risible voyage of discovery from Europe to Transylvania, the Carpathian Mountains and the East.
He’s now found himself commissioned by the Russian Czar to map out the far east territories of the Russian Empire, though he’ll find himself in China through encounters of such mammoths in fantasy. The fantastic elements are everywhere: grotesque looking creatures vaguely designed between alien and insects, Chinese princesses, cute flying goblins (words that should never be uttered within the same sentence), and just a lot of British soldiers speaking in dubbed English to some truism dialogues. Like Fantasy Mission Force, Chan is top billed to attract the fandom galore, but only really appears in a couple of scenes in a film far less interested in its actual core and central characters.
When you’ve got Jackie Chan and Arnold Schwarzenegger at the top billing of Stepchenko’s The Iron Mask (or, in its confusing alternative title The Mystery of the Dragon Seal: Journey to China), one’s to expect an obvious duel of awesomeness in perhaps a rebuttal of corny puns as seen from Schwarzenegger’s on screen duo with Stallone, Lou Ferrigno, Bruce Willis, Chuck Norris, and so forth. Unfortunately, a lot of those duos don’t measure to anything worth their talents, and that factor is pretty surprising given the endless amount of potentially exciting narratives that would put the models of vigour in what could be a quintessential cinema of this kind.
What does that mean? Before watching The Iron Mask there was a complete obliviousness to the film even existing. Who knew Jackie Chan and Arnold Schwarzenegger would co-star in a fantasy movie? Who wouldn’t want to see these two brawling it out from their own diffident strategy of the fist, and mutual philosophy of the fighter? Not only does the sequel to The Forbidden Kingdom (Rob Minkoff, 200*) rule out any exciting possibilities of a complete story between an ancient master and a brutish warden of the British army, but it for the most part, leaves them out of the film through almost its entirety.
Imagine living in an alternate universe where the movies The Expendables (Sylvester Stallone, 2010), Escape Plan (Mikael Håfström, 2013) , and the tired sequels of the Rambo and Terminator franchises, and every other modernist attempt at resurrecting the all might brawn of action heroes were actually more than what they’re obviously preceded as? What about the American Hollywood influences of Jackie Chan’s undeniable flair? The Rush Hour trilogy only have two redundant motivating aspects behind them: the comical delivery of such nearly crude lines by Chan’s broken English, and the (at least, these days) underappreciated martial choreography distracting the mass viewers from an incoherent story. These movies have the potential for being radical departures from their predecessors of the 1990s. Believe it or not, audiences are smart enough to recognise a new wave of this timeworn genre dismissing plausibilities with an idle attempt of exposition and bloated visual reverence in par to mediocrity.
The Iron Mask features some scenes with Chan and Schwarzenegger that feel uninspired. Best way to really describe it is both of these tyrants are dressed in costume and playing their parts to a comical core. There’s nothing more to it. The clear focus of The Iron Mask is between the cartographer, Jonathon Green and the mystery behind a creature known as Viy. A creature capable of mind controlling with its trillion of eyes, turning men into grotesque looking creatures and . . . Well, admittedly, that’s as far into the mysticism and confusing thread of this saga that really lucidly makes sense.
Here’s what to expect: An unusual English dubbing over Jason Fleyming and Anna Churina, some laugh out loud 3D splendour, and a heavy handed CGI title sequence that completely rips off Game of Thrones’ opening theme (with Tywin Lannister’s Charles Dance narrating the origin story between Jonathan Green and his forbidden love-to-be of a dotty daughter to an auestering Lord).
As a viewer, there is a part of this mess that abandons any general preference for what’s considerably watchable. It could be enjoyed for the sake of how bluntly cartoonish it serves as a fantasy and swashbuckling duality between impressionable caricatures seen in the Tekken and Mortal Kombat franchises.
It’s not meant to be taken seriously as a whole. But with the top billed names Chan and Schwarzenegger, the dissatisfied expectancy will remain frustratingly the same as the movies before it, and inevitably after.
The Iron Mask is out on VoD on Friday, April 10th.
It may be titled like a 1980s action film, but Danger Close is one of the better Vietnam War films in recent memory, and it features not American GIs but elements of the 1st Australian Task Force (ATF). Australia and New Zealand’s participation may be news to some, but over 60,000 antipodean troops served in the conflict, fighting several major battles. Danger Close recounts the first of these bloody engagements – the Battle of Long Tan in 1966, which saw an Australian platoon trail a seemingly broken Vietnamese unit that subsequently counterattacked in much greater numbers.
Director Kriv Stenders and screenwriter Stuart Beattie waste no time in establishing the ATF and their base in the muggy Vietnamese jungle, introducing us to Major Harry Smith (Travis Fimmel) in a scene that has minor trappings of Apocalypse Now (see the panning shot of the schooner and Colt 1911 on the table).
Moments later, the base comes under attack from Vietnamese mortar fire that’s quashed by a volley of artillery, sending the enemy fleeing. With the advantage ostensibly theirs, Major Smith is ordered to rally the men of 11th Platoon and pursue the ragtag force. Travis Fimmel performs Smith with a hardened sagacity, conveying his hard-nosed nous as he leads the quasi-adolescent conscripts, who are based on real individuals.
The film’s central relationship is between Major Smith and Pvt. Paul Large (Daniel Webber), who share the familiar dynamic of stern superior and recalcitrant subordinate. It’s a connection that one is unlikely to invest in, but Fimmel and Webber’s performances are natural enough for it to be perfectly believable. There’s not a great deal of character-work outside of this, but there is a definite sense of atmosphere and chemistry in the camp and in the field.
Anyway, Danger Close is not a character-piece but a story of guts, honour and chain of command. It depicts the coordination of battle very well, showing the weight of life and death decisions in combat scenes that are high-impact, realistic and largely free of aestheticised violence.
Particularly impressive is how it depicts the relationship between infantry and artillery, namely a scene in which a bird’s-eye shot traces a shell’s journey from the howitzer’s muzzle, over the trees and onto the enemy’s position. Of course, CGI is used to achieve this, but the effect is complementary rather than intrusive. There are some slow-motion sequences that are slightly over-egged, admittedly, but not to the extent of, say, the tasteless slow-mo headshot of Mustafa in American Sniper (Clint Eastwood, 2014).
Several critics have slammed Danger Close for not considering the war’s divisive context, but such broad moralising is not what the film is about. Rather, it is a robust, nuts-and-bolts account of a battle known by few. Indeed, even the Australian authorities took 45 years before they fully recognised their countrymen’s bravery.
Danger Close is on VoD and DVD on Monday, April 6th.
