The main criticism of this film has been that it is derivative – a knock -off Training Day (Antoine Fuqua, 2001). This issue is compounded in the UK market by the decision to rename it Bulletproof, a meaningless non-title. In the rest of the world it is known as Crown Vic, a reference to the V8-powered Ford Crown Victoria that carried police officers for some twenty years.
The Crown Vic, or ‘black and white’, is an almost holy place to Officer Ray Mandel (Thomas Jane), a mustachioed hardhat assigned to break in rookie Nick Holland (Luke Kleintank), “There’s a world inside this squad car, and then there’s everything else outside of it”. However, despite appearances and a few stern moments as they load up for duty, Ray proves to be reasonable – firm but fair. The men share their stories and philosophies of the job as they patrol their area, building a quiet rapport that’s familiar yet credible.
Within 10 minutes of their beat, a foreign object strikes the Crown Vic, sending Nick on foot to apprehend the petty criminal bolting down the street. This is followed by a night of events – drink driving, robbery, car fire, domestic squabbles – that bring excitement, suspense, and even levity.
There is a touch of cinéma vérité to how the film unravels. Large portions are without narrative; we simply observe Ray and Nick on the job, meeting a cross-section of society often at their worst. This docudrama aesthetic, combined with Thomas Scott Stanton’s photography of a tenebrous Los Angeles, gives a strong sense of time and place. You feel absorbed in the officers’ job and almost need your own Styrofoam cup of coffee to keep up with their nocturnal prowl.
The danger of the men’s beat is foreshadowed by the film’s opening, which sees a pair of heavily armed bank robbers blast their way through police in a style reminiscent of the North Hollywood shootout. The robbers remain at large and are described by Ray as ‘deadstick men’, hardened criminals who will not hesitate to kill. Their reappearance, it seems, is just a matter of time.
The explosive opener is brief but punchy, bringing to mind Reservoir Dogs (Quentin Tarantino, 1992) and Heat (Michael Mann, 1995).But that is the problem with Bulletproof – it is shackled by its influences. We have seen the rookie cop and the roguish veteran countless times and we know all the moral quandaries that come with them. Yet the realism and strong performances go some way to skirting its triteness. Jane, perfectly cast, assumes his role with just the right cantankerousness, while Kleintank is suitably earnest and straight-laced; they’re both grounded, believable performances. There’s solid supporting work, especially from Josh Hopkins in the role of Jack Van Zandt, an obnoxious plainclothes officer wired on steroids, women and wanton violence. He’s just another misfit in the shadowy wasteland of Ray and Nick’s overnight patrol.
Alas, the fluid pace of our protagonists’ beat is interrupted by a side story involving Ray’s druggy former lover and her abducted child. It is a distraction that breaks with its docudrama energy and sees Ray behave with improbable corruption in the company of a rookie partner he neither knows nor trusts.
Critics may be lukewarm or even outright negative about Bulletproof, but I suspect its competent, nuts-and-bolts quality will earn Joel Souza’s debut a healthy following.
Bulletproof is available on VoD Monday, September 7.
With Guest of Honour, filmmaker Atom Egoyan reaffirms his penchant for the investigative drama. His last film, Remember, spun a mad yarn about a senile Holocaust survivor crossing the US to wreak vengeance against his former oppressors, in what critic Richard Roeper described as ‘a mash-up of The Terminator, Marathon Man and Memento’. It was an outrageous premise that only got sillier as the conspiratorial plot unraveled, but its excesses were bound by the strength of Christopher Plummer’s endearing performance. This is repeated in Guest of Honour, whose questionable dramatic content is anchored by the presence of its lead, David Thewlis.
Thewlis assumes the role of Jim, a cantankerous food safety inspector who scrutinises without mercy, looking down his nose at local restaurateurs as he crabbily explains their noncompliance. After a long day of dorky hectoring, he returns to an empty home where the only company is a big white rabbit and a glass of red. This is because his wife is dead and his daughter imprisoned.
His daughter is Veronica (Laysla De Oliveira), a young music teacher jailed for ‘abusing her power’ after pulling a salacious prank with her students. The conviction is unjust and unfair, but she accepts and even encourages her fate owing to what she considers an original sin concerning Jim’s adulterous relationship with her piano teacher.
This mystery and its non-linear delivery pique your interest somewhat, but by halfway it all becomes overwrought and unconvincing; especially a central plot point in which Jim’s occupation allows him to coerce one of the boys involved in the case. The matter isn’t helped by the unlikability of Veronica, either. She has this insouciant, po-faced smugness about her and is always ready with some smart-alec response when Jim tries to understand her.
Thewlis, however, proves to be the film’s buoy when it risks tanking, revitalising Egoyan’s turgid script with real pathos and empathy. This is especially true when Jim becomes the titular guest of honour, going far beyond his customary glass of red and pouring his heart out to a bewildered restaurant audience. It’s a fine piece of inebriated acting, showing all the cracks and vulnerabilities in Jim’s psyche with perceptive nuance. Alas, much of this is undone in the film’s closing moments, which target the heartstrings but miss entirely, in what is ultimately a second-grade melodrama from Atom Egoyan.
There’s a reason many couples – typically new and loved up – choose horror on a movie night; it is the genre most likely to draw them together, causing grips to tighten and heads to nestle. However, no such experience will be had watching The Final Wish, a scare-free effort that trades on Lin Shaye’s B-movie charisma.
Shaye’s schtick is a good fit for unhinged matriarch Kate Hammond, who she commands with a blend of psychosis, senility and the supernatural. Michael Welch also proves capable as her son Aaron, a bewildered everyman trying to make it as a lawyer. Regrettably, everyone else is a stock character – Jeremy the stoner friend, Derek the brutish local sheriff, Lisa the vapid love interest.
Even worse than the characters are the woefully constructed scares. It’s a reheated medley of creaky floorboards, possessed household items and characters’ reflections screaming at them in the mirror – all of which occur in a rickety old house with inexplicably poor lighting… why is it so dark in there?
And of course, this litany of tropes is amplified by a generic score that does two things: assaults you like a cattle prod during its irritating jump scares or counterfeits the tortured strings of The Shining. Even more annoying is the trailer, which uses that almost dubstep-inflected crescendo of synthetic drumbeats and screaming noises that audiences are just sick and tired of.
There is a plot, something about a haunted urn and seven wishes, but it’s so trite that it doesn’t bear repeating. Ultimately, this is just another rehashed horror movie. Aside from the competence of Shaye and Welch, the only praise one can eke out goes to the gaffers and set designers, who mock up some neon-kissed diners that have a charming air of Americana about them. Otherwise, there’s barely a shred of flair or creativity.
Sudan has been in a near-consecutive string of conflicts since its independence in 1956. The deadliest of these was the Second Sudanese Civil War, which raged from 1983 to 2005 and ended with the creation of South Sudan, which would have its own civil war from 2013 to February 2020, causing a further 383,000 deaths. This miasma of death and dictatorship crushed infrastructure and erased culture that wasn’t overtly Islamic. Consequently, Sudan has been without a film industry since the military coup of 1989.
Amidst this narrative of chaos, however, has been the Sudanese Film Group (SFG), led by four retired filmmakers – Shaddad, Suliman Ibrahim, Eltayeb Mahdi and Manar Al-Hilo. They’re an affable, insouciant bunch whose bond has seen – as they humorously catalogue – ‘three democracies and three dictatorships’. The true soul of their friendship, though, is an existential passion for cinema, and Talking About Trees documents their struggle to share it with the Omdurman community.
To do this, they aim to host a series of free public film screenings that, after consulting the locals, will kick-off with a showing of Django Unchained – a solid choice. Their venue is dusty, gutted and decrepit, but the old pals’ easygoing stoicism very much subscribes to the maxim of “where there’s a will, there’s a way”; until, that is, they notify the local government, which is a hive of venality, incompetence and Islamic fundamentalism.
The men’s quiet struggle is observed rather than investigated. Director and cinematographer Suhaib Gasmelbari steps back from his subjects, framing shot after beautiful shot with an almost tableau effect; the only life in them coming from the men’s energy and ambition.
Despite the injustice of it all, Talking About Trees isn’t here to appeal or campaign. It is an unassuming work with an organic, engaging humanity. Alas, thanks to a mindless, authoritarian regime, it seems the Sudanese Film Group will struggle to move beyond their dark, dusty storeroom trove of 16mm cameras and Bunuel tapes, and the locals, who have a combined literacy rate of 47%, will continue to be failed by their government.
Talking About Trees is available on DVD and VOD on Monday, April 27.
Roger Corman, the pope of pop cinema, once said: “The worst thing you can do is have a limited budget and try to do some big looking film. That’s when you end up with very bad work.” Happily, with a nano-budget of just £200, indie filmmakers Jack Sambrook and Will Unsworth are well aware of their limitations, and Bad Guys is all the better for it.
Corman learned the ropes with trashy horror movies, but this Brighton duo have drawn inspiration from the kitchen sink flavours of the British indie scene, namely Ben Wheatley’s Kill List and Down Terrace. As a result, the film’s influences are worn on its sleeve, but this is all part of the Corman philosophy – watch a load of movies, understand how they work, and turn this knowledge into your own cineliterate, nuts-and-bolts feature.
The story, which is a road trip-cum-crime caper, follows Gaz (Sambrook) and Cal (Unsworth), a pair of lowly debt collectors operating in a grey and gloomy Brighton. The dynamic is one you can imagine – Gaz is aloof and stand-offish, while Cal is loquacious, reckless and prone to violent outbursts. When Cal’s temper kills a man, the young men are ordered to drive the body north and bury it in the countryside.
The film’s bleak tone is framed by Rowan Holford’s striking cinematography, which combines long static shots and handheld work that skilfully balances rawness and fluidity. Particularly absorbing are the driving montages through Britain’s bypasses and winding, canopied B-roads, deftly capturing the motion and sensation of travel. Indeed, there is an elemental streak that runs throughout Bad Guys, which is complemented by Matt Unsworth’s orchestral, Carter Burwell-inflected score.
The real draw, however, is the chemistry between the leads. Sambrook is appropriately crabby as Gaz, making the rules as he goes along in an attempt to control Cal, who chinwags with anyone who’ll listen. Gaz does lighten up, though, and their exchanges consider everything from petrol station confectionary to a revelatory discussion of the female urethra. The dialogue never feels contrived and no wisecracks fall flat, which is a reflection of the leads’ performances and their collaboration on the script.
Another merit is a small but marked flair for suspense, which is ratcheted in a bathroom encounter between Gaz and a faceless, ominous stranger. It reminds you that these young men, barely into their twenties, are in a grave situation with some very dubious people.
We love indie film here at DMovies, so it is always a delight when an accomplished nano-budget feature like Bad Guys appears on our radar. Sambrook and Unsworth will have more cash for their next film, no doubt, but this won’t mar their grounded, kitchen sink sensibilities – it will bolster them.
Bad Guys is available on Amazon Prime in the UK now.
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.
In his fourth feature, director Justin Kurzel has plunged Antipodean folklore into a hellscape reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch, creating a harsh, barren experience that is surreal yet acutely human.
Anyone expecting a history lesson will be disappointed by the opening announcement “nothing you are about to see is true”. After all, Ned Kelly is to Australia what Rasputin is to Russia – a figure of mythical proportions. Adapting Peter Carey’s 2001 novel, screenwriter Shaun Grant uses this line to fix a postmodern filter on all that follows, commenting on the distortions and controversies of Kelly’s legacy.
We are introduced to Ned Kelly as a boy (Orlando Schwerdt) living in a charred wasteland with his cruelly dysfunctional family, led by venomous matriarch Ellen Kelly (Essie Davis). They are at the mercy of local authority figures in this quasi-lawless land, the latest being Sergeant O’Neill (Charlie Hunnam), a smug cavalryman who uses Ellen for sex.
However, he is soon replaced by Harry Power (Russell Crowe), a gruff, charismatic bushranger with a dubious appetite for violence. Building upon the anger and poison of the family dynamic, Power takes Kelly under his wing, imbuing him with a foul-mouthed contempt for authority – British authority – and familiarising him with weapons, torture and murder.
The depiction of Kelly’s formative years breathes humanity into that steely mugshot known by many an Australian. Young and ingenuous, we see him beguiled by his own mother that to be a man is to main and kill. He is shown to be a victim moulded not so much by the imperial bogeyman of legend but his own family. Whether this vulnerability is accurate is almost incidental because it’s a convincing, compelling yarn.
But make no mistake, there is some real British nastiness here. As Constable Fitzpatrick, Nicholas Hoult thrives in the role of pompous imperial bastard, giving an almost Alan Rickman level of villainy. In this respect, Kurzel very much feeds into the Kelly myth and it’s some of the best stuff in the film.
But all of that patrician arrogance cannot restrain George McKay’s snarling, physical turn as Kelly. As lean and vicious as a wild dog, Kelly leads his troupe of cross-dressing anarchists into frenzied oblivion. Yet despite all his grit and fury, there is that wounded humanity to this character.
Kurzel’s film, then, is a curious biopic; it at once subverts and supports the legend of its source material with a post-modern veneer of ambiguity and harsh, sensory aesthetics. It’s divisive but dirty.
True History Of The Kelly Gang is in cinemas on Friday, February 28th. On VoD on Monday, June 22nd.
In 1998, for the TV anthology Gakko no Kaidan G, Takashi Shimizu made two very short (three-minute) shock films, respectively titled Katasumu and 4444444444, in which he introduced creepy, contorting revenant Kayako Saeko and her meowing son Toshio, laying the central groundwork for the grudge-dbearing, implacably vengeful spirits at the epicentre of what would become his Ju-on series. Their popularity enabled him to expand this universe into the feature-length ‘V-cinema’ features Ju-on: The Curse and Ju-on: The Curse 2 (both 2000), and these in turn would be remixed by Shimizu into the theatrical features Ju-on: The Grudge (2002) and Ju-on: The Grudge 2 (2003). By this stage, the J-horror craze had hit the United States, and Shimizu was invited to remake his films for an American audience. In the first of these, The Grudge (2004), Shimizu retained the Tokyo setting and the extraordinary actress Takako Fuji (in the role of Kayako Saeki), while importing an ensemble of American characters to add to the alienation and disorientation that were always fundamental parts of the series. By The Grudge 2 (2006), Shimizu had allowed Kayako’s curse to be translocated stateside to Chicago, and by The Grudge 3 (2009), he had handed over the property entirely to director Toby Wilkins’ caretaking. There have been further reboots in Japan (also lacking Shimizu’s personal touch) with diminishing returns, and there has even been Koji Shiraishi’s more-fun-than-it-sounds Sadako vs Kayako (2016), a postmodern crossover of The Grudge with that other iconic, multiple sequel spawning sequel J-horror sensationRing (Hideo Nakata, 2000).
So there are inevitably some whose knee-jerk response to news of yet another attempt at The Grudge will be to roll their eyes and begrudge this umpteenth retake its very need to exist. After all, there is little new that co-writer (with Jeff Buhgler) and director Nicolas Pesce brings to the prospect, apart from his identity as an extremely talented creator of mannered indie horror (The Eyes of My Mother, 2017; Piercing, 2019), and the associated promise of a more idiosyncratic spin on the material. Yet with The Grudge, Pesce merely retreads old ground. We have already many times seen Kayako aiming her irrational rage at anyone – young or old, male or female, good or bad, local or foreign – who has the misfortune to step into the residence where she and Toshio were murdered by her husband.
We have even already seen this rage transferred across the Pacific to America. Pesce is pointedly going back to the source of his inheritance, expressly setting the passage of Kayako’s grudge from Japan to America in 2004, the same year as Shimizu’s first cross-cultural American remake, and then skipping ahead to 2006. the year of Shimizu’s remake sequel. The new location of the transplanted curse is a small town in Pennsylvania whose very name, Cross Rivers, marks it as a site of transition – a place of passing between one country, or perhaps one state of being, and another.
Ignoring the warnings of her police colleague Detective Goodman (Demián Bichir), newly widowed, newly arrived Muldoon (Andrea Riseborough) starts investigating the connections between a strange series of deaths that have radiated out from 44 Reyburn Drive ever since, two years earlier, Fiona Landry (Tara Westwood) returned from a Tokyo job and moved in there with her family. You already know the score. The stories of those that either lived or even just set foot in the house, and the inexorable deaths that came to them afterwards, are here told in a mixed-up manner that confounds the norms of chronology, fitting everyone’s fate (including Muldoon’s own) into a complex jigsaw of creeping horror. This is, essentially, the pattern found in every version of The Grudge. Even Shimizu’s first theatrical version from 2002, not to mention his first American remake from 2004, were merely replaying – and refining – a routine that he had already set out clearly in the series’ previous incarnations. Not only do the Grudge films, with their recurrent hauntings in showers, baths, beds and closets, echo one another, but repetition – of a viral variety – is inscribed as a theme in the very fabric of each and every instalment, as the curse is passed, like a contagious infection, from one person to another, always, inevitably, leading to the same vain struggle to survive or escape, and to the same destructive outcome.
In all these films, the conclusion is foregone and a mood of utter nihilistic doom pervades. That is the films’ raison d’être – it is, precisely, the nature of the grudge, an ineluctable, supernatural force which, once it has put its hooks into a person, will never let go. Here, as previously, the fractured timeline ensures that we know that most of its characters are going to die – indeed, are already dead by the time Muldoon comes to look back on their cold case files. In this franchise, like in the Final Destination series, mortality is prescribed, and is not meant to come as a surprise, even if the precise form that it takes may, until revealed, be less clear.
Complaining that Pesce’s version is merely more of the same may involve some truth, but it is also missing the whole point of the franchise. Apart from Kayako herself, the one fixed point of these films is grotesque, harrowing death foretold, which Pesce, like previous directors, duly delivers as a bleak memento mori for the popcorn-chewing, thrill-seeking viewer. Pesce’s The Grudge is most definitely a Grudge film. If you have objections to that idea in principle, or dislike the Grudge films in general, then obviously it would be strange to pursue this one. The clue is in the title. If you like some or all of those other films, then Pesce’s film has all the grim goods – and if those goods seem like pre-loved hand-me-downs, in a way, with this particular franchise, they always were. Kayako’s iterative acts of vengeance have always been passed down a chain of contagious inheritance, affecting anyone and everyone but the actual party who wronged her.
“We’re still settling in,” Muldoon tells Goodman of her and Burke’s recent move to Cross Rivers. “It’s definitely different.” Perhaps Pesce felt the same way, having to find his way around a property that was not originally his own. Pesce’s previous film, Piercing, was already itself a Japanese import, adapting a 1994 novel by Ryu Murakami (whose writings also inspired Takashi Miike’s Audition, 1999) into the stylised idioms of an urban American giallo – but with The Grudge, one feels Pesce is far more constrained in his inventiveness by the demands of a studio, and struggling to put his individual stamp on an established and now highly conventionalised set of franchise tropes. He is certainly well-served by a cast that includes (among its victims) John Cho, Betty Gilpin, Jacki Weaver, Frankie Faison and Lin Shaye, all of whom – apart from Shaye, whose character’s dementia makes her different from the others – play their rôles with a genuine, earthy earnestness that brings an anchoring reality to the film’s more surreal flights of fancy.
Most of the effects work is practical, while careful attention is paid to the house’s gradual deterioration over time – like the terminally ill loved ones that both Muldoon and Goodman had to watch slowly getting worse. Old William Matheson (Faison) is also having to bear witness to the decline of his wife of 50 years, Faith (Shaye). Perhaps the most disturbing innovation of the film is not any of several standard (and not especially effective) jump scares, but rather William’s stated claim that the house, whose ghosts represent an opportunity for someone who otherwise has no belief in an afterlife, might be the best, indeed only, kind of hope for him to be able to spend more time with his dying wife. This is a loss of Faith in more than one sense. No doubt some viewers will state that Pesce’s film is not frightening, but most of its dread is of a more existential brand, with everything awash in anxiety, despair and the panic of fatalism.
The Grudge ends with a sustained exterior shot of yet another home. Even if we suspect that something horrible is happening indoors, nothing happens in the shot itself, which elapses merely to the banal sounds of a garden sprinkler and birdsong. This is where Pesce comes into his own as the film’s director, with a sequence that, in looking away, distances the viewer and frustrates any expectation of pat resolution. Though they always come with a supernatural overdetermination, most of the film’s killings are carried out by the living upon members of their own family, opening up a subtext of domestic violence and mental illness (both of which are formally presented within the film as the police’s explanations for the multiple deaths at Number 44). Pesce’s long final shot offers the chilling suggestion that we never really know what is going on inside, behind closed doors, in an America whose sunny suburban surfaces conceal a deep-seated anger and murderous madness that are catching.
Fellini’s eighth feature film has passed into the English language as a synonym for Italian exuberance, style and the ability to enjoy life without apology. No film has ever had such an ironic title as La Dolce Vita (“The Sweet Life”, had the film title ever been translated). In the film that made his international reputation, the Italian filmmaker pours cold water over the whole concept of a treacly existence. Instead, he reveals his home country as shallow, vacant and cruel. Indeed, he is not just depicting Italy but the whole era of the 1960s, which is the beginning of our own era, and all that he shows is still relevant and deeply prophetic.
The ennui of is emphasised by the fact there is in this film there is no very obvious narrative. The story consists basically of a reporter named Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni) drifting through of the streets of Rome, and contending with a number of events. His girlfriend takes an overdose, he encounter an heiress, a movie star, and so on. Each scene is a series of episodes, in night clubs, at parties, in restaurants, etc.
This is a movie built upon imagery and symbolism. The flying Christ scene mimics the idea of the Second Coming of Christ. Christ flies over his “eternal” city and what does he find? He finds paparazzi in the Via Veneto with rich, aimless people, he finds two children in a field pretending to have visions of the Virgin Mary, and a beautiful woman in a clinging dress climbing up the steps of the cupola of St. Peter’s, wearing what looks like a cardinal’s hat. The images of La Dolce Vita linger in the mind long after you have seen it.
The secular world he depicts is just as ridiculous and, perhaps, crueller. The one person who has any pretensions to intellectual insight is Steiner (Alain Cluny) and he shoots himself and his two children. The paparazzi wait until his wife gets off a bus and is told that her husband and children are dead and hope to photograph her reaction. The paparazzi are quite happy to run around a field in a downpour while two children pretend to have visions. It doesn’t matter to them. It’s all news. If it’s fake news, it doesn’t matter. It still sells. Even glamorous Rome is not that glamorous. The down at heel prostitute Maddalena (Anouk Aimée) whose flat Marcello Rubini stays at with a girlfriend lives in a depressing housing estate on the edge of Rome. You can’t get into her sitting room or bedroom except by walking over planks because the floor is flooded, and no one has come to do the repairs.
This film heralded the beginning of the 1960’s. Besides its teasing of Catholicism, it also featured openly gay characters. It was the beginning of the modern age which is still very much with us. It is a world of trivia, diversion and pointless celebrities. It believes nothing and knows nothing. The great fish that ends up on the beach right at the end of the film with its huge vacant eyes symbolises this. It could well be a metaphor for modern life, large, bloated and meaningless. The only aspect of today it lacks is poisonous politics.
The only people who seem to do an honest day’s work are the police and a beautiful young girl running a beachside restaurant and her busy, little brother laying out the plates on the tables. At the end of the film the girl tries desperately to communicate with Marcello, but she cannot be understood because the gap between her world and the world of the rich and spoilt people Marcello inhabits is too vast.
The film was loathed by many at its first screening in Milan. The Vatican hated the film and it was banned in several Catholic countries. Yet abroad it was immediately greeted as a masterpiece.
The 4k restoration of La Dolce Vitta was in cinemas across the UK on Friday, January 3rd. The BFI are holding a centennial celebration of Fellini’s work in 2020. On Mubi in June.
