Tag: accident

The Young Arsonists

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

The Summer of 1987. Nicole (Maddy Martin), Veronica (Jenna Warren), Amber (Sadie Rose), Sara (Madison Baines); four rural girls on the verge of womanhood, having their periods for the first time. Nicole hasn’t yet got over the death of her older brother Seamus, killed by an accident with a thresher. She’s so wrapped up in this, and in generally being a teenager, that she fails to spend much time with her little brother Brendan.

Her tomboy best friend Veronica spends her time bunking off household chores demanded by her hard-drinking, authoritarian father Gavin (Joe Bostick) and seems to be constantly pushing boundaries. Plus-sized Amber seems timid and easily frightened, and is subject to sporadic bullying by Veronica, yet is a dark horse capable of a shocking practical joke or unexpected, anti-social behaviour.

We never find out that much about Sara beyond that she’s embarrassed by her conservative, aerobics-obsessed mum (Measha Brueggergosman). She’s most definitely the fourth character with Nicole as the main protagonist, Veronica as the second and Amber as the third, in that hierarchical order (was it that way in the script?) And while Veronica’s father Gavin remains largely a dark, troubling figure in the background, we see quite a bit more of Nicole’s family life and parents.

Her dad Dale (Aaron Poole) is out of work and can’t seem to find a job anywhere, although he appears to be actively looking, at least some of the time. Dissatisfied with her husband’s lack of progress on this front, wife May (Miranda Calderon) goes out and gets a job with the company building homes in the area, Happy Haven Development – much to Dale’s disgust.

Meanwhile the four girls (initially five, but one has a run in with Veronica and walks away early on) move in to Nicole’s family’s former home, now abandoned and dilapidated. This is a summer childhood game rather than anything with any legal standing, and at various points they find the front door and windows boarded up with Happy Haven warnings of private property, impending development and no trespassing, which signs are cheerfully pulled down by the bravura Veronica and others.

It’s also an excuse for Nicole to move into her late brother’s room, where she frequently sees and talks to Seamus (Kyle Meagher), who never talks back, asking him questions like, what’s it like to be dead? This aspect of a teenager dealing with sibling bereavement is nicely handled, even if it at one point tips over into the conceit of seeing him standing upside down on the ceiling and her walking up the side of the wall to stand beside him, a competent visual effects job even if one’s not exactly sure what the writer director is trying to say at this point.

That moment is representative of the whole film: it’s constantly going off in different directions and, having established the four girls in their illicit summer property, throws in myriad scenes and plot strands without seeming to know what it’s about or where it’s going. To have two characters driving around a cornfield in an old car may look good, but it doesn’t seem to take the story anywhere and delivers little more than an excuse to play a striking music track in Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart, which doesn’t really add anything beyond immediate, gratuitous, foot-tapping adrenaline rush. Likewise in another scene which throws in Brian Eno’s Babies On Fire. Fabulous music – but why is it here?

This means that final reel attempts to close the narrative feel forced, and even then there are too many such attempts going on at once. A shame that the film can’t make up its mind quite what story it wants to tell (out of several on offer), because the competing narratives are all pretty interesting. Such a shame these problems couldn’t have been fixed at script stage, because the performances have a natural feel while writer-director Pye appears to have genuine vision, albeit unfocused.

As for the title – one character (singular) commits arson towards the end. The is no group of arsonists (plural). Happy Haven or Happy Haven Development might have made a much better title, because all the ideas floating around here seem to relate to the happiness (or otherwise) of the home environment.

The Young Arsonists plays in the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. It is part of the brand new Critics’ Picks strand.

Black Light (Bit-Gwa Cheol)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

In the aftermath of an accident, it is human nature to want to fully understand exactly what happened. But what can you do when the key witness is in a coma, unlikely to wake up soon? This is the key issue that haunts Korean melodrama Black Light, which starts with a seemingly simple premise before adding multiple, often contradictory, layers.

Heejoo (Kim Si-eun) returns to her former home and returns to the same job she had in a factory before she got married to her late husband. She doesn’t seem to have it all together: a quiet, nervous woman, her fear of the past often leads her scurrying away from fearful situations. Then when she meets a canteen worker at the factory and the wife of the other man in the accident, Youngnam (Yum Hye-ran), she is forced to uncover the hidden secrets of the car crash which killed her husband.

Black Light gets more interesting as it goes along — indicting the factory and the local police force, as well as multiple supporting players, in what may or may not have happened. By the end, it seems like nearly everyone in the town has a part in what went on, making the film a complicated exploration of how the truth can be a slippery beast. Yet, appearing to have more perspectives on the central death than all three seasons of Twin Peaks, this multifaceted approach is both the film’s strongest and weakest points.

How many key reveals should a drama have? Conventional screenwriting suggests that you should save your reveal for near the end, thus creating a clever twist that makes you rethink what has come before. Black Light rips up conventional wisdom, delivering more “a-ha” moments than a season’s worth of Poirot. But when the revelations seem to go in multiple directions, it blurs both women’s perspectives together to create a blurry picture of what the truth really is.

The problem with this technique is that, while interesting from an academic standpoint, it ends up stripping these reveals from having any emotional power. Repetitious to a fault, it deadens the plot instead of enriching it. This is reflected in the style of the film too, with many confrontations shot in almost exactly the same way. Characters meet and are framed in a traditional two-camera shot. Then near the end of the scene, cinematographer Cho Wangseob cuts to a wide medium shot, with both characters balanced on either side of the frame. The style functions as a metaphor for the movie, which offers up both perspectives at multiple times before mashing them together.

I found myself pulled towards and away the film throughout its 107-minute runtime. On the one hand it’s a clever investigation of what the “truth” could be, told by unreliable, knotty protagonists, and handsomely mounted and acted. On the other, its repetitious and often melodramatic tone left me with little investment in what was going on. Evoking Burning in its enigmatic approach, it ultimately lacks that film’s haunting and imperceptible tension.

Black Light plays as part of the First Feature competition at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, running from 13th to 29th November.

An Elephant Sitting Still (Da Xiang Xi De Er Zuo)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Clocking in at just under four hours, An Elephant Sitting Still isn’t something you’re going to watch unless you’re prepared for a long-haul viewing. However it’s worth it. Hu Bo’s unremittingly bleak world might not be somewhere you’d want to live, but it’s most definitely worth a visit. That said, he only made the one feature length film before committing suicide. You can’t help but wonder whether the vision he presents here bore any relation to his state of mind leading up to that tragedy.

The morning after Yu Cheng (Zhang Yu) has slept with his best friend’s estranged wife, his best friend turns up at the apartment, sees Yu and throws himself out of the window. In a nearby flat, a couple try to talk their ageing parent Wang Jin (Liu Congxi) into entering a nursing home as they have scarcely enough room for themselves and their small daughter.

Meanwhile, 16 year old Wei Bu (Peng Yuchang) gets caught up in a row over the alleged theft of a phone by his friend Li Kai ( Ling Zhenghui) from school bully Yu Shuai (Zhang Xiaolong). In an argument Wei accidentally pushes the latter down a flight of stairs putting him into a critical condition. Now Shen’s elder brother Cheng is after him. Elsewhere, Wei’s horrified classmate Huang Ling (Wang Yuwen) finds herself and her lover, the school’s vice principal, the subject of a viral video which threatens to ruin both their lives.

All the characters’ pointless existences threaten to close down around them. As the fortunes of Yu, Wei, Huang and Wang take a turn for the worse in the course of a single day and night, dragging them into their intersecting metaphysical cul-de-sacs, the film follows each of the characters in a compelling series of single takes around their rundown daytime Chinese town which recalls the nighttime one in Have A Nice Day (Liu Jian, 2017). There’s a similar sense of hopelessness to that film, although its much briefer running length makes you wonder if Hu could have tried harder to say what he wanted to here in a shorter amount of time.

That said, Hu’s four-hour film is brilliantly paced and furnishes him the time he needs to explore his characters’ lives at some length. However, the ending just… well, ends, making you wonder if he could have ended the whole thing earlier or simply cut some scenes out to get the length down. (This writer is not sure whether or not that could have been done without ruining the film. But, maybe…?)

The title derives from a story, trotted out at the start, about a legendary elephant in Manzhouli Zoo who sits around all day without moving. Both Wei and Huang resolve to visit the beast – pretty much the nearest either of them get to any sort of motivation to do anything with their lives – while Wang also wants to visit Manzhouli for different reasons.

In the end, this is bleak and gruelling stuff – but well worth putting aside four hours of your time to watch.

An Elephant Sitting Still is out in the UK on Friday, December 14th, and then on VoD on Monday, December 24th. Watch the film trailer below: