Tag: cat and mouse

Tallinn 2022 Kids Animation Programme – part 2

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

One of two hungry mice becomes trapped inside a large, circular cheese in Mouse House (Timon Leder, Slovenia/Croatia, 9 mins) and is able to gorge himself inside while his companion struggles unsuccessfully, stomach rumbling, to transport the cheese. Meanwhile, a cat prowls around. The cat is peripheral: this is not so much a game of cat and mouse as of mouse and cheese.

The deceptively simple plot of The Turnip (Piret Sigus/Silja Saarepuu, Estonia, 7 mins) involves the planting and the subsequent, less than successful pulling up of that vegetable. The human villagers are represented, often as close ups of feet, in relief, cut-out animation, that is to say somewhere between 2D and 3D, a technique heightened in the lengthy sequences of centipedes and other bugs under the earth interacting with the turnip prior to its extraction.

The lively visuals of Away From Home (Brunella De Cola, Italy, 6 mins) convey the idea of Africans wanting it to snow in Africa.

Letters From The Edge Of The Forest (Jelena Droz, Croatia, 12 mins) adopts the time-worn setting of a bunch of forest animals to question such prevalent values as selfishness and greed. When a squirrel proposes to write a letter, a visit to local owl sees the latter make it very clear that he, and only he, can perform this service. But eventually, he is talked round to the idea that if he were able to help other animals write letters free of charge, it would be a good thing for everybody.

The anthropomorphised crocodile of Lost Brain (Isabelle Favez, Switzerland, 7 mins) gets ill and stays home after getting caught in the rain outside. Thus, her world is turned into black and white with areas covered by inkblots. Suddenly, she is no longer able to find the key to open her front door. After venturing into such curiously satisfying visual conceits as a lampshade becoming a toaster, a tear falls on a piano key and she starts to compose music, which turns out to be part of her route out of her predicament. She is later seen in a park where trees resemble musical notes.

The second of three programmes of Kids Animation shorts plays in the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

Revenge

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Flown in by private helicopter pilot, Frenchman Richard (Kevin Janssens) takes Jen (Matilda Lutz) to his luxury home in the middle of the desert for a day or so. He is clearly rolling in money, she appears to be in love with him but perhaps she’s play acting: something of the gold-digger in her, maybe. She wears skimpy clothing emphasising sexual aspects of her body. She comes on strong to him. Passion ensures. All of which is a lot less fun to watch than it sounds: the male is little more then a caricature of the sort often found in the less carefully made end of French action and gangster movie production while the girl displays every patriarchal cliché in the book in the way she moves, dresses, acts and interacts.

Director Fargeat has a very different agenda, however. The next morning, Jen is startled by the unexpected appearance of two male gunmen outside the patio window. Richard’s business associates Stan (Vincent Colombe) and Dimitri (Guillaume Bouchède) have arrived for the three men’s hunting party a day earlier than expected, shattering the couple’s intended privacy. No matter: all four drink and party into the night and Jen just can’t resist coming on as strong to Stan as she did to Richard the previous day.

The day after that, when Richard is away for a few hours, Stan tries his luck at love, is understandably shocked when Jen rejects his advances then somewhat less understandably rapes her. He even invites Dimitri to join in, but the latter is nursing a hangover and leaves them to it, turning up the TV volume to drown out the woman’s cries. When Richard returns, being an irredeemable male stereotype, he sides with his two pals not his girlfriend.

At this point, the by-the-numbers feminist tract suddenly becomes both inventive and interesting. Ensuing events lead to Jen’s impalement on a small, desert bush. Her self-extrication leaves her with a distinctly phallic, pointed piece of wood through her stomach. She retreats to a womb-like cave and ingests some of the local peyote to remove the wooden projectile, cauterise the wound and emerge as a blackened, scantily clad huntress who will track down each of the three men in turn and exact her revenge. The remainder of the film (which is most of it) does exactly what it says in the title – and with considerable style.

It’s not the woman reborn theme and intentions that are impressive: they arguably get in the way. Fargeat is so determined to put her feminist heroine on screen that, for instance, Jen doesn’t take the shoes off the first man she kills but proceeds to track the others barefoot. The images are more arresting, the proceedings less believable.

However, what Fargeat is clearly very good at is orchestrating the cat and mouse antics of pursuer and pursed, on which level Revenge is absolutely peerless once it eventually gets going. On foot, she tracks down one of the men parked by a waterhole, another as he drives along a trail and finally her former boyfriend back at the luxury home where it all started, now a labyrinth of slippery, bloody corridors. Fargeat has fun with some highly sexualised Freudian imagery too, for instance having a man open up a vagina-like wound in his foot when he steps on a piece of broken glass. Apparently the director admires David Cronenberg.

If you can overlook its tedious, predictable male fantasy first reel, the last two thirds of Revenge deliver an edge of the seat thriller with a compelling, blood-soaked climax. From the moment the male/female power roles reverse, it becomes utterly compelling on a non-rational, visceral level, a French, feminist tract masquerading as a trashy US action thriller. Clench your teeth through the opening reel and you’ll enjoy (if that’s the right word) everything that follows.

Revenge is out in the UK on Friday, May 11th with a preview at PictureHouse Central, London + Q&A with Director Coralie Fargeat and star Matilda Lutz on Friday 4th at 6.30pm. It’s out on VoD on Monday, September 10th.

Watch the official UK film trailer below (but be warned – it contains one serious spoiler: we recommend you watch the whole movie first):

Three horrific short movies

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

The first short film of this horror triptych by British filmmaker Neville Pierce is the psychological terror Lock In (2016, pictured above). It boasts a clever little script concerning a gangster Jimmy (Nicholas Pinnock) visiting a pub just after closing time ostensibly to ask Richard the landlord (Tim McInnerny) for protection money. Richard, meanwhile, is soon to be a granddad: his pregnant daughter Lucy (Sing Street’s Lucy Boynton) is working behind the bar and hits Jimmy over the head with a bottle, knocking him out. Unbeknownst to Lucy, Richard and James have a history as former school teacher and difficult pupil.

Aside from some in car shots and a few exterior pub moments, the whole thing takes place inside the pub. The script packs in a lot in its 10 minutes and is a real gift for a director. Pierce responds with some fantastic casting: McInnerny, a prolific actor who deserves much wider recognition, plays a character who seems to change as revelations alter our perception of him. The catalytic Pinnock lends the whole thing an edge while Boynton is terrific as the daughter confronted with unpleasant home truths (or are they lies?) about her father. Pierce also has a striking feel for pace: the whole thing never lets up and moves along very nicely.

The second short Bricks (2015) adapts Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Cask Of Amontillado in which one nobleman lures another to his wine cellar to exact a cruel revenge. The Russell/Pierce adaptation shifts the tale to the present day and the two characters to stockbroker William (Blake Ritson), the owner of the wine cellar, and builder Clive (Jason Flemyng), his unsuspecting victim. Which means that the script has the virtue of consisting of just two characters on one set, which makes it reasonably easy to produce as a film. But that virtue could so easily be the film’s downfall: hard to imagine anything potentially more boring than two people in a room.

Fortunately for us viewers, as the two characters from their very different worlds talk, Russell avoids that pitfall and delivers a taut sparring, a game of cat and mouse. Pierce again demonstrates astute casting skills and elicits from both actors performances among the most memorable of their considerable careers. Flemyng claims this film is one of the few times a director has actually given him direction – and you can feel it as you watch. The short has also been championed by no less a director than David Fincher (who directed Flemyng in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, 2008).

For this writer, however, the best of the three films here is the black and white photographed Ghosted (2016). Again, Russell’s script posits a deceptively simple idea. A widow in search of love and romance visits a restaurant on a series of five dates (the fifth is a man who happens to be at the next table when date number four goes wrong) accompanied by the ghost of her late husband whom she alone can see. It’s an excuse to explore male foibles – narcissism, personal baggage, obsession with tech, earnest intellectualism.

The five dates are beautifully cast, among them Jason Flemyng as a man unable to forget the woman who left him, a very different but arguably equally impressive performance to the one he gave in Bricks. Christien Anholt projects just the right amount of wry observation and world weariness as the dead husband, but the actor who really brings the tale to life is leading lady and comedienne Alice Lowe (Prevenge/2016, Sightseers/2012) who is as good here as she’s ever been (which is saying something). Pierce pulls his various elements together brilliantly: comedy is a notoriously difficult genre to do well, and this one is very funny indeed.

So, an intriguing horror story adaptation, a tense gangster genre outing underpinned by relationships and an hilarious romantic comedy with supernatural overtones. Quite an impressive range of material and all three well executed which makes me, for one, want to see more by this writer-director team. I have no idea what Russell and Pierce will do next (the latter has already made another short with a different writer, unseen at the time of writing) but if they can come up between them with a feature length piece as good as these shorts, we want to see them make it. Meanwhile, the three shorts just released are something of dirty treat.

The Three Neville Pierce Shorts are available to view on Vimeo from Monday, February 5th. Find them here.

The films will also screen on YouTube channel Tall Tales, the new online home for indie films. Lock In will play on Tall Tales from February 6th, Ghosted from February 13th and Bricks later in 2018.