Tag: Cats

Conversations On Hatred (Conversaciones Sobre El Odio)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

A voice on an entryphone in darkness. Deborah (Cecilia Roth) has turned up to see Debora (Maricel Álvarez). Debora is not in a good way (she could be in a wheelchair, although it’s impossible to tell with the lighting of what looks like a power cut). She starts complaining about a home help who opened windows onto the balcony through which her cats got out. Her cats have the names or various film directors – Luc, Ozu, Buñuel, Kurosawa and Kitano, among others – what kind of person would name cats with surnames?

Debora gets Deborah to put the light on, revealing that Debora has a cannula between her legs (the sight of which we’re fortunately spared). As the dialogue continues (and there’s a lot of it) it emerges that both are actresses who worked together in the past before they fell out. Spending time in Debora’s apartment, and in her company, it’s not hard to see why: she apparently never has a good word to say about anyone, and listening to her moan about one person after another is likely to try the patience of an audience.

This makes it near impossible for an actress to elicit any sympathy for the character – not the performer’s fault, just an impossible task. There needs to be some redeemable aspect, however small, for the audience to cling to, but writer/director Vera Fogwill gives us nothing of this sort here.

When, at various points, Deborah utters mantras like, “I knew I shouldn’t have come”, the audience feels much the same.

The other thing about Debora is her apartment, crammed with books, home videos of various formats, rubbish, half-eaten food, spilled cat little, basically an horrific, unhygienic health hazard of an environment that no-one would want to go near. We should be thankful that everyday technology has not extended to Smell-O-Vision or Odorama – this film would smell truly vile, not least because of cats marking their territory with urine.

There’s a further problem here. One character meets with another in their apartment. They stay there for the duration of the script. That’s not necessarily a movie. It’s almost certainly a stage play unless you take some specific course of action to somehow make it work for a cinema audience. Some critics might like filmed plays that make no attempt to be cinema: not this critic, sorry.

Conversations On Hatred plays in the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. Watch the film trailer below:

Zuhal

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

Schrödinger’s cat might be rooted in ideas of quantum mechanics, but in popular culture it’s basically the idea of saying that something can’t be proven to either exist or not exist. In fact, it both exists and doesn’t exist at the same time! This conundrum is quizzically explored in Zuhal, where the film’s eponymous character (Nihal Yalçın) living in an apartment block is convinced that she can hear the meowing of a cat somewhere within its walls. The only problem is, no one else believes the cat even exists…

This is essentially a one-joke movie, thinly stretched out to feature length. Your mileage will vary on your love for cats and for the oddities of the film’s humour. Given that stray cats roam Istanbul with impunity — and are well beloved in Turkish culture — it’s no surprise that this type of story has emerged from the Eurasian nation. Elsewhere, Murakami, the patron saint of lost and mysterious cats, will be kicking himself he hasn’t written this first.

The cat can either be seen as a metaphor for Zuhal herself, who becomes increasingly more dogged (wink, wink) in her search for the mysterious feline, or as an excuse to explore the ins and outs of the unique apartment block. With rare exceptions, the vast majority of the film takes place within the building — covering block disputes, grating landlords, cabinets that can’t fit through walls, women who refuse to conform, and incredibly impetuous children. Credit must go to the production design, using simple photos, drawings, and furniture designs to give each individual room its own character.

At the centre is Nihal Yalçın, who comports herself and looks a little like Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, only without the severe breakdowns or asides to the camera, but still a fiercely independent woman and work-from-home lawyer who will stop at no end to make sure she uncovers the cat. Surrounded by a cast of self-absorbed, moody, obtuse neighbors, she is the both the sanest person around and the closest to a mental breakdown, Yalçın never quite giving us a true insight into how her character truly thinks.

To create a sense of semi-ironic distance, director Nazli Elif Durlu shoots medium-distance shots, often bifurcated by hallways and doors, with careful placing of furniture and characters. Shot on handheld, the frame is constantly moving, but only a little bit, making the viewer uneasy. While this type of idea could’ve got boring very quickly, this use of inventive framing and camerawork helps to keep things somewhat fresh.

Nonetheless, I couldn’t help but feel this would have been stronger and punchier as a short. At just under 90 minutes and the endlessly-explored basic premise needed to go somewhere else to be truly effective. But perhaps going elsewhere would ruin the joke. That said, I’m a dog person; maybe it’s all just a cat person thing.

Zuhal plays in the First Feature section of the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, running from 12-28th November.

Cats

Posted on by victorfraga

Ballerina Victoria (Francesca Hayward) leads a troupe of feline singers, dancers and acerbic entertainers through a ceaseless song selection, paraded over a series of matchless designs and acrobatics. Whatever plot the Jellicle Cats face is hard to decipher (the story more or less revolves around a tribe of cats who must decide which one will ascend to the Heaviside Layer and come back to a new life), but that’s a small matter in a kaleidoscopic spectacle, detailed in one long dance through the Edward Hopper tinted town streets and skyscrapers.

Cats might be the bravest, boldest and battiest picture that’s come this barmy year, and the kinkiest too! Everywhere, latex linen suits wade in the viewer’s eyesight, crotch capers carrying the eye-line of the camera’s attention. Sleek, the myriad dancers parade with gutty gymnastic poses, throwing each of their bodies into the multi-colored routines. The songs come interchangeably, frivolously feasting on their nonsensical verse and costumes. Exquisitely produced, the song’s take a sombre, affecting turn during Grizabella’s (Jennifer Hudson’s) Memories, an ageing elegy sung as the spinning camera eyes the falling debris that surround the commune of cats. This is visual art, shades of Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927) and Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) hanging on the architectural designs.

It’s an impressive cast listing, venerable custodians of the stage (Ian McKellen and Judi Dench) parading with the prescient pop artists of the millennial world (Taylor Swift, Jason Derulo and James Corden among the cast list). Parading in delightful nonsense, the catchy collection of cats emerge in the linen gutter filled paths, as others dine with cutlery items larger than the diners themselves. It’s utterly, joyfully offbeat, an illustrated adaptation of the wackiness T.S. Elliot intended for his creations. Behind the furry felines sits Idris Elba’s Macavity, purring in his criminal ambition. Elba’s resume has rarely shown such propensity for pantomime, eager in clawed posts to wander the variegated set pieces with playful rigor.

Through a Camp collection of colourful cuts comes the most exciting and invigorating of dance set pieces. In its own way, it’s the purest translation of musical theatre, expressing the animal atmosphere both the West End and Broadway productions produce. The costumes take centre stage, an overture of textures, colours, carousels and captures, a vehicle of fur for its centre cast. Clandestine changes of colour and choreography take precedence over semblance of plot. Instead, its the glorious engagement of vaudevillian value in all of its seductive permutation. Slick, shiny, sexy, colourful, creative and camp!

Cats is out in cinemas on Friday, December 20th.