Tag: death

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.

Decision To Leave (Heojil Kyolshim)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

South Korea. City-based detective Hae-joon (Park Hae-il from The Fortress, Hwang Dong-hyuk, 2017; The Host, 2006, Memories Of Murder, 2003, both Bong Joon ho) is married to a science nerd (Jung Yi-seo) who works at a nuclear plant in the seaside town of Ipo. Whatever sexual or romantic energy once existed between them has long since evaporated. She tolerates sex with him once a week on the grounds that research has shown it’s good for you and keeps you sharp, but she doesn’t appear to enjoy it much, going through the motions of a necessary chore. There doesn’t seem to be much more to this marriage for either of them than keeping up appearances. She lives and works in Ipo while he spends most of his working time away in the city, often going on nighttime stakeouts to observe suspects and forget about his habitual insomnia.

Which means that when Hae-joon finds himself investigating a case in which skilled amateur climber Ki Do-soo (Yoo Seung-mok from The Gangster, The Cop, The Devil, Lee Won-Tae, 2019; also The Host, Memories Of Murder) has fallen from a great height and the dead man’s Chinese-born wife Seo-rye (Tang Wei from Lust, Caution, Ang Lee, 2007) is a murder suspect, the detective is much more interested in her as a romantic subject than as a possible perpetrator, and this sensibility clouds his judgement. Eventually the case is closed, and she gets off scot-free, but the more time Hae-joon spends with her after this, and the more we see of her, the more likely it seems that she was the murderer.

The above constitutes what one might call the film’s first act. This first act and the subsequent second act, in which certain plot elements recur, recalls Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958). In the second act, Hae-joon has moved to the seaside town presumably so that he can spend more time with his wife. One day the couple are wandering though the fish market where they run into Seo-rye, who by coincidence has likewise moved into the area, with her new and shady financial consultant husband in tow. The latter seems more keen than he should be to talk to Hae-joon’s wife and leaves her his card.

It turns out this second husband has a history as a scam merchant and has made a lot of enemies along the way. Before we get to know him much more, however, he turns up dead in his swimming pool. His wife could be responsible, but there is another suspect too, a victim of his sharp business practices, who looks more likely.

Rather than allowing all this to unfold in straightforward linear narrative fashion, director Park works in terms of layers and constantly jumps back and forth throughout. This is at once enthralling and infuriating to watch; enthralling because of the myriad of painstakingly worked out details piled on top of one another, infuriating because there is so much going on at any one time that it’s easy to lose track.

Things might make more sense on a second viewing, but equally they might simply prove as confusing as they did first time round. Without a second watch, it’s impossible to say. Nevertheless, it’s a very rich film, thoroughly engrossing; one to which, having seen it once, you’ll want to return.

Decision To Leave is out in cinemas from Friday, 21st October. On Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Curzon Home Cinema in March.

Orphée

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) was a self-styled ‘poet’, a versatile, avant-garde French artist who worked across a number of different media – novels, visual art, design, theatre, cinema as well as poetry. 1950’s Orphée is one of his most celebrated films. And rightly so.

Famed poet Orphée (Jean Marais) is going through a bad creative patch when newcomer rival Cégeste (Edouard Dermithe) is killed by two speeding, leather-clad motorcycle riders. Orphée becomes obsessed with messages transmitted over the radio of the car belonging to Cégeste’s patron the Princess (Maria Casarès) which seem to him better than any lines he’s written recently.

So obsessed with these broadcasts does Orphée become that he fails to pay enough attention to his wife Eurydice (Marie Déa) who becomes increasingly restless. Every night as he sleeps, the Princess – who a voiceover (read by Jean Cocteau himself) informs us is actually Orphée’s death – visits his room through his wardrobe mirror to watch over him. When Eurydice dies following her too being hit by the motorcyclists, Orphée must venture through the mirror and across the Zone to get her back from the underworld. But once there, he’s confronted by a panel of men judging the Princess for trying to seduce him into going there…

It’s a fairly basic production by today’s standards. The director’s understanding of the mythology is profoundly inventive. Cocteau’s ideas easily transcend not only its budgetary limitations, but also the contemporary 1950 French café society setting in which it was made. As well as the motorcycling Angels of Death, some of the amazing visuals include running the camera backwards so that, for example, dead people are resurrected for their journey into the underworld by reverse falling from horizontal on a bed to an upright standing position. People travel through the surface of mirrors, with one extraordinary close up image created by rubber-gloved hands being plunged into a vat of mercury, a special effect that would probably not be allowed today for health and safety reasons. And in the Zone, Orphée and the Princess’ chauffeur Heurtebise (François Périer) pull themselves along walls as if climbing or are sucked past them as if towards a vacuum.

Orphée is an extraordinary special effects fest, underpinned by Cocteau’s poetic sensibility, storytelling ability and visual flair. There’s no obvious reason why such seemingly extraneous material of radio messages such as “a glass of water illuminates the world” should make such an impression on both Orphée and us, but they do. Once we realise that not only is the Princess in love with Orphée but Heurtebise has fallen for Eurydice, we sympathise with each of them in their various plights as well. Plus, the film is packed with incredible images that, once seen, aren’t easily expunged from your head.

It doesn’t hurt that Cocteau knows how to cast actors who are visually striking in addition to giving compelling performances. Leading man Jean Marais is just as memorable in Orphée as he is in full beast make-up in the director’s earlier Beauty and the Beast (1946) while Maria Casarès is both elegant and enigmatic as Death.

You could beef up the effects by spending more money – but Cocteau’s inventiveness with the minimal resources available to him remains more impressive than most if not all contemporary megabudget movies. In the cinema of magic, mythmaking and enchantment, Cocteau has no equal and has left a lasting imprint on film cuture. You can see Orphée‘s influence in works as diverse as Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) and Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1977). Orphée’s pursuit of the Princess who vanishes into thin air in a colonnade anticipates the sequence in Vertigo where the pursued woman vanishes into thin air in the McKittrick Hotel, not to mention the setting of a colonnade at the Spanish Mission later on. And the dogtooth pattern on Orphée’s bedroom floor prefigures the one in the protagonist’s dream in Eraserhead, not to mention the room where the dwarf appears in Lynch’s subsequent TV series Twin Peaks (1990-91).

Society has changed a lot since the 1950s. You might think the relationships in the film would benefit from being more explicit, but somehow the lack of bodily flesh on display here adds to the film’s charm: why be explicit when you can do it all with subtle hints and suggestion? The one area where the film might be made differently today is in its portrayal of women. If the strong willed Princess is impressive enough, Eurydice does little beyond pine for her husband and desire to make him happy. Also, the committee that sits in judgement on the Princess consists entirely of men, whereas today one would include both sexes. And although Cocteau himself was openly homosexual (no-one used the word ‘gay’ in his lifetime), there are no LGBT characters as such here. Perhaps in today’s more open society he’d have realised his characters slightly differently.

Nevertheless, there’s really nothing else in cinema quite like Orphée just as there’s really no-one else in the wider world of the arts quite like Jean Cocteau. Orphée is just as dazzling today as it was when first released two thirds of a century ago. The BFI’s new 2K restoration of this classic in cinemas provides the perfect opportunity either to revisit it for the umpteenth time or to view it for the very first.

Orphée is out in the UK on Friday, October 19th. Watch the BFI’s brand new film trailer below:

It’s also showing as part of Fantastique: The Dream Worlds of French Cinema

at BFI Southbank from Tuesday, October 23rd to the end of November

and a Jean Cocteau retrospective at the Institut français

from Tuesday, October 23rd to Sunday, November 18th.

The animated life of Isao Takahata!!!

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

In the twin worlds of animation and movies, Japanese director Isao Takahata – who died yesterday aged 82 and whose death was announced earlier today by Studio Ghibli – was one of a kind. In 1985, following the success of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) which Isao Takahata produced and Hayao Miyazaki directed, the two men founded the animation company Studio Ghibli. People who know Ghibli tend to know the Miyazaki films, blockbusters in their home territory of Japan and big successes among family, animation and foreign language audiences internationally. Very fine films they are too. But Takahata is a slightly different kettle of fish.

Where Miyazaki, at least until he reached old age and started making noises about retiring, turned around a new film about every two years or so and these tended to be hits, Takahata often took twice as long and the resultant films were much less viable commercial propositions. This is the man who, for example, early in Ghibli’s history made a live action documentary about canals (The Story of Yanagawa’s Canals/1987), something about which he was clearly passionate but hardly the sort of blockbuster follow up to Nausicaä that would impress the bean counters.

.

Not just another animated face

His next Ghibli film, the profoundly affecting Grave Of The Fireflies (1988), was a long way from traditional children’s animated fare being the story about a young boy and his much smaller sister orphaned during WW2 and their struggle to survive in an abandoned bomb shelter on a riverbank. It’s harrowing, tear-jerking and stunning.

Other films included Only Yesterday (1991, pictured above), in which a 27-year-old office girl rediscovers herself upon moving to the countryside. It’s peppered with flashbacks. The resultant film was considered so inherently Japanese by the Studio that for over two decades they refused to dub Only Yesterday into English, believing the task an impossibility. (Ironically, the excellent dub the Studio was eventually talked into a few years ago is in this writer’s opinion one of the few instances where for English-speaking audiences the dubbed version of a foreign animated film surpasses the original subtitled one).

His 1999 feature My Neighbours The Yamadas (pictured below) again broke the Ghibli mould in terms both of unfamiliar production techniques and visual style. Takahata wanted to create something akin to a newspaper strip cartoon wherein characters are loosely delineated by lines while the odd bit of pastel shading replaces the fully coloured-in look (the aesthetic historically popularised and locked in to the popular concept of what an animated film should look like by Disney’s industrialisation of the medium).

Takahata was determined to utilise computers – but not in the way that everybody else in animation did which was to create more immersive, three dimensional looking worlds and characters. He was after a completely different quality. If his approach indicated a purity of artistry, it made little economic sense. The Studio swiftly moved on to a more successful Miyazaki project (Spirited Away/2001) and Takahata didn’t work on another project for years. But he had introduced computers into Ghibli’s production process as a by-product of his artistic obsessions.

.

A life extraordinary

The sheer quality of the director’s films inevitably had its admirers. In 2005, a Nippon Television Network executive approached Ghibli with the money to fund another Takahata offering so that he could go to his grave knowing he’d done so. Given a completely free rein, Takahata spent five years in discussion with a young Ghibli producer about a vague project which looked like it might never materialise. Eventually, he was talked into directing his own conception of an adaptation of the Japanese folk tale The Tale Of The Princess Kaguya (pictured below), but as production dragged on, dogged by Takahata’s perfectionist approach, it looked for a while like it might never reach completion. Takahata was dissatisfied with one element here and tinkered with another one there. Those who had to work with him must have been tearing their hair out. The film eventually appeared in 2014, a remarkably rich and strange work which no-one would make if their only intention was box office returns. Widespread international acclaim and an Oscar nomination followed.

Isao Takahata was a cinematic maverick whose refusal to play by the industry’s rules could easily have destroyed him. Instead, thanks in no small part to his association with Miyazaki and the latter’s considerable faith in him, Takahata directed a small number of truly remarkable films. We should be thankful his career went the way it did: he’s a director whose idiosyncratic vision overcame impossible obstacles to leave an indelible impression. His passing is a great loss which will be felt both by those at the Studio he co-founded and in the wider world of international film culture.