Tag: Martin Scorsese

Killers of the Flower Moon

Posted on by victorfraga

At slightly over 80 years of age, Martin Scorsese has now been making movies for more than 60 years. Like his last, fictional, narrative feature The Irishman (2019), this one is pushing three and a half hours. I always have issues with films that long: the vast majority are that way due to director’s ego and / or inability to tell a story concisely. Some of them might have been better suited to a TV mini-series ( a medium in which, incidentally, Scorsese also works). Yet if you try and imagine Killers Of The Flower Moon cut down in length, it’s difficult. Maybe you could take out the frame story – the performance of a crime drama on the radio on the subject of the Osage Indian Murders – but that sets the scene nicely at the start and takes you back out of the movie equally nicely at the end, so it would be a shame to do so. Beyond that, looking at the film, there isn’t much (if any) slack you could take out. You sit in the cinema for three and a half hours and are engrossed.

The real life crime case on which the film is based mostly took place in the 1920s. The land rights of the Osage tribe of Native Americans living in Osage County, Oklahoma were protected by law, which had been put in place before anyone anticipated either the value of oil (“black gold”) or the amount of it on their lands. Consequently, the stage was set for others to try and take those rights from them one way or another. In 1929, Oklahoma cattleman William Hale was imprisoned as the person behind the murders. He was later the focus of David Grann’s book Killers Of The Flower Moon, from which the current film is adapted.

We first meet Hale (Robert De Niro) at the same time as his nephew Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) when the latter returns home after serving in World War One. Hale comes on the benevolent uncle, and extols the Osage as the greatest people on Earth, even as he pronounces the importance of their inheritance finding its way into his and his family’s personal empire. He warns Ernest of the dishonesty of many people in the locality, satisfying himself that his nephew is a good sort. He also tells him that the Osage may not appear to say much, but they are shrewd and generally know everything that is going on.

Hale sets Ernest up as a driver, ferrying local people hither and thither. One of Ernest’s fares in the quiet, dignified Osage woman Mollie (Lily Gladstone from First Cow, Kelly Reichardt, 2019) who at one point, true to Hale’s characterising of the Osage, tells Ernest, “you talk too much.” Nevertheless, he has seen a certain something in her, and she in him, and they fall in love and marry. She also has land rights and is extremely well off (although the suggestion here is that Ernest marries Mollie not for the money but for love.) While all this is going on, Ernest’s uncle is making suggestions about how she would be a good person for his nephew to get to know, and insisting that in the event of her death, it would be imperative that her wealth pass to Hale and his family.

An Osage is out minding his own business in a lonely place when someone appears behind him and puts a bullet through his head. (Actually, we’ve seen Osage deaths before – there’s a little montage of them at the beginning where various Osage men or women are killed or die alone drinking poisoned whisky, described by a narrator as closed cases, categorised in at least one instance as suicide – after we’ve watched the shooter plant a gun in the victim’s hand).

This punctuation of the narrative with violence feels like familiar Scorsese territory – look no further than the “house painting” early on in The Irishman or the violent multiple stabbing of the man in the car boot which opens Goodfellas (1990). Yet, if we think of Scorsese’s films as alternating between violent urban stories often about gangs or lawlessness and other stories about other things, in which violence sometimes but not always plays a part – Silence (2016), Kundun (1997), The Age Of Innocence (1993) – Killers Of The Flower Moon, in essence a sprawling, true crime drama about lawlessness, seems somehow to belong in the ‘other’ films category.

De Niro’s Hale, a character who appears onscreen a lot and is totally integral to the plot, is a deeply criminal and greedy individual who we always see from the outside and to whom we are never allowed to get close or alongside. There are things about him that leave a nasty taste in the mouth. The contrast with the Osage Mollie, her mother Lizzie Q (Tantoo Cardinal) and siblings couldn’t be greater. Like Mollie, they are mostly centred, calmness and dignity personified. Like Ernest, we feel drawn to her and her family. Perhaps under the unconscious influence of his uncle’s desire to possess the Osage’s wealth, which attitude Ernest never quite processes for himself, the nephew seems to take a dislike to similarly white brother-in-law Bill Smith (Jason Isbell), the husband of Mollie’s sister Reta (JaNae Collins).

In fact, Ernest lives a double life, sometimes going out at night with the two younger members of the Hale household to rob and murder Osage or people looking out for Osage interests. Yet, as with Hale, we never really get involved with this side of Ernest, emotionally investing with him as a family man (the couple have a daughter). Just as he is a professing Catholic who doesn’t see a conflict between robbery and murder on a Saturday night and saying mass with his family on Sunday morning, so the screenplay seems to confine his darker side to a briefly glimpsed emotional netherworld that the audience only ever experience at a distance. This is very different from the main protagonists of The Irishman, The Wolf Of Wall Street (2013), Goodfellas or Taxi Driver (1976) with whom we are invited to journey alongside in their violence or other lawlessness.

Much of the violence in Killers Of The Flower Moon is as sudden as its effects are immediate. Sometimes, as in the killing of Mollie’s promiscuous, unmarried sister Anna (Cara Jade Myers), who while drunk on a night out is taken to a secluded spot by two men, one of whom shoots her in the head, the murder scenario is discussed verbally and then, after the relieved audience thinks it’s escaped watching the ordeal, is shown to the audience in full. Yet Scorsese seems less interested in the killings than the emotional effects on the bereaved. Perhaps this is never more poignant than the long sunning episode in which Hale, having procured regular supplies of the then hard to obtain drug insulin for the diabetic Mollie, talks Ernest into administering “additional medicine” in her shots as a way of boosting its effectiveness. When her health starts to go downhill, Ernest, who appears to genuinely love has wife, somewhat incredibly, has no idea that he is the instrument of her being poisoned. He is clearly not the sharpest man in town.

As the story proceeds towards its conclusion, and Hale makes increasingly strange demands on Ernest to sign various legal documents, just in case something should happen, which as Hale says it won’t, various lawyers and investigators are introduced into the narrative as it flirts with both investigative procedural and courtroom drama, but commendably never allows itself to get bogged down in either (much as it never allows itself to get bogged down with the tale’s violent acts of killing). This furnishes room for further astonishing character acting from Jesse Plemons (from Judas And The Black Messiah, Shaka King, 2021) as a BOI man (the Bureau of Investigation, under J. Edgar Hoover, mentioned here in name only, was a forerunner of the FBI or Federal Bureau of Investigation) through John Lithgow as a state attorney and Brendan Fraser as Hale’s unnervingly manipulative defence attorney.

The film is an outstanding achievement in a remarkable career. It’s an old man’s film in the sense that one can’t imagine the young Scorsese who made energetic films like Taxi Driver and Mean Streets (1973) pulling it off, and it’s much slower and more measured. Yet it’s not just the (captivatingly) slow pace that sets it apart; it gets into the effects of crime and violence on the ordinary, regular members of the community in a way that’s not so familiar in Scorsese’s wider body of work. For this extraordinary feat, it’s to be commended.

Killers Of The Flower Moon plays the 2023 London Film Festival which runs from Wednesday, October 4th until Sunday, October 15th, and is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, October 20th.

This piece was originally published at Jeremy C. Processing.

Bringing Out the Dead

Posted on by victorfraga

It seems that no director/writer duo, regardless of their track record, is immune to having work undeservedly slip through the cracks. In the case of Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader, who had previously seen critical success with Raging Bull (1980) and The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), their forgotten gem is Bringing Out the Dead.

Based on a book of the same name by Joe Connelly and celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2019, Bringing Out the Dead can be seen as an update of Scorsese and Schrader’s seminal Taxi Driver (1976) – both are set in New York and take place largely at night, for example, where the lead character drives around the city, dismayed at the depravity he sees.

The biggest difference between the two antagonists is that while Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle looked at all these people with contempt and a misguided sense of righteousness, Bringing Out the Dead’s Frank Pierce (Nicolas Cage) wants to help them – which is no surprise, really, given he’s a paramedic. The film follows Frank across three nights patrolling New York’s seedier streets in an ambulance, each time accompanied by a different partner (John Goodman, Ving Rhames and Tom Seizemore), treating those in need of assistance – much of them on the city’s underground in the middle of an epidemic of a new drug called the Red Death.

We get an insight into Frank’s mindset and an idea of what the many years on the job have done to his psyche. Everywhere he goes, his mind flashes back to the people he knows have died there, in particular one particular patient, a young woman who he could not resuscitate on the street. Seeing death in all corners of the city clearly have taken a toll on Frank. Another similarity is that they both find themselves drawn to a woman; for Travis it was Betsy and in Frank’s case it’s Mary Burke (Patricia Arquette), the daughter of a heart attack patient he treats. However, whereas Travis saw Betsy as being his salvation, Mary affords Frank something less needful but just as important – comfort and respite from the bleakness of his life.

Though open to comparisons, Bringing Out the Dead is far more than just Taxi Driver revised. In might seem like a bit of a departure or diversion for Scorsese, but in many ways it’s a model of his entire body of work. Everything you would expect from a Scorsese film is all there – the New York backdrop, the conflicted man at a turning point in his life, characters who feel the system is against them. It’s a film that shows that he is unfazed as a filmmaker and willing to tackle any subject, and does so with his usual enthusiasm and energy.

Scorsese and Schrader don’t put Frank on a conventional journey to redemption or salvation, instead providing a snapshot look at his life. Also, Frank is not a Christ-like character acting on behalf of a higher power, he is far more realistic and relatable than that, and the absence of a more traditional narrative makes Bringing Out the Dead more intriguing and compelling.

Bringing Out the Dead is not all doom and gloom, though – on another level it works just as well as a dark comedy. Frank’s fellow medical professionals, so jaded by the job, indulge in plenty of inappropriate conversations throughout the film. Rhames has the best moment, gathering together members of a punk band to pray for the revival of one of their own, who goes by the name I.B. Bangin.

The film opened in October 1999 to favourable reviews, but was unable to find an audience and made a big loss at the box office. Maybe the faint praise didn’t do it any favours, maybe the masses found it indefinite. Another possible explanation is that David Fincher’s Fight Club was released the week before and was still taking cinemas by storm. Whatever happened, there’s no real reason why Bringing Out the Dead should not have done better, especially given its pedigree.

Even so, Bringing Out The Dead is not a film that falls back on its laurels or its own mythology, it is made with conviction and everyone involved – Scorsese, Schrader, Cage, cinematographer Robert Richardson, editor Thelma Schoonmaker to name a few – are firing on all cylinders. This is a worthy entry in the careers of all involved and definitely does not deserve to be forgotten.

This piece was written for the 20th anniversary of Bringing Out the Dead. The re-release has been scheduled, but the film is widely available on all major VoD platforms.

The Irishman

Posted on by victorfraga

There’s a moment midway through Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman that seems hauntingly melancholic as it is inadvertently emotive the more you think about it. Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro) has just acquainted the teamster president, Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino). They’ve only marginally confided with one another, speaking subtextually for what’s to become of their partnership. As Frank is getting ready to rest, Jimmy descends to his room, leaving the doors ajar as a thinning see through before turning the lights off.

This particular moment has a nuance spanning through the film’s 210-minute run time. It suggests more than what it simply emits, and not so much in character but in the philosophy which commentates the ethos of the inevitable means the men in this history prevail upon. The moment lingers with Frank placing his revolver on a night stand and quietly remaining still, guarding and inhabiting the confines of what’s to become his own solitude.

This is one of many moments in The Irishman, an engrossing epic of an unexpected power, that proposes a different kind of attitude towards a very familiar subject Scorsese is relatively known for. It is a rather bleak, at times dryly funny, and senescent biography of Frank Sheeran, a World War II veteran who became a hitman for the mafia, and then a union leader, and who had a simultaneously trusting friendship with Hoffa and Northeastern Pennsylvania mob boss, Russell Buffalino (Joe Pesci).

The film, adapted by Steve Zaillian from Charles Brandt’s book I Heard You Paint Houses opens in a retirement home, finding the back of an old Frank Sheeran, sitting on his wheelchair as the gliding long shot spirals to his front. He’s a boulder of an appearance, wearing shades over his leaden eyes and never once straining his mouth to evoke an expression. His entire demeanor is ghostly but living, and the moment he speaks, his statements become the narration of a history expanding through crime and politics, an intertwining of mafia history and American history. If Sheeran’s account on his own life were to be taken to credence (which, from the sources of many crime historians and investigators, it most definitely wouldn’t), then Frank would’ve been the Waldo in the rooms and events of pivotal moments in American history.

This would include the rise of Castro and the Bay of Pigs, John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the ‘blood feud’ between Bobby Kennedy and Jimmy Hoffa, and the mob wars spanning a decade. And somehow, all through the film, Frank seems as passive as he is old and immobile from when we first see him. It is from his narration that relays a denial of how everything went down, how his choices may have defined him and an uncertainty of what he must’ve felt. Capable of great violence, but neither pensive nor neurotic by the degree of his own violence, Frank is mostly a content figure lingering behind the talkative wise guys, the eccentrics more reckless and domineering for absolute rule. He is more reactive to abide, is muted by a nature that is never truly explained, and is perfectly capable of talking himself out of perilous confrontations. He’s introduced to the legacy of the Buffalino crime family by taking on petty theft jobs that involve running meat-truck scams and by simply being in the right place at the right time, meeting the right people. This begins with Felix “Skinny Razor” DiTullio (Bobby Cannavale), the teamster lawyer and cousin to Russell, Bill Buffalino (Ray Romano), and regarded Philadelphia crime boss Angelo Bruno (Harvey Keitel). Through these interactions, Frank describes his severe choices from their influences, and several murders made willingly as occurrences of complete arbitrary.

The unusual thing about The Irishman is how self-contained Scorsese is with helming a saga perhaps all too larger in pretext than Goodfellas (1990) and Casino (1995). There’s an admirably prolonging commitment to the film’s deadpan comedy, the deviation of its characters (in particular Pacino, and Katherine Narducci as Russell’s wife, Carrie), and it’s at times underwhelming response to the crux of every demise at the forefront. There’s rarely a saturation in the film’s design to introduce a variety of characters from an elder construct or the bombastic renaissance of figures such as Anthony Provenzano (Stephen Graham), and “Crazy” Joe Gallo (Sebastian Maniscalo). At the same time, from the constraints in which the film liberties the potential of never masking its heavily crestfallen semblance of its essence, the film faintly falters on that expense by keeping certain aspects unfulfilling.

Key players such as Anthony Salerno (Dominick Lombardozzi, unrecognizable in his aging prosthetics), DiTullio, Bill Buffalino (whose daughter’s wedding serves as a ploy for Frank and Russell to take a road tip that metaphorically denotes life, itself), Hoffa’s son Chuck (Jesse Plemmons), and Angelo Bruno all penetrate an emotional presence by introduction but their motives are fairly vague. As people, they’re almost difficult to define. It is evidently clear they’re involvement in the narrative is to essentially be rather than become a figure of influence that isn’t simply mannequinned by default.

Scorsese has never been one to feature a defining female presence in his crime-inducing films, unless one were to recount both Sharon Stone’s role in Casino and Lorraine Bracco’s all too knowing wife of Henry Hill’s in Goodfellas. They’re an element of the wise guy’s awakening, a somewhat entity of masquerading devotion, allured by embellishment curated by inherent sin. They are, for the most part and put bluntly in the world of Scorsese’s wise guys, their downfall. The women are manipulated from the expense of machismo lifestyle, they’re ignored and misunderstood. It is a dynamic in the romances from those films that are absent here for something potentially more refining in poignancy but is left as a minor study of fatherhood. That is from one of Frank’s daughters (the others are rarely characters) Peggy (Anna Paquin), who’s more of a muted astute ghost than Frank, himself. In the span of her lifetime involving Frank, she’s at first a witness to his brutality towards a grocery store runner who regrettably enforces physical disciplinary action towards her. His involvement with Russell and absentee as a father becomes more of a visceral frame of memory. It is cold, and thematically, the greatest loss in the war of politics and crime that Frank, by the end of the film, probably still doesn’t even realise.

There will be concerns regarding the de-aging technology used on De Niro, Pacino, Pesci, and Keitel. For the most part, it isn’t quite there yet, but as the film progresses that technical factor becomes less patent and goes to great effect (especially with the latter three, De Niro’s at first glance can’t go unnoticed). Another reason it almost seems so seamless through its entirety is on the basis of its performances that are apparent from the mild evolutions that transpire through the timeline.

You can see and feel the range of Robert De Niro and his years from this faded performance. His years as an actor are assembled (and not even instinctively) to the bare minimum of every trademark and energy he’s refined in ways only De Niro can deliver (and in specifics, his collaboration with Scorsese). This could be said the same for Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, and Harvey Keitel (who spends most of the time in the film sitting behind a table, with faint sway). It is unusual to see Pacino in a Scorsese film, in the same way it was for Jack Nicholson purveying his anomalous energy in The Departed (Scorsese, 2006). You question why they haven’t worked together before. And Pacino shares a great amount of screentime with De Niro that become less of a spectacle, than let’s say, their one scene in Heat (1995, Scorsese), and their overly prompted back and forths in Righteous Kill (John Avnet, 2008), and more interactive by an unexpected depth of compassion. Pacino in particular, shares a few scenes with De Niro and one incredible scene with Pesci that are so masterfully performed, and so simplistically constructed by Scorsese that it echoes the Herculean spirit of The Godfather.

Which makes this viewing of The Irishman almost more personal than analytical in the sense that this was premiered at the 57th Annual New York Film Festival, with a 35mm IB technicolor print screening of The Godfather Part II (1974) just a few days after. That film serves as a case study for Michael Corleone’s obsession for protecting the family name by blood, business, and a legacy sprawling from one too many prides tampered by conceited desires (given Sonny’s recklessness for violence, and Fredo’s weakness for respect and riches, and Tom’s loyalty over a name that isn’t even his), and his own family (Kay, and his children).

Michael is at the forefront of all the other eccentrics who deem power, but is for the most part ghostly in his rule, and desensitised to the convictions of those around him that he, by the nature of his own impassiveness to what’s of importance, loses just about everything he’s built (as in the case of The Irishman, Frank Sheeran). The parallel of this to young Vito Corleone (played by De Niro) establishing a new wave of crime from a more respectful and family driven angle, is perhaps the underlying and all too certain decree of what destroys the Corleone’s in its saga of betrayal, politics, the mafia, and essentially the pride of its maleness vitality.

For Frank Sheeran to pose a paralleling figure of Michael Corleone seems almost too determined and instinctual, but then you’d have to consider Pacino and Pesci’s take on the egos surrounding Frank. How unavoidable many contrivances could’ve been if meshing politics with crime would be of no reality. For every action and incentive, originated by a pureness for altering a time utilising on the vices that seem everlastingly timeless, paradoxically foil to the sin of what inspires no other measure other than the final and fatalistic destination.

And as one film illustrates this from a more operatic, and family oriented view in sin. Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman revisits this from an angle he’s approached in almost every film in his filmography, but is perhaps the most personal in delving from the vintage Scorsese that has transitioned to an elder Scorsese, one who’s lens is clearer from intense imagery to a sombre casualty of the many characters of his whom are left in the isolation of their attempts to unravel in nothingness. What was their aim at the end of all things? What do we make of Frank Sheeran, old, confused, scarred by a history that repeats itself with fresher spectators, sitting to a door left ajar?

It is unclear (and by design, perhaps) whether Martin Scorsese is using this narrative to unveil what could be his struggling, or at this point, accepted conviction of religion and sin. The 76-year-old American director can easily retire after this feat, which will live on with the powerful aspect of never being confessional to that idea, or many more viewers will choose to analyse when noting the hauntingly impassive nature of it’s lead.

The Irishman premiered at the New York Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It’s out in cinemas on Friday, November 8th. On Netflix in January.

A Ciambra

Posted on by Alasdair Bayman

Premiering at Cannes 2017’s Director’s Fortnight, A Ciambra screened at the Festival to a largely positive reception. However, outside the special bubbles created by such an environment, for better or worse, a festival favourite becomes malleable to the real world away from the confides of sponsored Illy cups of coffee.

Further, with an executive producing credit, Jonas Carpignano’s latest feature possess an extra selling point: Martin Scorsese is one of the film’s executive producers, alongside Emma Tillinger Koskoff. Adopting a milieu in the mould of Italian Neorealism, A Ciambra works as a piece in the mould of the cinematic past, whilst projecting its contemporary context to the forefront of its visuals.

Pio (Pia Amato) knows nothing else outside of a life away from hustling cars with his brother, smoking and voyeuristically observing men of crime in rural Calabria, Italy. Caught somewhere between boyhood and manhood, he is too old to be fooling around with younger kids but has yet to prove his masculinity to the older men in the criminal underworld. At home, he comes from a line of Roma people that are known to the Carabinieri to be criminally engaged with car theft and extortion. In his unique approach, Carpignano gained the trust of Italian-Roma travellers, who are consequently cast throughout the film. Again recalling Neorealism, this technique works well in the introduction of the Pio’s actual family but halters past this point.

Stories such as this have been expressed before in cinema’s history but Carpignano’s acceptance and head on confrontation of the European migration crisis from the East bestows the film with fresh light, represented in the boy’s friendship with a working migrant, Ayiva (Koudous Seihond).

Shooting across the remote and desolate locations of Calabria, the cinematography here could juxtapose the innocence of the boy with blushing pastoral beauty. Yet, what is deployed through Tim Curtain’s camera is a tight focus of Pio himself. There are no sweeping longshots, whatever the boy observes the audience likewise does. Recalling the haunting work of László Nemes and his DP Mátyás Erdély in Son of Saul (2015), the work submerges one’s spectatorship into the world present. Meandering through the space, the distinct lack of profundity towards Pio’s true existence, as so fundamental to the mastery exhibited in Neorealism, means that this cinematic technique serves to isolate and become repetitive.

This is not a lacklustre film. There is a vitality in witnessing this boy go through the motions of getting sucked into the criminal underworld, yet the whole affair lacks true perspicacity. One has to complete Carpignano on incorporating the migrant crisis deep into his narrative, still this only serves as a buffer to the main narrative. This unfortunately results in one of the most on-the-nose endings I can recall in recent memory. Souring the taste after its tedious almost two hour running time, it was enough to produce a lousy gasp on my behalf.

A Ciambra is out in cinemas across the UK of Friday, June 15th. It’s out on VoD on Monday, October 15th.

You Were Never Really Here

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Dazzling. Kaleidoscopic. Violent. Psycho. Taxi Driver. Scottish director Lynne Ramsay’s latest film is at once a rare piece of virtuoso cinema playing with the possibilities of the form and a dark journey into a Hellish American underbelly. The images are the cinematograph’s answer to great paintings courtesy of production designer Tim Grimes and director of photography Thomas Townend: the music is an unforgettable, sometimes pounding score by Jonny Greenwood interspersed with classic songs like If I Knew You Were Coming I’d’ve Baked You A Cake, in this context all the more unsettling for their homeliness.

Joaquin Phoenix’s performance is completely out there. One could say he dominates the movie, but actually Ramsay’s images and sounds dominate it just as much as Phoenix does. He has a much bigger role here than he does playing Jesus in Mary Magdalene, out next week. It seems almost disingenuous that of the two roles, You Were Never Really Here is the one that should tower above the medium. Maybe that’s the problem with portraying good and evil: it’s much easier to make evil stand out. Not that Phoenix’s character here is entirely bad: his antihero possesses a certain moral ambiguity.

Joe (Phoenix) is a mercenary employed by rich fathers of disappeared teenage girls to track them down and rescue them from captivity – meaning enforced sex work in houses used by paedophile rings. Joe’s modus operandi is to work out how many people including guards or security are inside, then take a hammer and bludgeon them to death as he encounters them one by one in order to safely remove his client’s daughter and return her to her father.

But this is no linear plot. The narrative is fractured so that, for example, events seen at the start turn up again later on. Were you watching a flashback? A flashforward? These games are constantly played with the audience, so much so that the piece may actually play differently to you if you go back and watch it again. There are moments cutting from the adult Joe to glimpses of him experiencing trauma as a child, for example breathing with a polythene bag over his head. Who is Joe? What happened to him in the past to make him the way he is now? We are given hints but told nothing specific and expected to draw our own conclusions. A multiplicity of interpretations, perhaps?

He constantly looks in on the home of his ageing mother (Judith Roberts) to check she’s okay. When he first visits, she’s been watching a TV rerun of Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) and it’s scared her. As in, she’s enjoyed watching a really scary movie. She takes a shower. She’s as independent and strong-willed as he is – and Joe is torn between being frustrated by the fact and being a devoted son. He mimics knife-slashing outside her bathroom door while she showers inside.

The other major female character is Senator’s young daughter Nina (Ekaterina Samsonov), drugged to her eyeballs when Joe rescues her from a paedophiles’ brothel. A young girl with no idea of what’s going on or being done to her. Very different from the seemingly savvy underage child prostitute played by Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976) and apparently at the opposite end of things from Joe’s own mother – young, healthy and adrift rather than old, frail and anchored. And yet, these archetypes are undermined in the course of the film: mother has become the victim and Nina has been rescued.

Finally, who is Joe? In the closing minutes, he performs an extreme act of violent self-harm right before our eyes. Or perhaps not. Perhaps it’s in his imagination. Or perhaps it isn’t and the narrative’s happy ending is in his imagination.

Cut to somewhere in the middle of the film. Joe has delivered hammer blows to the head of two suited thugs. One of them, who has admitted that he wasn’t the murderer on this occasion, lies dying on the floor. Joe lies down beside him and allows the dying man to hold his hand. A moment of tenderness in the aftermath of violence.

The film constantly shifts the audience’s allegiances like this. Sometimes we warm to Joe. At other times, he’s our worst nightmare. He doesn’t say a lot. The strong script is generally sparse on dialogue, preferring to provide the wherewithal for the film to weave its magic/wreak its havoc in sounds, images, performances, editing and music. As such, it’s a highly visceral experience almost unimaginable in a medium other than cinema. It’s also indubitably dirty in its subject matter, in its manipulation of the cinematic medium and in its dealings with the audience. Even down to its enigmatic title, taken from the book from which it was adapted. If you were never really here, then that begs the question, where were you really? Should you have been here or should you have been somewhere else? Or did you really imagine the whole thing?

You Were Never Really Here was out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 9th. It’s available for digital streaming on Monday, July 2nd.

A Dirty Carnival (Biyeolhan Geori)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Byung-doo, 29, (Jo In-sung) is a smart, lean and hungry gangster on the mean streets of Seoul, in A Dirty Carnival. As a debt collector he successfully collects payments from difficult customers. Yet his immediate boss Sang-chul (Yun Je-mun) pays him so little that Byung-doo must constantly beg him for the money to pay his mother’s apartment rent. Looking out for those beneath him and determined to better himself in the wider organisation, Byung-doo realises that its overall boss Hwang (Chun Ho-jin) would like nothing more than to get the sycophantic Prosecutor Park (Kwon Tae-won) off his back. Sang-chul clearly isn’t going to do anything about it so Byung-doo takes the task upon himself. He and one of his men drive into the back of Park’s car in a secluded spot and he kills the prosecutor when they get out of their cars to exchange details.

Byung-doo’s best mate Min-ho (Min Nam-koong) is an aspiring film director who can’t sell the script for the gangster film on which he’s working because the studio producer he approaches doesn’t think it’s realistic enough. After meeting up with Byung-doo, Min-ho chances to observe the latter and his men caught up in a vicious fight to defend a nightclub’s premises. He realises that his old pal is a genuine, real life gangster and decides to mine him for all the background information he possibly can. The studio subsequently accepts Min-ho’s “much more realistic” script from which he makes a highly successful film. Alas, many of the scenes are lifted directly from life, including Park’s murder. Byung-doo eventually realises he may have to kill his friend in order to survive. But it may already be too late for both of them.

Before the two men’s relationship sours, Min-ho reintroduces Byung-doo to the girl he fancied in school Hyun-joo (Lee Bo-young), who now works in a bookstore. Their developing relationship is going well until the night a work colleague sexually harrasses Hyun-joo on the street and the outraged Byung-doo brutally beats him up in front of her. Horrified, she immediately walks away from him and out of his life, but he’s still fixated on her and wants the relationship to continue.

Unlike much of the more recent, slicker and formulaic Korean gangster fare, there’s a gritty sensibility recalling low budget, Hong Kong marvel Made In Hong Kong (Fruit Chan, 1997). Yoo’s narrative charts its way between compelling gang fights, ruthless killings, good and bad romantic episodes and down to earth, everyday scenes involving people unlucky enough to have for a relative a gangster whose deeds will adversely affect their own lives.

A Dirty Carnival would make a terrific double bill with GoodFellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990). Both boast well observed characters in terms of gangsters and their wives or girlfriends. Both involve loyalty and betrayal. As people are beaten up, killed or buried alive, the viewer is compelled to watch in horrified fascination. Looking at the plight of the gangsters’ womenfolk, we’re torn apart. Yet we like Byung-doo. He gives his job everything he’s got and treats the men below him in his organisation with great respect, looking out for their interests.

Like GoodFellas‘ three protagonists, Byung-doo is an outsider trying to work his way up the organisation’s ranks with the odds stacked against him. Tasked with moving poor residents out of an area so it can be developed to line his boss’ and his own pockets, it becomes clear just how ruthless and self-centred a social parasite he is. Alongside his traumatised girlfriend Hyun-joo, when he commits acts of extreme violence we want to get as far away from him as possible. We like him as a character in a movie just like we like the three guys in GoodFellas despite their horrifically violent acts, but we might not want anything to do with any of them in real life.

A Dirty Carnival is well-paced and grips the viewer in an emotional vice from start to finish. Ten years on, this neglected masterpiece has lost none of its ability to engage and shock in equal measure. It deserves to be far more widely seen.

A Dirty Carnival plays in the London Korean Film Festival taking place until November 19th, and it hits the road on the 12th, visiting various dirty cities across the UK.

Taxi Driver

Posted on by mjbstaging

In the mid-1970s New York was a very dark and dangerous city and tourists were avoiding it. In 1975, a year before Taxi Driver was launched, violence was so widespread that here were posters around Manhattan that said “stay off the streets after 6pm” and “do not walk alone”. Urban people were suffering with unemployment, inflation, crime and corruption, with many experiencing loneliness and anxieties. Screenwriter Paul Schrader didn’t have to look far in order to find inspiration for Taxi Driver.

As you probably know, Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) works as a taxi driver in New York City. He complains about how dirty New York is and talks about how he does not discriminate against his passengers. He drives around everywhere on a typical day. When he gets off work in the morning after driving for hours and hours, he begins drinking and goes to a local porn cinema, where he spends the mornings on his own. Travis confesses his inability to sleep and talks about wanting to become more normal. Deep inside he wishes he could find a different place to go and to fit in with other people. Travis Bickle is a Vietnam War marine veteran. But he also has a much darker, dangerous and murderous side.

Paul Schrader wrote the screenplay while he was divorcing from his wife. He had no home. He slept in his car and was obsessed with guns and pornography. His experiences are reflected on Travis. What’s more, the car suddenly impersonated his feelings of loneliness and maladjustment, which Martin Scorsese deftly transposed to the screen. More than the cab driver, the taxi is a character. It is the car that sees underground New York. It is the car that chases the scum of the earth: the pimps and hookers. From inside the taxi, there is a perspective of New York that must be eliminated. The marginalised inhabitants of New York don’t fit in Travis’s reactionary idea of a “clean city”.

If Travis was around today, he would be on a lorry similar to the white lorry whose driver delivered an expletive-laden attack outside a mosque in Florida last year. Instead of searching for half-naked, blonde and young hookers, such as Iris (Jodie Foster’s cinema first role), Travis would exterminate burka-clad and Muslism women in general. His hate-fuelled mind would be intoxicated with racist Trumpian vitriol.

In fact, on the first script, Travis was much more racist than in the film. All of his shooting victims were African-Americans. Taxi Driver is such a cult movie that offers different readings as time goes by. In the film, there is a plethora of hidden figures that reveal the psychotic side of the seemingly ordimary citizen..

What makes Scorsese’s feature so vivid is its authenticity. Robert De Niro worked as a taxi driver in order to prepare for the role (his taxi driver’s licence is pictured above). Harvey Keitel, who plays the pimp Sport, did improv for weeks with a pimp. Jodie Foster was only 12 years old. Her role was considered so bawdy that she had to have a social worker on the set with her. She also had to spend several hours with a therapist in order to prevent psychological damage. They all got deep into the roles. Such authenticity elicited a quick reaction from the audience. On the day the film came out in New York, the queues were huge, and there were many taxi drivers lining up.

The film associates pornography with romance. Travis falls in love with Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), a secretary for a politician running for mayor. She is clearly out of his league but Travis insists on a date. On their first date, Travis takes her to see to a porn cinema.

Taxi Driver shows ugliness for what it is. There is no glamour and nothing is picturesque. Quite the contrary: it is menacing and dirty. The film is out again in cinemas on Friday, February 10th.

In time: A year after Taxi Driver was launched, William S. Doyle, Deputy Commissioner of the New York State Department of Commerce and Dr. Mark Donnelly, Art Director for New York State, hired advertising agency to develop a marketing campaign for New York State. The logo has become a pop-culture meme used everywhere around the globe. “I ❤ NY” was conceived in a taxi over to a meeting for the campaign. Watch below the song for the radio ad:

Silence

Posted on by victorfraga

Religion is a subject capable of arousing great emotion among both believers and non-believers. Martin Scorsese’s Silence is essentially concerned with adherents of one religion attempting to proselytise in a foreign land where the predominant religious system is so utterly alien as to be almost unassailable. To the point where even the incoming missionaries might have to abandon the faith which they seek to spread.

That land is 17th century Japan, where Christianity has been outlawed and believers practise their faith in secret as Kakure Kirishitan (“hidden” Christians). Two Jesuit priests, Father Garupe (Adam Driver) and Father Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) are smuggled into the country in order to find the older Father Ferreira (Liam Neeson) who is rumoured to have denounced his faith. After spending time with local believers, they are captured by the authorities who proceed to torture the Japanese Christians and make the priests watch, thereby encouraging them to renounce the Jesus they adore and serve.

Having discovered Japanese Christian novelist Shusako Endo’s book around the time of The Last Temptation Of Christ’s 1988 release, Scorsese spent about 25 years working with co-writer Jay Cocks on a screenplay. In this story of men out of their depth in a foreign culture, you feel Scorsese understands not only the Portuguese priests and the Japanese believers they meet (who include Shinya Tsukamoto, director of 1989 Japanese horror Tetsuo: The Iron Man) but also travelling inquisitor Inoue (Issey Ogata) and his cunning interpreter (Asano Tadanobu).

The director who once had union rep David Carradine crucified on the side of a railroad cattle wagon in Boxcar Bertha (1972) and turned Robert De Niro into a death-dealing avenging angel at the end of Taxi Driver (1977) here inflicts assorted lethal tortures on groups of Japanese believers who won’t recant: rapid drowning or burning alive after being rolled up in straw mats, slow drowning in the rising tide by crucifixion on the coast or hanging upside down with a puncture-wound to the neck so that the blood drains from the body.

Being forced to watch all this suffering, the priests find themselves grappling with unsettling questions about their Christian beliefs. Where is God while this cruelty is being meted out? Does He suffer with them in silence? Does He even exist? When Rodrigues finally meets Ferreira at the end of the movie, what he learns from the encounter will challenge the very framework from which he asks these questions.

Silence is out in cinemas on Sunday, January 1st. Don’t forget to watch the film trailer below!