Tag: Noir

Zeros and Ones

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

The Eternal City is often portrayed as joyous place, filled with life, excitement, beautiful people and incredible scenery. But when walking very late at night, it can often feel rather malevolent and mysterious, filled with long-hidden secrets. The Rome of Zeros and Ones is a pandemic-infused noir suffused with dark shadows, the endless symbols of Christianity repurposed for much darker purposes.

Into this reality comes American military officer JJ (Ethan Hawke): equipped with a face-mask, he looks like he has never smiled in his life. He is on a mission to seemingly save the world from an unknown threat. He invokes Jesus through voiceover more than once, boldly stating that he was “just another soldier.”

Any of the genuine Christian elements such as loving your neighbor, turning the other cheek and self-sacrifice seem omitted here: this is a cold and lonely world, exacerbated by the worst pandemic in a hundred years. It’s difficult to say exactly what he is fighting, only that he manoeuvres an almost empty world, solely populated by Russian spies, Asian drug dealers and American spooks. His brother (also played by Ethan Hawke) has been detained, accused of promoting revolutionary ideals across the country. What those ideas are, we never quite know, as the film prefers to shroud its central mystery in an ambivalent, shadow-heavy tone.

Ferrara works hand-in-hand with cinematographer Sean Price Williams, one of the best cameramen in the business, as evidenced through his work with the Safdies and Alex Ross Perry. Williams shoots Rome almost entirely at night, making it seem as filled with betrayals and secrets as The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949). This is complemented by grainy, over-exposed digital footage, ramping up the paranoia with a sense of constant surveillance. The music by Joe Delia then expands the scope where the evidently small budget can’t, featuring reverb-heavy military drums and Glenn Branca-like guitars. The result is an incredibly moody spy thriller so baked in cynicism that it makes John Le Carre look like Frederick Forsyth.

The setting make absolute sense and is integral to the film’s mood. Italy was the ground zero for coronavirus in Europe, the haunting images emerging from the country a terrifying prelude to what would soon devour the continent. Nonetheless, while it is definitely a more interesting corona-influenced film than the comedies and dramas I have seen so far, finding a way to wrap it into a political thriller, Zeros and Ones preference for atmosphere over coherence can make it hard to find a grip.

Ferrera is a great experimental filmmaker, making his relative misfires still worth exploring and digging into. But while something such as Siberia (2019) could work brilliantly as an exploration of the mind and soul despite having little to no plot, Zeros and Ones’ attempt at reconfiguring a genre usually obsessed with plot makes it harder to love. No one could come out of that film knowing what actually happened, but certain images — like the saints of the Vatican shot like members of a secret cult, or Ethan Hawke running down a deserted, barely-illuminated alleyway or yet another Ferrara sex scene between JJ and a mysterious woman — will stick with me, creating an allegory for a world that has been plunged into a new dark age.

Zeros and Ones played in Concorso internazionale at Locarno Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. On all major VoD platforms on Monday, March 21st (2022).

Cordelia

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

Antonia Campbell Hughes plays the eponymous character, a distracted actress still reeling from a terrorist attack on the Underground. One of the very few survivors, she compares herself to a rat, unsure how to reassemble her life. Yet she still believes that she has her life under control, rehearsing for a play in the West End that has the potential to revitalise her wayward career. But when her twin sister (also Hughes) skips off to Bruges for the weekend with her new boyfriend, Cordelia finds herself far more vulnerable than she thought. Constant phone calls, with no voice on the other end, do little to alleviate her anxiety.

Director Adrian Shergold has a great knack for constructing unsettling moments that make us think one step ahead of our characters. Men seem to appear out of nowhere; first mere faces in the crowd before slowly coming into Cordelia’s rearview. One innocuous meeting between Cordelia and an old friend on Millennium Bridge is filled with portent; both sides skirting around the issue with passive aggressive politeness.

Cordelia

Yet, she isn’t totally impervious to people of the opposite sex, lulled by the melancholic cello sounds of her upstairs neighbor Frank (Johnny Flynn). He accosts her at a coffee shop, and asks if the music bothers her. When she replies that the music is beautiful, he invites her for a drink in an empty Soho joint.

Musician-actor Johnny Flynn puts in a fascinating performance, relying on his good looks to give us a false sense of security before slowly revealing the tortured man underneath. Constantly talking about his failed music career, which once spanned concerts from Buenos Aires to Moscow, his overt friendliness feels almost immediately like a trap. Yet she only sees his vulnerability, seemingly happy to find someone she can confide her deepest concerns in.

Their doomed romance unravels in a bizarre, interesting way, its denouement occupying the last third of the film. With its focus on feminine paranoia as well as its dark vision of London, Cordelia evokes classic British 1940s psychological thrillers such as Gaslight (1940, 1944) ,as well as early Hitchcock. Dim lamps and dark interiors give Cordelia’s flat a murky feeling, the streets of Soho consisting only of the iconic overhanging lamps. Characters are often shot head on, making them feel like part of the furniture.

Yet the supporting cast are subsumed by this world. British luminaries such as Joel Fry, Alun Armstrong and Catherine McCormack are given little chance to stand out. Michael Gambon for example, is severely under-utilised as one of Cordelia’s neighbors, briefly introduced before barely being seen again. These types of thrillers, especially of the old-school variety, thrive on prying and nosey neighbours — providing ironic levity to an otherwise grim experience.

While worth watching for its well-constructed sets and foreboding production design, creating a convincing portrait of a dark and gloomy London, it can’t corral its mood into something energising. Much like its lighting, Cordelia is too dim to electrify the audience.

Cordelia is in cinemas on Friday, October 23rd. On Sky Cinema and NOW on October 19th (2021). Also available on other platforms:

Motherless Brooklyn

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

It’s taken Edward Norton 20 years to adapt Jonathan Lethem’s novel Motherless Brooklyn for the screen, but it’s been worth the wait. Norton is best known as an actor, but his talent clearly extends a long way outside of that field – as well as being the lead, star actor here, he produced, wrote and directed, fulfilling all these duties as well as you can imagine any four separate people doing. You can sense the time that’s gone into this: the loving period detail, the feeling that the script has marinated so that the characters have a real depth to them on the page, the superb music score. There is a palpable sense here that you are watching one of the great private eye movies. Actually, there’s more than that… although this is a period piece, it feels very much about where we are now.

New York City, 1957. Lionel Essrog (Norton) works for Frank Minna’s detective agency. A confident, safe pair of hands, Minna (Bruce Willis) has taken a chance on Lionel who suffers from Tourette Syndrome. Someone will say a word or make a gesture and it will set Lionel off. He just can’t help it. Most people would regard Lionel as an unemployable misfit, a drain on social resources. Frank sees his potential. Lionel’s head detects patterns, makes connections, won’t leave puzzles alone until all the pieces that don’t quite fit have been assembled into a coherent whole. Lionel is now an invaluable asset on Frank’s crew.

So when in the opening minutes Frank goes to a meeting which leads to a car ride which ends in his death, the circumstances and background worm their way into Lionel’s subconscious and force him to investigate, ponder and try to make the disparate pieces fit together. Somewhere in the puzzle, an unseen member of numerous committees at City Hall, lies the power behind the city’s planning department, visionary developer Moses Randolph (Alec Baldwin, the actor who among other roles is known for satirising Donald Trump on Saturday Night Live) who thinks nothing of demolishing areas where poor people live to further his idealised metropolis of the future. It’s simply collateral damage. Moses is contrasted with Paul (Willem Dafoe) who looks like a tramp but turns out to be a trained architect fallen from grace and the brother of Moses, with whom he has profound disagreements about urban development and the way people who live in a city should be treated.

Lionel’s investigations lead him to a woman named Laura Rose (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) at the Committee Against Racial Inequality in Housing. She drags him to a Harlem jazz dive where he discovers the music to be a liberating experience; if his Tourette’s is normally a cause of social embarrassment, here he finds himself involuntarily singing scat and impressing the players on the stage. He and she connect on the level of outsiders – he because of his so-called disability, she because of the colour of her skin. Eventually he will work out for himself her place in the complex puzzle his head is putting together.

Everything about this film – from its broadest brushstrokes to its finest detail – is magnificent. Nothing is here that hasn’t been considered, from Dick Pope’s satisfying noirish cinematography to a period jazz score with a contemporary urban edge involving legendary trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, composer Daniel Pemberton and a demo (of his song Daily Battles) by Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke. Norton’s vision is so strong and so detailed that he elicits and encourages incredible work from his well chosen team be they in front of or behind the camera.

More significantly though, the film is about something very important: ordinary people at the bottom of the pile, with their weaknesses and idiosyncrasies which make them human, doing the best they can. Perhaps even making a positive difference. And, at the other end of the social spectrum, the rich and powerful who walk all over them without seeing themselves doing anything wrong. It’s a US movie which clearly speaks to an America run by the despotic, racist and sexist Trump. The film doesn’t appear to be conceived that way – it was in development way before Trump was even a presidential nominee – it’s just that as a movie coming out now it seems to fit the place in which America currently finds itself. It likewise seems appropriate as a comment on the wider world right now. As for Britain, currently in the throes of a general election where the incumbent Tories appear to care little for truth in their duplicitous and deceitful campaigning, ordinary damaged heroes like Lionel who fight for human dignity as best they can are exactly what we need. The movie of the moment. Go see it as soon as you possibly can.

Motherless Brooklyn is out in the UK on Friday, December 6th.

Under the Silver Lake

Posted on by victor@dmovies.org

Bloated, hyped, panned, lionised. David Robert Mitchell’s follow-up to the inventive Horror flick It Follows (2015) arrives in cinemas and on Mubi day-and-date this week. A year on from its decidedly mixed response at Cannes, the cluttered, uncompromising vision of Under the Silver Lake is destined to accrue a cult, midnight movie reputation.

Set in an uber-lush LA, full of foliage and animals and animal killers, after Andrew Garfield’s loser Sam gets caught watching Riley Keough through some binoculars and getting stoned together, they set a date to hook up tomorrow. But the next day, she’s nowhere to be found. Entire flat empty, leave no trace. This sends Garfield into a paranoid, spiralling quest through Los Angeles, where he uncovers a thousand conspiracies and points the finger at everyone but himself. The camerawork is lush, the music by Disasterpiece is great, intoxicating you on all that LA hedonism, with a bonerfied, libido deconstruction on the level of Thomas Pynchon, whose tone is captured better here than in literal adaptation, Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2014).

Mitchell has built a city where nothing really leads anywhere but back up your own behind. Yes, it’s self-indulgent, but so is this quite hateful lead character played with adaptive skill by Andrew Garfield. The way he runs across the screen, flapping his stiff hands by his side, is hilarious. His sneer, hiding behind his shades, his dejection every time someone points out how bad he smells. It’s funny, Little Tramp material. And then Mitchell undercuts that sympathy by having Sam beat up a child.

As an audience identification figure, he sucks. And yet are we asked to align with Garfield again and again, and Mitchell is not always in control our understanding of exactly where we should be in opposition to him. That’s what lets the film down, but also what makes it interesting to figure out. His journey, for all of the film’s complicated, shaggy dog nonsense, doesn’t take Sam particularly far outside of his own social milieu. He’s is already peripherally connected to almost everyone he encounters, so much of his conspiracizing is just about a social group that he can’t really infiltrate. The failure of the male ego.

Mitchell has been compared, unfavourably, to David Lynch, for his employment of surrealism within the metier of the classic Hollywood. But his style doesn’t resemble Lynch as much as both directors build characters who are self-consciously situated within an intertextual world.

The mannered costumes, like LA is a perma-fancy dress party, brought to mind Rivette’s play acting in his fantasy films like Duelle (1976). Under the Silver Lake always seems on the verge of falling all the way into those fantastical elements. There’s nothing fantastical however about the way that all the women in Sam’s sphere, young aspiring starlets the lot of them, are being infantalised and sexually exploited by this world, forced to keep up those movie star smiles and behave placidly even around a broke dude who smells like skunk spray.

Indeed, charges of sexism against the films gaze on its female characters seem to be missing the point. Isn’t it clear to the point of bluntness about their objectification? Isn’t there a scene where Garfield and Grace use a drone to spy on a woman and then lose their boners when she begins to cry as she strips? Isn’t Garfields ineffectiveness as a person, in forming relationships, in developing as a person, punished by the film? Don’t the glimpses of conspiracy that are uncovered all revolve around the power that incredibly rich and powerful men hold over vulnerable people? Do viewers really need these things spoken aloud? The visual system of the film, from these plot beats down to the production and, of course, the fact that Garfield smells like a literal skunk for much of the run time, tell us the answers. Does a character need to placate the audience by appearing just verbally admonish him? Hang on, that happens too!

Perhaps Mitchell is throwing too much at the audience for a real coherence to be found. But its approach to mystery doesn’t lead you to expect every loose end to be closed off as much as to just savour the morsels it throws your way. You are forced to work through Sam’s bad decisions, the convoluted mystery, the novelistic digressions. Some of the places Under the Silver Lake reaches are perhaps too easy, as though Mitchell’s grasp of the galaxy-brain-society stuff he’s talking about is all surface level, like he himself is lost in the mire that is modern life. But you couldn’t have a film about self-indulgence that doesn’t swim in those waters itself, could you?

Under the Silver Lake is in selected cinemas on Friday, March 15th (2019). On Mubi in August 2020.

The Third Murder

Posted on by Alasdair Bayman

F ollowing his captivating examination of the family in After the Storm (2016), Hirokazu Koreeda continues his prolific form of one-film-a-year and delivers a multi-layered emotional tapestry in The Third Murder. Pre-dating the appearance of the title on screen, Misumi (Kôji Yakusho) commits the titular cardinal sin, whilst stealing the dead man’s wallet. Charged on the account of murder and robbery, his fate looks sealed until the prudent lawyer Shigemori (Masaharu Fukuyama) seeks to add truth to the matter. Retaining the familial themes that have imbued his works with a vibrant quality, whilst venturing to pastures green, Koreeda entrances you into the seams of his narrative; leaving one emotionally charged and contained.

Throughout, the murder which Misumi has committed only has one valid piece of evidence; his confession. Apart from the fact he worked at a canning factory owned by the man he killed, there is actually very little hard evidence to support Misumi committing murder. Shigemori is all too aware of this and proceeds to look beyond Misumi’s confession and study the actual narrative of the killing. Previous to Shigemori’s involvement, his father examined the case but was all too swift to jump towards the conclusion that the murder was all down to Misumi.

Working in a small team of four, Shigemori’s work relationship is imbued with a tender stroke by Koreeda. Replicating the narrative bonding act of eating noodles, which is so fundamental to the relationships in After the Storm, ingrains a delicate characteristic to the lead. Acting as a cathartic escape from the stresses of the murder case, such senses add levity towards the Noirish elements of Misumi’s brutal act of murder. The fine balance between light and dark tones is an artistic stroke of virtuosity from the director, resulting in a deep emotion investment to all the characters, regardless if they are criminals or not.

Similar to Our Little Sister (Hirokazu Koreeda, 2015) an exploration of young femininity is unearthed in Sakie (Suzu Hirose). The daughter of the man Misumi killed-or seemingly so- she is a vulnerable tender being. Operating to a level of secrecy towards Shigemori, the secrets of her father are uncovered through her. Hirose’s graceful pale faces furthers the progress of her character’s tenderness too.

Matching Misumi and Shigemori, Mikiya Takimoto’s CinemaScope camera fills their claustrophobic encounters in the holding cell with peculiar angles, occasionally merging the two men’s faces together or intimately. Recalling the aesthetics of Robby Müller’s cinematography in Wim Wender’s essential Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders, 1984), it is absorbing to witness.

Adding to an already impressive and varied filmography, Koreeda serves up a delightful slice of enthralling cinema. Akin to the varying genres explored by Francois Ozon from 8 Women (2002) to Frantz (2016) knows what field the Japanese director will operate in next. This interchangeable form of filmmaking is as good as it gets.

The Third Murder was out in UK cinemas in March. It’s out on VoD on Monday, July 16th. The director won the Palme d’Or in Cannes for his latest film Shoplifters, yet to be released in the UK and elsewhere.