Tag: photography

Framed

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

For those put off by the overblown histrionics of The Woman in the Window (2021), Framed offers a far more effective low-key and lower budget alternative riff on a classic Rear Window (1954) premise. Telling the story of a young amateur photographer who becomes obsessed with snapping the woman across the street, it is a film of actual substance, unlike Joe Wright’s excessive A-list nonsense.

Thomas Law stars as the entitled Karl who begins the film quitting his job to become a full-time amateur photographer. One assumes he has amassed a significant savings fund to live in a studio apartment in London without a job, where opposite in a nondescript apartment building is a woman with no qualms about strutting around the house in her underwear with her clothes off.

Like the protagonist of the Krzysztof Kieslowski’s masterpiece A Short Film About Love (1988), his voyeurism doesn’t appear to be sexually motivated — rather he sees his project in terms of its artistic potential, wanting to create an exhibition entitled “The Stalker & The Exhibitionist.” When the woman sends notes asking for more pictures, they build a strange relationship built on watching and being watched.

Working with a limited budget and a constrained amount of sets, Framed isn’t particularly interested in going down the lurid thriller route, rather using its premise as a means to explore the nature of consent, the relationship between the sexes and the relationship between life and art. Lottie Amor plays Karl’s friend and confidant Virginia, who is appalled by the photos, acting as the film’s feminist conscience. Rarely given much interiority of her own, Amor (in a debut role) shows an impressive naturalism in certain scenes but does tend to overplay her hand in others.

Framed

Conversely, Law does a great job of conveying male pride and privilege that leaks beneath a “nice guy” persona. He knows what he is doing is wrong, but believes that as he hasn’t got any bad intentions, then it doesn’t matter. His convoluted views of gender and relationships — including seeing nothing wrong with a man insisting on paying the entire bill — seem to stem from this same wellspring of male chauvinism, all the more sinister considering how nice he seems from his exterior. This persona seems to remain intact throughout the film, a brave decision considering how easy Framed could have fallen into false moralism by the end. Instead, we are invited to watch alongside Thomas and come to our own conclusions.

A late-in-the-game twist — featuring blackmail, a private detective and a political scandal — does little to dispel the academic nature of the film, which remains firmly fixed in second gear throughout its short runtime. Nonetheless, given its micro-budget and modest aims, Framed is a confident debut from Nick Rizzini that provides far more to chew on than the empty $40 million The Woman in the Window. Not quite Hitchcock, and not quite Kieslowski either, it charts its own dogged path through sexual politics and the compromised nature of much male-created art.

Framed is now available to stream on Prime Video.

Earthquake Bird

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Tokyo, 1989. An American woman who’s not long been in Japan has disappeared and the last person to see her alive is Lucy Fly (Alicia Vikander) who has lived in the country for five years, two months. Lucy is hauled in for questioning by the police and as her life in Japan slowly reveals itself in flashback, it becomes apparent why they want to talk to her.

Lucy is quiet, reserved, introverted. She mostly keeps herself to herself. She fits in well in Japanese society with its emphasis on the importance of the group over the individual. She is fluent in Japanese and works as a translator. She plays cello in an amateur string quartet with three much older Japanese women.

She also socialises with a group of international expats which is where Bob (Jack Huston) introduces her to the woman about whom the police wish to question her, Lily Bridges (Riley Keough) who is working as a nurse. The two women possess very different personalities. Lucy might be foolish to agree to take the newly arrived foreigner under her wing and show her the ropes. Lily is the stereotypical American: brash, outgoing and nosy. Not someone you imagine adapting well to Japanese society. She doesn’t even speak the language.

Lucy’s life changes when she runs into a man taking photographs on the street. He claims not to be interested in photographing people, only buildings, water, reflections. Something hooks her. Teiji Matsuda (Naoki Kobayashi) works at a noodle restaurant, but amateur photography is his passion. Soon she’s regularly going back to his flat, strangely situated at the top of an exterior spiral staircase and fully equipped as a darkroom, to be photographed. When on one occasion she removes her top, he tells her that wasn’t what he wanted. Before long, however, the pair have entered into a full-on, physical relationship.

She becomes obsessed with the photographs of old girlfriends Teiji keeps locked away in a filing cabinet. She knows where the key is and takes a look. When he later finds out, he is not pleased. Lily, meanwhile, wants to meet the boyfriend and when she does is clearly attracted to Teiji. This classic love triangle setup is fuelled by the growing tension between Lucy and Teiji.

Much as it would like to play like a Japanese thriller, Earthquake Bird is the adaptation of an English novel and it doesn’t feel very Japanese – despite a great quantity of Japanese dialogue, much of it delivered by Vikander. (To her credit, for this film she had to learn both the Japanese language and playing the cello, the latter something she’d learned a little as a child.) That said, as an outsider’s view of Japan, it’s convincing enough. And it has to have something of a grasp of Japanese culture and the country’s mindset to work.

When the police initially question Lucy, they do so in second-rate English until they discover she’s fluent in Japanese, something she doesn’t initially reveal. This seems to be typical of the woman. She is beset by guilt for an incident in her pre-Japan past for which she rightly or wrongly believes herself responsible.

For those wondering about the title, it relates to a bird that, as Teiji explains to Lucy, if you listen carefully, can be quietly heard to sing following an earthquake. There are several small-scale literal earthquakes in the narrative, that are soon over without any ill after effects. And then there are minor earthquake-comparable incidents, like a violinist from the string quartet slipping down steps to her death, to the shame of her fellow player who has recently polished the stairs and fears she may be responsible for the accident. Or Lucy falling ill when she, Teiji and Lily go on a day trip to Sado Island.

The whole is visually arresting throughout, with top-notch cinematography by Chung Chung-hoon who shot Oldboy (Park Chan-wook, 2003) and The Handmaiden (Park Chan-wook, 2016) and production design by Yohei Tanada who also did ManHunt (John Woo, 2017) and The Third Murder (Hirokazu Koreeda, 2017), so while you could wait a couple of weeks for it to turn up on Netflix, you might enjoy it more if you see it on the big screen first. As you might expect from Wash Westmoreland, previously the co-writer-director behind Still Alice (2014) and Colette (2018), this is as much character and culture study as it is thriller, which may infuriate some but reward those with the patience to take it on its own terms.

Earthquake Bird is out in the UK on Friday, November 1st. On Netflix in March!