Tag: Spring

Youth (Spring)

Posted on by victorfraga

Fifty-five-year-old Wang Bing is perhaps China’s most internationally acclaimed documentarist. His films are recognised for the humanistic portray of Chinese people as well as for their peculiar duration: Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (2002) lasted a mere 551 minutes (little more than nine hours). Youth is no different, with an equally focus on real people, and at a taut 213 minutes (little more than 3.5 hours). The film follows various young people – mostly adolescents aged 16 to 19 who migrated from the neighbouring province of Anhui – as they toil and unwind (in their scarce leisure time) in Zhili, a small town in the vicinities of Shanghai. Their stories intertwine, in a movie devoid of a narrative arc. The director stays behind the camera, in a fly-on-the-wall type of interaction.

These young people are energetic and boisterous. They carry out their work undaunted, and almost invariably with a smile on their faces. Their joie-de-vivre is entirely palpable. They don’t seem to mind the insalubrious working and living conditions. The corridors are littered with debris, the walls collapsing with filth, the sleeping areas crammed with countless people (bedsits often next to the sewing machines). These workers are at the coalface around the clock. Their favourite topics are marriage and money. Only very occasionally there is a touch of romance. These people seem to have an inborn sense of practicality. They spend most of the film calculating how many garments they have to produce in order to make ends meet. Thousands. Perhaps even tens of thousand. They are paid between 4 and 12 yuan per piece (£0.40 to £1, roughly). They presumably have to work exceptionally long hours in order to make a decent living wage. Despite taking place in a technically communist nation, it is the machinations of Neoliberalism – particularly the gig economy – that you will identify in Youth (at one point, a boss reminds his workers of their replaceability. while also insulting them: “retards”).

Strangely, these people never bemoan their working conditions, and they don’t dream of getting away either. There is no desire for change, it seems. I wonder the reason for such lack of self-reflection and criticism. Is it due to censorship, is this a factuality, or perhaps just a creative choice instead? While certainly not a piece of government propaganda, I am not sure whether Chinese authorities vetted Wang Bing’s latest film Hence I genuinely don’t know the answer to the question that I just posed. Whatever the answer, I wouldn’t blame the director. He is not responsible for the protocols that may (or may not) be forced upon him.

The cinematography is sombre and elegant, in line with the shabby locations, and in contrast to the chirpy demeanour of the characters. Despite the “spring” in its title, Bing’s latest endeavour is a very dark one, at least from a visual perspective. The weather is almost invariably cloudy or rainy. The director presumably used a very low ISO: the photography light is visibly bust during the only, extremely brief sequence out in the sun.

While Bing deserves unequivocal praise for his realism, the same does not extend to the length of the narrative. Overall, Spring does overstay its welcome. It is possible to make an extremely long documentary about spirited teens that’s engaging throughout. If you enjoy watching young people haggling relentlessly for 3.5 hours, this is the film for you. Otherwise you might get a little bored. Or you might at least want to pop out of the cinema for a little break (the film is being shown without an interval at all)

Youth (Sprint) premiered in the Official Competition of the 76th Cannes Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It isn’t the only documentary in a strand normally reserved for fiction features. Tunisian drama Four Daughters (Kaouther Ben Hania) is a highly inventive and audacious family and political doc. Out in the UK in October, as part of the BFI London Film Festival.

This is the first entry in a trilogy of films that follow the same characters over an extended period of time.Wang Bing estimated the trilogy would run for approximately nine hours and 40 minutes.

Resolution

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Michael (Peter Cilella) drops in on his old friend Chris (Vinny Curran) who has become a crack addict and is living in an abandoned house in the middle of some scrub wasteland. Chris thinks Mike wants to join him but Mike has another idea in mind. He wants to force Chris to go cold turkey so he cuffs his friend to some wall piping and gets rid of the drug.

Now the long wait beings. And a series of messages recorded on all manner of media begin arriving: an LP, a VHS videotape, wall carvings and more. Someone – or something – is recording them. But who. Or what? And why?

Resolution is the auspicious debut feature of independents Benson & Moorhead who went on to make Spring (2014) and The Endless (2017). Boasting a wickedly clever script by Benson and shot by Moorhead, it’s not only a textbook example of how to make a low budget feature and launch a film career but also a terrific and dirty little movie.

It’s basically a two-hander – two people alone in and around a room together. Other characters appear intermittently – two addicts at the door who want to buy from their dealer Chris, the Red Indian owner of the house who understandably wants them gone, three whiter than white shirted religious types (Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead and producer David Lawson Jr.) and a few others. There are also a few locations outside the house. A character called Shitty Carl gets mentioned in a line of dialogue.

If you’ve been lucky enough to have seen the duo’s recent The Endless, you’ll immediately recognise the two main characters from one of that film’s subplots. Both films are self-contained, yet they very cleverly link up. Whichever way round you see them, you’ll make the connections when you see the second film and go back to thinking about the first.

The Endless is a bigger film. Like Spring, it has a wider set of locations than Resolution. Unlike Spring, it boasts considerably more characters than Resolution. Yet Resolution remains highly effective: beautifully written, directed, shot and edited (yep, the editing is also by Benson & Moorhead) on a tiny budget.

As a Blu-ray and DVD release, Resolution includes a massive amount of extras, among them a deleted scene taken out because it didn’t really add anything – watching that scene you’re likely to agree. The real treat, though, is having Resolution on a two-disc set alongside an equally extras-laden disc of The Endless, the film to which it’s a welcome precursor. Resolution may not quite as good as that, but for a first feature it’s still pretty impressive.

Resolution constitutes the second disc in the UK Blu-ray and DVD releases of The Endless, out now. Watch the film trailer below:

The Endless

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

The third film from independent US directors Benson & Moorhead following Resolution (2012) and Spring (2014) sees them cast themselves as characters with their own first names. Here, Justin and Aaron are brothers whose lives seem to have lost direction since they escaped to LA from an isolated cult out in the desert some years ago. Specifically, Justin pulled the pair out of there when he became convinced that the cult members were about to enact a mass suicide. However, Aaron is not convinced that Justin’s suspicions were correct.

These tensions surface with the arrival through the post of an old videotape from the cult which suggests its members are still very much alive. Aaron has fond memories of great cooking and a family of sorts so wants to go back and visit; Justin hesitantly agrees provided they stay one night only and then leave. But once they’re there, Aaron doesn’t want to leave and one night becomes two and then more. The people at the camp seem outwardly friendly but there are some very odd occurrences. Things are clearly not what they at first seem.

Benson & Moorhead’s new – for want of a better term – fantasy thriller is likely to be among the most enthralling movies of its kind you’ll see all year. While the two brothers themselves are compelling onscreen characters, so too are the assorted cult members such as benevolent and beatific leader Hal (Tate Ellington) and Anna, the girl Justin fancies (Callie Hernandez from Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant and Damien Chazelle’s La La Land, both from last year). Then there are people living in the nearby desert scrubland who may or may not be part of the cult such as Shitty Carl (James Jordan).

Serial messages keep cropping up on a range of media – videotape, cans of film and more – seemingly sent from somewhere inside the camp. Indeed, enough of these have already turned up that there’s a literal shedful of them on the premises.

Add to that a mysterious tug of war where contestants at one end pull on a rope which ascends into the night sky at the other and other seemingly inexplicable scenarios like a man trying to set fire to his own house and you have a real brain teaser of a movie.

And that’s the great thing about The Endless: it plays with your head, an act it pulls off seemingly effortlessly, and in a very dirty way. Where it employs special effects, it does so both sparingly and highly effectively. You’ll come out pondering its peculiar network of relationships, asking yourself what you just saw and wanting to go back in and see it again in order to work out exactly what it was you saw.

Numerous big budget movies with high profile ads make want to see them then turn out not to deliver on their promise. The Endless is the other way round. Don’t expect a massive advertising campaign, just make the effort to seek it out on the big screen while it’s there. If you like your cinema dirty, you won’t be disappointed.

The Endless is out in the UK in cinemas and digital HD on Friday, June 29th. Watch the film trailer below:

The Endless

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Quote: “I was told… that they were all going to kill themselves… and THAT’S why we left the cult.” The opening words on the soundtrack of the new trailer for The Endless. Directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead (Resolution/2012, Spring/2014) play two brothers named Justin and Aaron. Tension between them. A thunderclap and a flashing image of a man putting a gun to his head. Light, eerie music. Sun-soaked rocks in a daylight American desert. A yearning. “They were our family. I want to go back.” A car journeying across Western desert country, then the image flipped so the sky is beneath and the land above, with no car… and superimposed over this, logos from half a dozen major film festivals. The brothers’ car passing a beatifically smiling man standing beside a sign that reads: ‘Camp Arcadia’. A videotape features strange circular images in a landscape. A man in a group of people round a table asks, “what video?” The sound of a clock ticking.

The music slowly builds via repeated and increasingly loud beats to something much more tense and unsettling throughout the rest of the trailer. A girl smiles. Dust above a dirt track in the evening, strange bird formations in the daytime sky. A rope drops out of the night sky to land amidst the circle of people below. “whoo!…” says a man boosted by adrenaline, “who’s next?” Another voice: “We can’t go back to our lives… knowing that there’s something out here.” (What WAS that sudden movement behind him that we just saw?)

Terrifying black and white drawings of…what? “It doesn’t let me sleep? It doesn’t let me dream!” One brother in the underwater darkness exhaling air bubbles. In the boat, on the surface, he breathlessly tells the other, “there’s something down there!” Seen from above, a strange circular pattern below a boat on a lake. Three written quotes on the screen: “Fantastical.” “Magnificent.” “Masterful.” A voice: “If you let it control you, it’s going to control you over and over again.” Kissing the girl. A clock reads ten past twelve. Jump cut: the same clock reads five past twelve. The girl smiling beside a campfire. Panic as something circular starts to assemble in the night sky. Two successive verbal quotes on the screen: “Mind-Bending”, “Brilliant.” A matter of fact question on the soundtrack: “there’s something out here, isn’t there?” The two brothers in their car at night fleeing a forest fire behind them. The title ‘The Endless’ with the slogan below ‘Never Go Back’. Fade to hashtag slogan #JoinTheCult

Some trailers show you the entire film and leave no surprises. Not this one. This extraordinary trailer shows a conundrum, pieces of a puzzle, which leave you wanting much more. Benson and Moorhead’s earlier Spring was an incredible, genre-defying narrative that’s well worth tracking down. Their debut Resolution – which apparently is not entirely unrelated to The Endless – will be included on the UK Blu-ray/DVD release of The Endless released three days after the new film’s theatrical release. You’re going to want to see The Endless on the big screen first, though.

The Endless is out in the UK in cinemas and digital HD on Friday, June 29th.