Tag: woods

Dark Heart of the Forest (Le coeur noir des forêts

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

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Dark Heart of the Forest is a modest Belgian tale, handsomely told, bolstered by two keen performances by veteran child actress Elsa Houben and newcomer Quito Rayon Richter. Playing two young lovers who escape the confines of their care home and run off into the countryside, it explores the full potential of the woods for both rebirth and connection.

Nikolaï (Quito Rayon Richter) has always been an odd duck. Discovered in the forest by social services, he is quickly branded “Mowgli” by the other kids in the home. Meanwhile, Camille (Elsa Houben) appears to be the more put-together one, but she is hiding a second pregnancy that could land her in a lot of trouble. They quickly find each other in the home and decide to run away. Having no real parents themselves, and Camille losing her first baby due to a forced abortion, they want to be the type of good people that their parents never were.

Despite some narrative trickery in the first half— telling essentially the same story twice yet with key variations in both the male and female perspective — there is little in the final story that should surprise, bar the filmmaker choosing to end on either a positive or a tragic note. This is more of a mood and character piece than a conventional tale — for one, the gendarmerie don’t chase them around — taking great detail to capture the awkwardness of teenage love, as well as its elation, contrasted against a world that quickly wants to confine those who don’t fit in.

Living near a forest myself and usually walking there at least once a day with my dog, I have noticed how its entire look can change depending on the time of day, time of year, precipitation level, weather and available sunlight. As the name suggests, cinematographer Virginie Surdej captures the different moods of the forest well, from foreboding light green to malevolent darkness to hope in the form of the sun chinking through the trees. This moody feel is complemented by hazy synths and later, manic violin scales, rising to a crescendo during the film’s pivotal final scenes. Still, by the end it did feel as if the filmmaking team were running out of ways to shoot essentially the same place.

Shooting on handheld widescreen, featuring close-ups of small gestures and facial expressions, director Serge Mirzabekiantz takes great care to pay respect to the teenager’s plight, including teenage sex scenes that don’t come across as exploitative. While the more combative moments between the young and testy couple could’ve been more interestingly rendered, both Houben and Richter bring a fine rawness to their roles and their adolescent difficulties. Together they feel like a believable young couple, with all the attendant naïveté and passion that entails. The woods may be a cold, dank and often miserable place, but with the right person, there appears to be a chance to create something new.

Dark Heart of the Forest plays in the First Feature section of the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, running from 12-28th November.

Major Arcana

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Dink (Ujon Tokarski) parks his pickup outside a deserted shack in the middle of the woods. Inside, it’s a mess – old clothes strewn all over the floor, utter chaos. He takes some six packs out of the fridge and empties the contents down the sink. He checks inside of one of the walls and, sure enough, the expected stash of dollar bills is there. He pitches a basic tent outside the place.

Next day, he dons a hard hat and gets to work chainsawing some trees to make a clearing. He is purposeful and seems to be a skilled carpenter judging by the way, over the next days and weeks, he puts together his own wood cabin. His hard bitten mother Jean (Lane Bradbury) turns up and berates him for not being in touch. When he later visits her home, it’s visibly untidy in the same way as the shack, if not quite as bad.

Various forays into town bring him into contact with Sierra (Tara Summers) who wants to know what he’s been doing with himself since he left all those years ago. She doesn’t seem too keen on seeing him again. When he catches her chatting to a friend outside of a bar, she invites him over and slaps him hard. But then before long, she’s visiting the shack to see him. It turns out he’s inherited 52 acres and a sum of money from his late father. And it also turns out that she does Tarot readings as a sideline – the title refers to the picture cards in a Tarot deck. So he wants her to read his fortune.

This is a nicely judged, low budget character study which makes great use of what little resources it has. There’s a certain pleasure and fascination in watching someone actually build a house single-handed and it certainly feels as if Tokarski is doing that for real before the camera, giving parts of the proceedings an almost documentary feel. The only thing I can think of that’s anything like this part of the film in a movie is the much bigger barn raising sequence in the Hollywood production Witness (Peter Weir, 1985) which involves a considerable number of people and is a montage sequence with a rousing orchestral score rather than a major plot thread running through a narrative.

But what really makes the piece tick is the interplay between Tokarski and Summers with the film being constructed around the former first time actor while the latter, boasting a considerable string of credits mostly in TV series, turns in a tough, no-nonsense performance. Lane Bradbury as the mother is striking too, but her role is very much on the fringes of what is basically a two-handed narrative. The whole thing is surprisingly watchable and has the virtue of a minimal 82 minute running time.

Major Arcana had its world premier in the Raindance Film Festival on Thursday, September 27th and played again at 13.00 on Friday, September 28th. Watch the film trailer below: