A razzledazzle musical reprise of Man At Bath, Christophe Honoré’s Beloved is a fractured but enjoyable romp through the swinging Sixties and nervous Noughties.

Beloved
★★★

This Is Not A Love Song by  Mark Wilshin

CAUTION: Here be spoilers

Christophe Honoré leads a double life. And while the first forms the basis of his most popular film Les Chansons d’Amour, with Catherine Deneuve and Louis Garrel gallicly singing their way up and down the boulevards of Paris with all the frolicsome colourfulness of a Jacques Demy film, the other is the seedier underworld of Ma Mère and L’Homme Au Bain, both infused with a tabooed sexuality worthy of Georges Bataille. Beloved though couldn’t be more different from L’Homme Au Bain. Shot in grainy handheld digital and flowing freely between fiction and documentary, Man At Bath is set largely amidst suburban Paris’s tower blocks with former porn star and would-be actor François Sagat as the jilted lover whose ex-boyfriend heads across the Atlantic to promote his film. And yet Les Bien-Aimés is a curious companion piece to L’Homme Au Bain – only brasher, better looking and with a lot more money.

Beloved opens with a multicoloured riot of Seventies pastels – pink, blue and white, in bright comparison to the digital mutedness of Man At Bath. But despite their apparent differences, there are still  plenty of threads connecting the two films. Chiara Mastroianni, who plays herself in Man At Bath, finds a fictional role here as Véra, the grown-up daughter of Madeleine, (incorporated  in the past by Ludivine Sagnier, and by Catherine Deneuve in the present). Véra falls in love with Henderson, a gay American with AIDS living in London. And despite Les Bien-Aimés’ predominantly straight narrative, here we dip briefly into an alternative gay story strata, with glimpses of characters borrowed from Man At Bath - the mustachioed filmmaker Omar at his flat, and Matthieu, Omar’s Canadian fling, at Henderson’s side in Montreal.

Les Bien-Aimés may be the straight younger brother to Man At Bath, yet it’s the irreconcilability of Véra and Henderson’s mutual attraction with their sexual identities which forms the contemporary narrative and provides the film’s tragic pathos. It’s an interesting, if not entirely novel, conceit – of love in the post-sexuality age where gay men can fall for attractive women. Henderson’s fascination is astonishing, crowned in toilet cubicle cunnilingus and a macho doorstep slap, but it does in fact echo Honoré’s own beautifully lensed and intimately adoring close-ups, whirling round a statuesque Mastroianni. But more than just a director’s love for his leading lady, Beloved‘s moral frontiers are complicated further by the spectre of AIDS.  We may have to look beyond the narrative implications of a homosexual bringing the “gay disease” into a straight relationship, but it’s a narrative twist that makes a 21^st century chaste romance conveniently credible, more careful than carefree.

After four years in the wilderness, pining for an impossible love and complaining to her fellow teacher and one-hit writer Clément,  played by a lank Louis Garrel at his most Raskolnikovian, Véra flies to meet Henderson on September 11^th 2001. Unable to land in New York, her flight is diverted to Montreal and Henderson drives up from the Big Apple to meet her. Véra is desperate to have Henderson’s baby, unable to live without loving him, or accept an end to their glimpsed love. But skirting round the subject of female biological urges and the risk of AIDS, Honoré’s interest in this very contemporary dilemma isn’t so much the threesome that might make it happen as the taboos of a woman willing to contract AIDS to have a baby and Véra’s would-be shocking 9/11 dance. Admittedly, it’s a shameful swansong, but neither lighthearted nor disrespectful, just a lonely woman lost in her own world. Nevertheless, it’s an unfortunate end for Véra, Chiara Mastroianni’s irrepressible luminosity sacrificed to the script as Véra’s slow, shuffling overdose ties her to an impossible relationship indefinitely. With no escape but death.

Les Bien-Aimés though is a film of two halves. Away from the delicate quandaries of the contemporary, lies the story of Véra’s mother Madeleine. It’s a Technicolor world of Parisian fashion and cheeky ambition, echoed by the French cover Ces Bottes Sont Faites Pour Marcher. Madeleine’s flagrant shoe theft is almost guiltless, brazen and carefree. But instead of turning to larceny, she funds her lifestyle with pocketmoney johns as a pute occasionelle. It’s worlds away from the modern story, easygoing and sexy, and its story is aptly told in stilettos and brogues, its seductive charm solicited  in an elegant scissoring of legs. Veering off into songs like La Tour Eiffel T’Ennuie Déjà, Mon Coeur Bat Plus Vite Quand Tu Penses A Moi or Les Chiens Ne Font Pas Des Chats, it’s a musical narrative that charts, in breathy easy-listening tunes, Madeleine’s romance with Jaromil, her move to Prague, his adultery, her return to Paris and her loveless marriage with dependable cavalryman François Gouriot.

The prologue’s musical brio even seeps into the modern story, with Chiara Mastroianni diva-dancing in a London nightclub, as well as her London Calling duet with Henderson on a spot-lit staircase. There’s also a flamboyant time-crossing quartet, sung by Catherine Deneuve and Chiara Mastroianni in the present and by Clara Couste and Ludivine Sagnier in the past, as well as a playful nod to Demy’s Les Parapluies De Cherbourg in an aerial shot of opening black umbrellas. But while Madeleine’s musical backstory is a nostalgically entertaining look into the careless sexual mores of the Swinging Sixties, it’s the tragedy-filled confusion of the present that provides Beloved’s purpose. It’s not just a different kind of loving, it’s a different world in which modern lovers must find contentment with either loving or being loved. It’s not the fifty-year romance of Madeleine and Jaromil still cavorting in a hotel by the Gare de l’Est, but a maelstrom of wincing self-examination. Anxious temerity in lieu of epic passion.

Dedicated to Marie-France Pisier, star of Truffaut’s L’Amour En Fuite, Beloved is most certainly a story of love on the run; Madeleine on the run from monotony and monogamy, Véra running after a fleeting vision of love. And with all the lighthearted cavorting of a Nouvelle Vague comedy, Les Bien-Aimés knows how to have its cake and eat it. It’s glossy, starry and fun, but also serious, thought-provoking and dark. You might see Honoré’s collision of two worlds as a cynical attempt to hedge his bets, or bring a blockbuster budget to a smaller story, but really Beloved finds itself in this space between. Like The Kinks’ cover that closes the film I Go To Sleep, its modern story is a melancholic fade to black, a far cry from the colourful excesses of its other story. But it’s Honoré’s love of the whole colour spectrum which makes Beloved‘s blacks darker and its colours brighter.

Beloved is released on 11th May 2012 in the UK

A devastating bedroom battle of the sexes, Malgorzata Szumowska’s Elles offers a glimpse into the secret lives of women behind closed doors.

Elles
★★★★

Belles De Jour by Mark Wilshin

CAUTION: Here be spoilers

From Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel through to Jacques Demy’s eponymous film, our cherished Lolas of cinema have always walked the line between working and showgirl. And following in the stilettoed footsteps of Marlene Dietrich and Anouk Aimée, Anaïs Demoustier’s Lola in Malgorzata Szumowska’s Elles is no different. She struts onto our screens as a pay-as-you-go seductress, tempting bored husbands and moneyed students with her gamine good looks. But it’s not long before Lola’s demystified and re-presented as Charlotte, a strapped-for-cash student living the Parisian dream. And as much as it is a film about high-class aspirationalism and its inevitable moral ebb, Elles is above all a film about women. Women and conversely, or should that be perversely, a film about men.

It’s Anne that provides our conduit into this seedy underworld. A writer at Elle magazine, she has the kind of easy and luxurious lifestyle Charlotte and Alicja crave. All dressed up in gauzy agnès b. creations, and with her sumptuous Parisian flat, Anne, as incorporated by Juliette Binoche, is effortlessly stylish and successful. The opening scenes turn out to be an interview with Charlotte that needs transcribing and Anne labours through the peace of night, cut off from the rest of the slumbering world by her shriving headphones, only rousing from her labours to pack her husband and two sons off to work and school. And it’s not exactly domestic bliss. Chaos reigns chez Anne, as she battles work, a dinner party for her husband’s boss and a temperamental fridge door. But what unbalances Anne more than anything else are those lingering encounters with elles.

Charlotte and Alicja are the sexy side of prostitution – no addictions, diseases or pimps. Just girl-next-door looks, a fancy salary and a surprising lack of unpleasant johns. And while Malgorzata Szumowska’s Elles is based on real-life reports of French students funding university courses through sex, its partisan optimism is more than a little unsettling. But that, of course, is the point. Like the girls’ cheery insouciance when it comes to condoms, it’s a confrontation to bourgeois sensibilities as well as common sense. Instead, the girls cheerfully steer a course through unorthodox sex acts with husbands bored of their humdrum sex wives. And for Alicja, it’s a way out of cheap furniture, acrylic jumpers and the high-rise, her Munchian scream over the HLMs in a very Eastern bloc-looking Villiers-le-Bel a violent expression of her frustration. Their secret call girl diaries lead them not only out of poverty and debt, but into a luxury world of designer shoes and flats. For these millennium girls, sex is nothing more than an uncomplicated exchange of bodily fluids, and worth every penny.

What’s most fascinating about Elles though is Anne’s relationship with Charlotte and Alicja. She meets Charlotte in the Buttes Chaumont, maternal and protective. But after her rendezvous with Alicja in a hotel, seduced by miniature bottles of vodka and Alicja’s winning smile, Anne is enveloped into a transgressive space, suddenly capable of things she normally wouldn’t do. And putting to good use the girl she paid for, Anne and Alicja dissolve into a cinematic blur, their two figures merging into one. Their influence endures though, well beyond the slow fade. And soon Anne begins to question her repetitious existence, her dinner party coq au Riesling a sly poke at her husband’s colleagues with a recipe borrowed from Alicja and her john. It’s a captivating performance from Juliette Binoche, caught between middle-class mores and a seething desire to explode, an erotically charged firework whose masturbation scene, with its blotched skin and pulsating veins, is overwhelmingly brave, honest and haunting.

Quaffing glasses of Chardonnay, Anne becomes more and more distant from her family and the world around her, an isolation that becomes even more apparent during a chilling dinner party scene in which all of her male guests are suddenly transformed in her mind’s eye into the girls’ clients. Gender mistrust, male dominance and female control are themes which dog Elles; Charlotte and Alicja battling for control of their paying guests with rules and lines drawn in the sand, while their customers in turn demand it harder, faster, stronger. Men fare badly in Elles, either teenage stoners or sex-obsessed philandering husbands, but breaking out from her middle-class malaise in an impetuous abruptness, she hits Paris by night, on the prowl and dangerous. Her new-found libertinism is only short-lived though, and soon she’s back in the family home. But repairing their marriage with fellatio, she turns herself into a belle de nuit, destroying her husband’s need and her fear of going elsewhere. It’s quietly devastating, and the final scene, with harmony restored to the breakfast table, is subtly shocking, its domestic bliss not even faked.

With entrancing cinematography from Michal Englert and a sumptuous score, Elles is an arthouse rocket. Joanna Kulig (of The Woman In The Fifth) and Anaïs Demoustier are bewitching as the butter-wouldn’t-melt temptresses, but it’s Juliette Binoche’s performance which provides the film’s gravitational pull, whipping up a maelstrom of frustration, misplaced morals and desire. Malgorzata Szumowska’s Elles may on the surface be about three women, and by extension womankind, but Elles isn’t other people, it’s La Binoche. It’s her very Freudian transition from Madonna to whore and back again. But like those cinematic Lolas of yesteryear, she’s more than just a showgirl.

Elles is released on 20th April 2012 in the UK

His first English language feature, Paolo Sorrentino’s This Must Be The Place turns the U-turn into a narrative art as a has-been popstar turns Nazi-hunter.

This Must Be The Place
★★★★

On The Road by Mark Wilshin

CAUTION: Here be spoilers

Paolo Sorrentino never makes the same film twice. And after the upbeat stylistics of Il Divo, his first English language film This Must Be The Place is something of a slow shuffle. A return to the glacial pace of The Consequences Of Love and the sartorial freakishness of The Family Friend, his latest film is a fresh yet familiar reconstruction of Sorrentino musings. But with a terrific performance by Sean Penn as Cheyenne, the rich, drug-addled rock star unable to stop being a kid and with a wickedly funny script, This Must Be The Place has a non-conformist charm worthy of its made-up and backcombed hero.

Skewered by an abrupt volte-face midway through, This Must Be The Place begins in Dublin, slowly piecing together fragments of a story; Cheyenne’s attempts at stock market investments, bare-hand bolote with his firefighter wife Jane (another brief but magnificent performance by Frances McDormand), his attempts at matchmaking emo friend Mary with straight-cut waiter Desmond or conversations about his randy friend’s exploits with girls in plaster casts. There are more elliptical undercurrents hinted at too - the disappearance of Mary’s brother Tony and the grave of two fragile young brothers who committed suicide after listening to Cheyenne’s depressing prog rock. But none make too much of a dent on the old rocker’s life of retirement – a fairly empty void filled only with amusing impasses to stave away boredom and guilt. Until that is, upon the death of his father, he takes a slow boat to New York (he’s afraid of flying) and, despite the years of teenage angst estrangement, Cheyenne picks up the Nazi hunt that dogged his vengeful dying dad.

Cue desert vistas, gas stations, motels and diners, a world away from comely Irish domesticity. And as Cheyenne turns into cinema’s most unlikely private eye, wheedling information out of Aloise Lang’s wife and granddaughter with naive charm, finally, with the help of professional Nazi hunter Mordecai Midler, he tracks down and confronts his father’s persecutor in his snow-bound mobile home. Once again, Sorrentino’s narrative takes a jump-cut, and circled by the camera, Heinz Lieven gives an amazing performance as the former SS officer confronted with unburied truths in a truly electric scene.

Cheyenne’s filial revenge may be humiliatingly appropriate, but it remains positively heartbreaking to see the octogenarian forced out naked onto the snow. It seems to be Sorrentino’s intention though to mix his tragedy with comedy, the taboo-seriousness of the holocaust with the ethics-free lightheartedness of the frivolous. It’s a riveting scene but still oceans apart from the rest of This Must Be The Place and Cheyenne’s father’s survivor diaries sit above the terrestrial plot, unable to penetrate the atmosphere of comic crisis and acerbic one-liners with their gravitas. It’s an interesting conceit, but utterly divisive, knifing the film into two.

More than anything though This Must Be The Place is Penn’s film, undeniably breathtaking as the shuffling, straw-sucking, lipstick-advice-giving, back-combed has-been. He’s the eternal child, his ascent into adulthood arrested by an irrepressible teenage feeling his father doesn’t love him because of the eyeliner he wears. Slowly, This Must Be The Place debunks Cheyenne’s look though as a mask he wears, preventing his own development to adulthood. It’s a narrative jolt which adds a strangely conformist twist to the inevitable final-reel reveal when Cheyenne appears, drug-induced shuffle still intact, out of the black with no make-up or jewellery. And that Mary’s mother sees her son Tony in the clean-cut Cheyenne lends a rather uncertain stickiness to the final reel, a half-baked plot-turn more laughable than wondrous.

But there’s no denying, despite its narrative faultlines, that Sorrentino has a fantastic quip-filled script in This Must Be The Place. Frances McDormand and Sean Penn conjure between them a lovable, quirky charm which enchants the film to the very end. And there’s real pathos in the taboo-filled tragedy Sorrentino so cleanly portrays. As a road movie, it’s a fairly anodyne journey of self-discovery, and it’s perhaps not as dazzling as his slick Italian language showpieces. But with his beautiful portrait of the American south and its New Mexico light and landscape, This Must Be The Place opens up a whole new horizon of storylines coming into view.

This Must Be The Place is released in the UK on 6th April 2012

Based on the bestselling novel by Jo Nesbø, Headhunters is a taut Norwegian thriller of slick art thefts, aggressive male rivalry and big inferiority complexes.

Headhunters
★★★★

Thieves In The Night by Mark Wilshin

CAUTION: Here be spoilers.

It won’t be too long before we see a Hollywood remake of Hodejegerne. Its Munch art thefts and dry, dark humour may be typically Norwegian, but its small-fish-out-of-water, cat-and-mouse plot as well as its underlying story arc of growing self-belief, allowing a surface-happy couple to downsize and found a family, are perfect for the studio make-over. Perhaps with Elijah Wood in the lead role, as businessman Roger Brown who works by day as a high-echelon recruiter with a penchant for reputation while supplementing his income during his lunch hours as a meticulous art thief.

Roger’s only just over 5ft tall and his leggy blonde wife Diana has expensive tastes, so even with the odd Munch smuggled off to Sweden with the help of his friend and security alarm employee Ove, he still can’t afford the repayments on his designer pad or the expensive gifts he smothers his wife with. Unusually, Headhunters is built on a psychological complex, based on a short man’s fear that he’s not good enough for his blonde amazon; his reluctance to have children symptomatic of his fear of abandonment. And despite a doorstep heart-to-heart where Roger comes clean while Diana cleans his wounds, her final reel disappearance into an ex-lover’s apartment suspends our own mistrust a little longer.

And yet the robbery business seems to be going pretty well until Clas Greve appears on the scene with a Nazi-stolen Rubens and a background in elite army tracking. Making their acquaintance at Diana’s gallery vernissage, Clas is the perfect candidate for a high-profile high-tech job Roger’s trying to fill. Better still, Clas doesn’t even want it. And with his priceless and badly protected Rubens, he’s like manna fallen from heaven. But the honeymoon’s quickly over when Roger finds Diana’s phone at his bedside during a robbery. And while Roger may have had his own counter-top trysts with Lotte, it’s a breach in conjugal trust that remains in suspension right to the end.

The cat and mouse chase between Clas and Roger is so intricate, it’s almost baffling to piece it back together. But there’s a clear, concise get-out – big business capitalism wants Roger dead, the only obstacle in their trade secrets theft manoeuvre. A seven-year long masquerade which plants his lover, and maybe his wife, in his way in order to control him. In the tricksy game of moral canasta, corporate bullying trumps stealing paintings hands down and Roger’s petty crimes are almost exculpated. We root for the plucky underdog in too deep as he sinks up to his neck in a cesspit or fakes his own death, his diegetic reputation intact.

Reputation is the leitmotif running through Headhunters, a cunning ruse for Roger to wheedle vital information out of prospective clients and rich art collectors, but also a kind of macho stand-off between Roger and Clas – two old pros who master the unspoken rules, navigating employment candidacy like Crouching Tiger‘s bamboo-tree fight, barely touching the ground. Reputation is also vital to the intricate create-no-waves plot of Nesbø’s source novel. Roger’s fastidiousness in tying up loose ends, retrieving his peanut bag of DNA from the coroner’s lab isn’t perhaps the most riveting sequence, but it alone assures him safe return out of the murderous labyrinth, back to his wife, his job and normality.

Unlike Norway’s dry, dark comedy The Troll Hunter, Morten Tyldum’s direction has all the finesse of a Hollywood studio, while Aksel Hennie’s performance as the unlikely hero is charmingly pitched somewhere between bewilderment and terror. A slick, darkly humorous thriller, Headhunters isn’t an exposé on corporate backhanders or marital inadequacy, but a riotous ride of shootings, skullduggery and psychological fulfilment. It’s not big, but it is clever.

Headhunters is released on 6th April 2012 in the UK

The 26th BFI London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival

CAUTION: Here be spoilers

Like a cloudburst, the annual London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival brightens our springtime with a brief glimpse into the contemporary mores of gay culture, queer thinking and foreign closets. And this year’s festival was off to a fine start with Thom Fitzgerald’s dazzling Cloudburst starring Brenda Fricker and Olympia Dukakis as a septuagenarian lesbian couple escaping a nursing home and heading across the border into Canada to get hitched. But they weren’t the only A-listers hitting the pink screen, with Kathleen Turner heading up The Perfect Family, Anne Renton’s take on reconciling homosexuality with faith. And while its view on Catholicism is probably too niche to ring true for most church-goers the world over, The Perfect Family neatly sidesteps preaching to the (un-)converted with a thought-provoking denouement in which Catholic Woman Of The Year nominee and general do-gooder Eileen must not only accept her family for who they are – alcoholic, philanderer and lesbian – but her family must accept her Holy See doctrines too.

It’s an interesting glimpse into family politics, pushing coming-out onto other family members too, without which less than ‘perfect’ members are thrust into an unmentionable oblivion. In the close, conservative world of upstate catholic California, it’s perhaps surprising how supportive other family members are, with little more than a shrug or a drunken quip about turkey-baster babies. But it’s a normative acceptance, the withdrawal of which is darkly illustrated by Steven Williford’s The Green. With its tale of a gay teacher living a happy suburban life with his long-term boyfriend Daniel in the lush green lanes of lakeside Connecticut and suddenly finding himself suspended after a mercenary allegation of improper behaviour, The Green is a very real look at a community retracting into a hesitant huddle of guilty-until-proven-innocent stasis and a paranoid (over-)sensitivity to hidden meanings on the part of the accused. It’s a heartbreaking storm that rents the couple apart, with secrets dredged up and trust broken in the maelstrom, and while it may have a hokey fight scene and a rather ill-advised loyalty to schoolboy prodigy Jason, it’s a frighteningly believable descent from conjugal bliss to fractious uncertainty.

The teacher-pupil relationship is seen from the other side in Marco Berger’s Ausente in which a schoolboy angles for a stay-over at his swimming teacher’s house. It has a similar feel to his magnificent Plan B, with its machiavellian stratagem and its shaken straight sensibilities, but Absent doesn’t quite master its subject in the same way. Man and boy’s futile car-bound odyssey across Buenos Aires is quietly suspenseful, as much as the freewheeling opportunism of teenage sexuality on display in teacher Sebastián’s apartment, but the story fizzles out following Martín’s absence. With fantastic performances from both Carlos Echevarría and Javier De Pietro, who marvellously combines both a manly determination and a boyish recalcitrance, Absent lingers on an impossible love after death and its all-too-theoretical sexual awakening, but it is nevertheless visually daring and poignantly clever.

Soon to be released in the UK, Oliver Hermanus’ Queer Palm winner Skoonheid is a frightening look into an older man’s fascination with youth. Set in the macho white world of South Africa’s deviant husbandry, Beauty follows middle-aged Francois as he becomes fascinated with his attractive young nephew Christian. It’s a slow-burner of observational tension punctuated with violent flash points, but with one stand-out scene of merciless violence it’s a shocking take on the grim ruthlessness of desire. And gay violence is an idea expounded on in two French films, in a curiously coincidental expression of French zeitgeist. Pascal Arnold and Jean-Marc Barr’s American Translation and Gaël Morel’s Notre Paradis, both influenced by American post-Beat literature and a sudden fascination withUS serial killers, make gay psychopaths of their heroes. American Translation is essentially a straight story, a highly sexual Natural Born Killers for the Y generation, but with Jean-Marc Barr’s camera adoring Pierre Perrier’s sculpted body as much as his nihilistic anarchism, it’s a male objectification unfamiliar to our screens. Chris’s scenes with do-nothing rich girl Aurore are powerful, but the film unravels with its rent-boy killings in the woods. With something of the Parisian cool and sexual openness of French cinema after the Nouvelle Vague, American Translation over-eggs its patisserie, with its ubercool soundtrack and libertine sex murders, and ends up feeling like The Dreamers turned sour.

Compared to Jean-Marc Barr’s digital hues, Gaël Morel’s Notre Paradis is positively delicious. Nicolas Dixmier’s photography is sublime, casting glassy veils over Vassili’s murders and turning a paunchy Stéphane Rideau into a tousled midnight cowboy. His psychopathy is equally enigmatic, perhaps a very French contempt of sordid johns, but there’s a touching tale of two mismatched men who find each other and hide away in a world of their own making. Above all, Notre Paradis is a commentary on modern materialism, with Vassili and Angelo selling themselves for sweatshirts and blow and helping themselves to what they want. But it’s also an improbably optimistic story of self-determination, like Malgorzata Szumowska’s Elles, in which the world of prostitution becomes an aspirational haven and an escape from the bourgeois anxieties of reality.

Circumstance, directed by the Iranian ex-pat Maryam Keshavarz, is another of those coming-out-in-a-foreign-climate movies, but very sensitively and very beautifully done. Gay rights are co-opted into human rights, à la Gus Van Sant’s Milk, which is referenced in the film as the two heroines decide to risk their reputations dubbing the banned film into Farsi. It’s shocking and quietly disturbing, watching a liberal, open-minded family slowly succumb to the patriarchal demands of religious brother Mehran. And punctuated with footage from CCTV cameras, the girls Atafeh and Shireen are observed first by the state on the street, then by Mehran in their own home. The ending is uncomfortably, albeit reasonably, pessimistic, Shireen giving in to a loveless marriage and Atafeh escaping to Dubai, but with beautiful imagery and a Teherani underground scene to rival No-One Knows About Persian Cats, Circumstance is a fascinating insight into Tehran behind the veil.

The 26th BFI London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival’s closing film North Sea, Texas couldn’t be more different. Set during the Eighties on the Dunkerque coast, Bavo Defurne’s film seems at least partly autobiographical, with its young protagonist Pim and his childhood crushes on older friend Gino and visiting gypsy Zoltan. It’s an intriguing delve into a boy’s own sexuality with his box of queer mementoes ranging from his mother’s beauty queen tiara and a rag christened with Gino’s spirit. Defurne’s first feature might feel impossibly upbeat, Pim having his cake and eating it with a straight line from unspoken crush, tent-in-the-dunes dalliance into a relationship that might even go somewhere. It runs almost counter to Pim’s grim determination to leave his neglected childhood and his temporary outlook on life, but with its Flemish joie de vivre and its idiosyncratic quirk, North Sea Texas is an impressive debut and a testament to the plurality of gay experience.

And so the clouds draw back for another year, a veil drawn over another year’s sunburst of cinematic dazzlers, the festival embracing not only its fair share of polemical, political and queer desire movies, but also daring towards a new wave of gay antiheroes and post-queer sensibilities. But with Christophe Honoré’s Beloved, Albert Nobbs and She Monkeys just over the horizon, maybe the clouds will part a little longer.

Set in Stratford’s badlands, Dexter Fletcher’s debut feature Wild Bill has Olympian dreams of turning a wayward father into a family hero. So very London 2012.

Wild Bill
★★★

Gangs Of Brixton by Mark Wilshin

CAUTION: Here be spoilers

Dexter Fletcher’s debut feature couldn’t be more British. Like a strange compendium of Richard Curtis and Guy Ritchie, Wild Bill begins with a coming together of different characters, ducking and diving around an estate in Stratford, East London. It’s jaunty, like English comedies should be. And with an outstanding performance from former Press Gang co-star Charlie Creed-Miles, as the instantly likeable but put-upon dad Bill Haywood returning home from an eight-year stint in Parkhurst Prison, Wild Bill is a curious mix of comedy and heartstring-tugging melodrama. It can hardly be called gritty realism with its caricature gangsters and a script with more carefully constructed jeopardy than a Hollywood script quack’s wet dream, but it’s an enjoyable rough and tumble that can raise both a laugh and a tear.

Like his most famous film Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels, Dexter Fletcher’s Wild Bill has an eclectic soundtrack of jazz, reggae and funk. Its score not so much a reflection or a commentary on the action as a synthetic gloss enveloping its scenes with a polished sheen. And with a host of former co-stars regularly cast as gangsters and cockneys, such as Jason Flemyng, Jaime Winstone and Sean Pertwee reinvented as social workers and policemen, Fletcher seems to be shaking the cosy comedy gangster world up. It’s a subversion that exists in his story too. An ex-con released from Her Majesty’s pleasure and enticed back into the criminal underworld he left behind – so far so familiar. But when the film circles in on Bill’s rediscovery of his two sons, grim-faced Dean and regular truant Jimmy, this is a different kind of family story.

Kids are the millstone around his neck that puts Bill back on the straight and narrow, turning the feckless reprobate into a father with a job and going straight for real. And in order to safeguard his family from the clutches of Children’s Services, after being abandoned by their mother for a nine-month holiday in Benidorm, he gives up on his own dreams of a new life on an oil rig in Scotland to look after them. As Wild Bill opens, Fletcher focuses on the eldest hard-as-nails boy Dean, superbly played by Will Poulter with a dour vigour worthy of an EastEnder, as he struggles to keep food on the table, Jimmy in school and himself in work on time. The film is sometimes seen through Dean’s eyes, fearfully watching his father holler through letterboxes, and with a lingering yellow-hued glow of empathy. He’s the recalcitrant one, only slowly relenting on his stubborn refusal to keep his dad out of his good books; only when he’s humiliated himself with a job holding a ‘Discount Shoes’ sign does Dean grant him a slightly thawed “See you at home.”

The film though really belongs to Bill, celebrating his transition from Wild Bill to Mild Bill. Released from prison on the Isle of Wight, he sails back to the mainland with a fearful determination not to return to prison, not expecting to find a family waiting for him, a family who hate him for leaving them. But with a job bringing money in and putting home-cooked food on the table, he can clean up his act as well as the flat; his new-found responsibilities symbolised in a filthy toilet nemesis. He readily takes responsiblity for his sons’ misdemeanours, getting Jimmy off the hook for vandalising the school’s music room with a gangland little white lie, and taking up his son’s drug-dumped debt with local dealer Terry and kingpin Glen. This new-found paternity might be laid on a bit thick, but there’s a moving moment all the same of Bill and his new family eating Chinese together, the sound dipped in cinematic homage to their idealised togetherness. But the scene of Charlie Creed-Miles descending in a lift to meet his son’s pusher, his face contorted by seething fearfulness, is a marvel.

Wild Bill has a great script, which really gets going with its family disputes; the “old bike” Will gives Dean as a birthday present, and its jovial badlands of scratch-card dreams and cartoon violence, manor-mouthed toddlers and against-type gangsters – “Don’t talk black to me!” But there are moments of real pathos too, in the cuppa Dean buys his dad, or his heartbreaking one-liner “I didn’t run away from home, home ran away from me.” Comedy and tragedy battle like Wild Bill‘s puny feckless gangsters. But like the glimpses of Stratford’s regeneration, with Olympic stadia springing up and with Dean narrowly keeping down a job on the building site, there is hope on the horizon. The has-been generation returns to recoup the sins of the past and the present, keeping today’s young people on the straight and narrow path. A cautionary tale for the Olympic era, Wild Bill might not be a medal-winner, but certainly it’s got a heart of gold.

Wild Bill is released on 23rd March 2012 in the UK

Tiny Furniture sees young filmmaker Lena Dunham trying to carve out a path for herself amidst the monochrome post-graduate confusion of New York.

Tiny Furniture
★★★

All the Small Things by Laura Bennett

A novice filmmaker, bit-part actress, and recent graduate Lena Dunham received plaudits from all directions and awards galore for her second feature length film Tiny Furniture, which she wrote, directed, and starred in. Shot in no time at all on a minimal budget in New York, Dunham cast her family in the lead roles and used her parents’ loft apartment as the setting for most of the film’s scenes. Start with what you know the old adage goes, and Dunham clearly chose to embrace this advice.

By her own admission Aura, played by Dunham herself, is in a “postgraduate delirium”. After four seemingly hedonistic years of studying film theory at a Mid-Western college Aura returns to the bosom of the family in Manhattan, the monochrome loft apartment of her artsy parents in Tribeca to be precise. The film’s title comes from her mother’s fittingly obscure artistic speciality of photographing minuscule pieces of furniture, sometimes given scale by the life-size body parts of her daughters.

With few plans to speak of, Aura’s soul searching and quarter-life funk frustrates her mother as her sassy younger sister accuses her of channelling a character in the “epilogue to Felicity”. She is still trying to come to terms with having been abandoned by her long-term college boyfriend who disappeared classically to “find himself”. The splashes of colour in Aura’s world, which is otherwise as white and endless as the decor in her parents’ apartment (“Where are the light bulbs? In the white cabinet!”), are provided by her friends, most of whom seem equally lost and directionless.

Aura’s existence is given structure by two friendships. The first is with Jed, who she meets at a party and subsequently invites to stay at her apartment while her mother is out of town. Jed is apparently on the verge of his big break but in the meantime contents himself with making YouTube videos acting out various skits entitled “The Sceptical Gynaecologist” and “The Nietzschean Cowboy”. It doesn’t look all that promising.

Aura has also rekindled a childhood friendship with the louche but beautiful Charlotte. Charlotte at least encourages Aura to get a job to provide structure to her time, helping her find a doomed position as a day hostess at a nearby restaurant. Given its tiny salary the job’s only attraction for Aura is the opportunity to flirt with one of the chefs, an equally listless and uninspiring type.

Aura’s encounters with the film’s other characters do little to advance the plot but provide plenty of quirky stories that allow her to postpone making any serious decisions about her life even further. Things come to a head when Aura’s younger sister Nadine has a teenage party while the girl’s mother is away. Even this teenage rebellion leaves Aura at a loss as she vacillates between wanting to become part of the fully-fledged adult world and trying to cling on to her own comparatively carefree youth.

As she hits rock bottom Aura eventually turns to her mother, admitting that she’s still “figuring it out” in the absence of someone to tell her who she is. It’s a familiar story, and ultimately the film’s conclusion provides few answers to Aura’s situation; fittingly there is no moment of dawning realisation, a chance encounter, or a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that gets Aura back on track. She continues to drift on aimlessly through the sea of white.

Recently given her own series by HBO, Girls, which will be produced by Judd Apatow, Lena Dunham is someone from whom there is undoubtedly much more to come. Given the budgetary limitations and the familial acting turns Tiny Furniture is hugely successful and deserving of the praise heaped upon it, yet, as a filmmaker, Dunham’s education is just beginning.

Tiny Furniture is released in the UK on 30 March 2012

Pål Sletaune’s Babycall is a hall of ghostly mirrors and fantasy reflections as a mother and victim of domestic abuse tries to keep a fracturing reality together.

Babycall is released on 30th March 2012 in the UK

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne return to heartbreaking form with The Kid With A Bike with a little boy lost looking for love with all the kinetic anxiety he can muster.

Le Gamin Au Vélo
★★★★

The Boy With The Thorn In His Side by Mark Wilshin

CAUTION: Here be spoilers.

Joint winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes last year with Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon A Time In Anatolia, The Kid With A Bike sets a new tone in the Dardenne brothers’ oeuvre. Whilst inhabiting the same Belgian underworld of hopeless criminality and grey fatalism, Le Gamin Au Vélo has an altogether sunnier tint. Filmed during the summer, The Kid With a Bike breaks away from the grayscale and with brief musical accompaniments, there’s even a dramatic fictionality to Luc and Jean-Pierre’s not-quite-so-crushing realism.

The Kid With A Bike recounts the story of Cyril, a young teenager deposited in a home by his feckless father after the death of his grandmother. And while the film’s first third follows Cyril’s feverish search for his lost bike and his gradual coming to terms with his father’s utter disinterest, played with grubby cowardliness by Jérémie Renier, the rest of Le Gamin Au Vélo relates the relationship between Samantha, an estate hairdresser marvellously embodied by Belgian-born actress Cécile de France, and Cyril. Thomas Doret is outstanding as the young boy desperate to track down his mountain bike and racing through schools, streets and squares with an indefatigable persistence.

Rebounding from one person to the next in his frantic search, Cyril’s illusions are slowly shattered as he is forced to confront the truth of his father’s betrayal, who not only sold his son’s beloved bike but purposefully tried to lose him by moving house and getting rid of his mobile. At first, it seems like all that matters to Cyril is his bike, but it soon becomes clear that this very material desire hides a more emotional need for love and affection, and if not from his father then from someone else. His desperation all the more apparent when his father fails to turn up in the town square where Samantha had arranged them to meet, he runs round the streets like a wild animal, unable to control his anxiety except through expending his nervous energy.

Cyril is violent, stubborn, disobedient and rude. And while we begin to understand the neglected nugget of goodness hidden deep within, Samantha’s motivations are never clear. It’s to Cécile de France’s credit that she’s able to make her hairdresser with a heart so credible with just a smile and a gesture. It’s tempting to believe it’s a spontaneous desire to help, or an unspoken desire to love unconditionally, but like with Olivier’s character in Le Fils, there’s an absolute refusal on behalf of the Dardenne brothers to explain.

Similarly inexplicable, yet perhaps more crucial to the plot, is Cyril’s falling in with the wrong crowd. It’s perhaps the young lad’s protective shell of violence or impaired moral judgment that lead him to attack a bookshop owner and his son with a baseball bat in order to impress Wes, the local dealer looking to make a quick and blame-free buck. Or maybe Cyril’s looking for a friend, or even a father figure. But it’s an almost wanton drive towards criminality that serves the film’s narrative arc of redemption all the better.

Cyril’s swerve towards petty crime is intended to test his relationship with Samantha to the limits, cutting her on the arm during a scrap with a pair of trimming scissors and saddling her with a 20-month fine.  Even when Cyril insults her boyfriend Gilles and the latter issues her with an “It’s either him or me” ultimatum, Samantha selflessly and resolutely chooses Cyril, a test of loyalty that he respects more than even he realises. His transformation is marked by a long travelling shot of Cyril riding his bike, and it’s not long before he and Samantha are going for picnics, bike rides and picnics – a reformed character. But for the Dardenne brothers it’s not enough – the bookseller’s son still harbours a grudge against Cyril, and it’s a moral, cosmic debt that must be paid.

And so, when Cyril runs into him at a petrol station, he’s pushed off his bike, chased up a tree and knocked out cold with a stone. Thinking him dead, father and son decide to conceal their crime, removing the blood-soaked evidence and getting their story straight before calling an ambulance. Finally, Cyril gets up and cycles off, refusing both an ambulance or revenge. It’s the closest a naturalist film can come to a double ending – the possibility of Cyril’s death an echo of the Dardenne brothers’ earlier nihilism, and now outshone by a less grey, if not exactly sunny, outcome. And in showing the easy transition from the victim to the perpetrator of a crime, Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne aim to show the universality of bad moral choices and the importance of forgiveness. It’s a recurring theme for the Dardenne brothers, but this time with a heartening warmth that lingers in the soul like an August evening.

The Kid With A Bike is released on 23^rd March 2012 in the UK

An epic night-time police investigation, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon A Time In Anatolia exhumes an inconvenient truth from the soul’s darkest recesses.

Once Upon A Time In Anatolia
★★★★

Lights In The Dusk by Mark Wilshin

CAUTION: Here be spoilers.

One of the greatest pleasures of cinema is finding a 24-frames-per-second order in the chaos that surrounds us, hewn from the shamanistic vision of a director. And no-one reveals chaos better than Nuri Bilge Ceylan, slowly unshrouding his narrative threads from the dense murk of images. It’s in such a vein that Once Upon A Time In Anatolia opens, on a steamed-up window pane, our eyes not yet accustomed to seeing through to the action. And it’s a device he repeats, this time with the plot rather than the camera, as the prologue of three friends drinking and talking in a mechanic’s workshop suddenly gives way to a seemingly unrelated and protracted criminal investigation in which the police, the self-confessed killer, and a forensic medical examiner attempt to locate and exhume a freshly murdered corpse.

There are many such abrupt disorientations in Once Upon A Time In Anatolia, such as the doctor’s gaze over an empty surgery, which suddenly becomes populated with the apparition of the court prosecutor. Or the temporal dislocation as Dr Celam and Arab the driver, sitting high over a fountain and a ploughed field, appear to be discussing past lives, when in fact it’s their disembodied voices from another moment which accompany their silent musing over the floodlit night. Nuri Bilge Ceylan even teaches us how to see, our visual adjustment from twittering birds to a fluttering awning beautifully guided by his focus-pulling hand. And yet, there’s still enough chaos in the Stygian gloom of Anatolia for our Dante to be glad of his Virgil.

Once Upon A Time In Anatolia is the story of a simple police procedural from the hidden burial of a murdered body to its autopsy, but treated with all the epic vistas, stunning widescreen cinematography and gun-toting of a Hollywood western. The geographical spaces of Anatolia are sparse and vast, but through the everyday conversations of the police, on yoghurt and prostate exams, Ceylan gives a local familiarity to this Turkish wild west – “Let it rain on Igdebeli.” Even if, to begin with the doctor is silent and passive – observing, thinking, remembering – it’s his journey, in the backseat of their nighttime odyssey. He’s not always at the centre, but his story slowly unfolds in told fragments and troubled looks, his existential moment of doubt revealed and somehow worthy of the momentous line, “Darkness and cold will enfold my weary soul.”

Celam’s internal story crosses Muhammet Uzuner’s face like a lunar eclipse, but it isn’t always cloudfree;  he feels empathy towards Kenan the gaunt killer, offering him a cigarette, and he ponders the nature of sin and guilt as a rolling apple lands in a stream and floats away. Perhaps most puzzling of all is his final gaze out of his office window, watching Kenan’s wife and son disappear into the distance. Maybe it’s a nostalgic memory of the divorced doctor’s own family left behind in the big smoke or a fleeting feeling of guilt. Like the rest of Once Upon A Time In Anatolia it’s hauntingly opaque, and yet still makes for hypnotic viewing. Gökhan Tiryaki’s jaw-dropping cinematography creates an oneiric vision, just like the grand appearance of the young girl Sinan, bringing tea and casting a spell over the resting men with her ethereal light. It’s a mesmerising dream and all eyes follow her, unable to wrest themselves from the great vision.

It’s no coincidence of course that Celam resembles Ceylan in name, the existential thinker. It may be Celam’s emotional journey, but it’s also Ceylan’s story, and the doctor’s look direct to camera seems to create a mirror either side of the lens; the director on one side, his character on the other. For Once Upon A Time In Anatolia is also an ode to filmmaking – the wearisome tribulations of moving from one location to another, work held up by a failing generator, and the mastery of the morgue a metaphor for the filmmaker’s artistry – unable to get started in the cutting room without a contract or funding.

Once Upon A Time in Anatolia is certainly a complex film, but also mesmerising, thought-provoking and contemplative. It’s also funny, with its Clark Gable lookalike prosecutor and its corpulent corpse too big for the squad car boot. But it’s not always easy, its mirror turned on society, Turkey, the soul and filmmaking. Sometimes poking into gloomy corners, but with a light that shines brightly.

Once Upon A Time In Anatolia is released on 16th March in the UK