A sister, a cult member, an alias - Sean Durkin’s psychological thriller Martha Marcy May Marlene is an assured debut as gripping as it is haunting.

Martha Marcy May Marlene
★★★★

I’ve Got All My Sisters With Me by Mark Wilshin

CAUTION: Here be spoilers

It’s hard not to fondly recall Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides when watching Sean Durkin’s debut feature Martha Marcy May Marlene. Not that it’s derivative in any way, but with its polyonomous title reminiscent of Coppola’s hypnotic daughters Lux, Mary, Cecilia, Therese and Bonny, along with its oneiric, sun-drenched colour palette, Durkin’s film is just as haunting, albeit more self-splintering than suicidal. With a stand-out performance from Elizabeth Olsen, the film quickly forks into Martha’s flight into Lucy and her husband Ted’s arms amidst reminiscences of the polygamous sect she left behind in the Catskills. Critical of the easy conformist aspirations of her newly re-found sister, with her oversized, lakeside summer house, blinkered careerism and grand designs for a family, Martha’s caught between the fractious ties of a loving, forgiving family and the free love of the commune.

That Durkin manages to make the cult even remotely appealing is no small feat. Its nurturing individualism and grow-your-own escapism from the clutches of consumerism and money is a tempting hook, along with its bevy of twenty-something beauties of both sexes, all got up in a selection of ripped, hand-me-down white T-shirts. You might even warily concede to the patrician authority of leader and philosopher Patrick, played with unpredictable intensity by John Hawkes from Winter’s Bone. And yet the farm’s white weather-boarded innocence and its faded glory comeliness is slowly and irreversibly poisoned by its segregated dinners, its drugged night-time rapes and burgling forays into rich neighbours’ homes.

Martha, or in this case Marcy May, is encouraged by the other handmaids not to feel like she’s been raped. But unlike Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale though, these women aren’t for seeding progeny. Instead, sex is a quasi-religious communion with their god on earth, and it’s a leap of faith worthy of a circus acrobat. Patrick is the alpha male to all the girls, and feeding on a mulch of sibling jealousy and the occasional communal carousal, each woman’s adoration of the patriarch is stimulated to a fever pitch, with the lord and master occasionally descending from his ivory tower to encourage, discipline or inspire. There’s not much pseudo-theological or practical reasoning though behind the disciples’ decision to start breaking and entering into wealthy people’s houses, but it’s a convenient way to kibosh any lingering sympathy for the cult when a man defending his all-American right to safeguard his home is gutted with a kitchen knife.

It’s perhaps not so much Martha’s part in this bloody murder, or even the group’s fascistic fascination with obedience and cold-blooded cat murder, but rather the drugging and fostering of newcomers that leaves a bitter, powdery taste in the mouth. And in the end, it’s this maelstrom of guilt, fear and shame which forces her to flee, in a fantastic hand-held scene in which Marcy May bolts through the woodland pursued by white nighty-clad acolytes with all the desperate innocence of child Furies. But as Martha enters her sister’s neat world of aspirational indulgence, she’s caught between the safe calm of family and a fearful longing for the spiritual transports of the cult. It’s an existential anxiety accompanied by a hum, a pulsating thrum that transforms moments in her mundane life in Connecticut into lingering memories of her found family. And some of these transitions are excellently choreographed, the scene in which Marcy May goes up to the attic to lie with Patrick only for Martha to climb into her sister’s conjugal bed amidst Lucy and Ted making love is particularly shocking.

In fact, Durkin makes little of the resemblance between Hugh Dancy and John Hawkes, the one a brawny scruff with a piercing, soul-searching stare, the other a preppy English lawyer Martha barely seems to notice. But the parallel is alluded to as a fear of the male, with Martha agreeing only reluctantly to accompanying Ted on a boat trip, and ultimately as she kicks him down the stairs in a moment of fear and loathing. For Martha, the family home is an almost hostile environment – frustrated at every turn by her sister’s repressive habits, she’s unable to put her feet on the counter or swim naked in the lake for fear of neighbouring children seeing. The scenes of Martha rehabilitating to the real world are perhaps not as tense as the foreboding sequences in the Catskills cult, but even numb and mute, Elizabeth Olsen conveys the confusion of post-traumatic anxiety and longing with great empathy.

These scenes are marked by a half-hearted attempt at sisterly bonding as Martha tries to keep a lid on her recent adventures. But in the end there’s no way out of family recriminations and Durkin’s scenes at the summer house start to swirl in a numb lethargy only broken when Martha makes contact with ‘Marlene’ at the family home, and the growing fear they’ll find her. It’s an anxiety which explodes in a fabulous scene at a house party in which Martha becomes convinced the tee-totalling barman is a cult member and dissolves into apoplexy, subdued again, chillingly, with pills. How they find her without the modern convenience of the internet remains a small mystery, but in a final-reel clincher, catch up with her they do. And as she travels to the city for therapy, their black SUV follows ominously behind.

Durkin leaves his ending and the fate of Martha and her family open. And yet it’s hard to believe the outcome can be positive. After Martha’s hesitations between her two possible lives and the excruciating tension as she shrugs away from telling Lucy and Ted the truth, there’s a desire for resolution and a will to action the film refuses to satisfy. Martha doesn’t overcome her troubles, nor does she make that first step towards recovery by telling her sister. So instead of a story of self-realisation in which Martha strikes out on her own path, Martha Marcy May Marlene delivers a genre final-girl post-credits slashing. The climactic tension, beautiful cinematography and delicious performances deserve better, but like its title and its hero, it’s schizophrenic in the final reel – art-house thriller psychodrama horror.

Martha Marcy May Marlene is released in the UK on 3rd February 2012

Patience (After Sebald) sees Grant Gee’s richly-textured path meander through the Suffolk countryside and the work of the acclaimed Anglo-German writer.

Patience (After Sebald)
★★★

Post-War Paths by Laura Bennett

CAUTION: Here be spoilers.

Better known for his rock-band documentaries, Grant Gee’s latest feature-length film focuses on retracing the steps of the internationally acclaimed Anglo-German writer and academic W.G. (Max) Sebald. Widely tipped as a potential Nobel Prize winner before his untimely death in a car accident in 2001, fame came to Sebald relatively late in life, on the translation of his works from his native German tongue into the English of his adopted home. A professor of European Literature at the University of East Anglia, Sebald set off one summer to walk the length of Suffolk to “dispel emptiness” after completing a long and gruelling stint of work. This walk formed the basis for his book The Rings of Saturn, the work on which Gee chooses to concentrate in this film.

As Patience (After Sebald) develops, those with a link to Sebald, such as his publisher, fellow writers, and academics to name but a few, offer their reminiscences of the author, in tandem with the feelings his works aroused in them. These appearances, sometimes taking the form of on-screen interviews and sometimes as voices-off, are interwoven with visual imagery of the retracing of Sebald’s steps and the countryside and sights he would have encountered on the route, albeit almost 20 years later. These images are occasionally given the luxury of full-screen format, but more often than not overlap in a frame-within-a-frame set up, providing an extra layer of complexity to the film’s intertextuality.

Inherently linked to a sense of place and journey the film begins with the thoughts of Barbara Hui, founder of the Litmap project. Hui was inspired to chart the locations featured in a variety of literary journeys and chose to begin with The Rings of Saturn, a book to which she felt a deep connection. Bringing the audience into the location, Sebald’s journey is pinpointed around this particular region of the UK, bulging as it does out into the North Sea towards his native Germany.

The features of Sebald’s works are his slowly developing thoughts and ideas, sparked to shoot off in particular directions on this occasion by stories or sights he sees along his journey. One of the commentators points out the juxtapositions in The Rings of Saturn, something mirrored by Gee’s film. As Sebald comes across a scene of local life in Lowestoft, in which the overabundance of the sea causes fish carcases to carpet the town’s main street, the narrative interweaves with the writer’s thoughts on the holocaust; themes of memory and an attempt at the reconciliation of the Second World War and its effect on his fellow German people occurring regularly in his work.

The film revels in the delights of the Great British outdoors, at a time of year when summer evenings spent on the coast have an almost halcyon quality. While Gee clearly enjoys recreating this atmosphere, he does not neglect the Sebaldian undercurrent of melancholy. This region, Britain at its best at this time of year, saw considerable destruction by German bombers during the war, something which Gee alludes to with just the right amount of frequency. Sebald never forgot this, gazing out from East Anglia towards his Teutonic homeland like a negative image of Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer.

Patience (After Sebald) begins with a walk and, after Sebald, concludes by recounting all the catastrophes of Western European culture. One of the commentators in the film mentions travel’s capacity to bring one back to one’s original state, citing road movies and a sense of freedom as providing a chance to ponder one’s existence outside the hustle and bustle of urban life. Gee’s gentle and thought-provoking film also accomplishes just that, although for an audience without prior knowledge of Sebald’s work, the film undoubtedly loses some of its references. For those familiar with the writer’s work this is a skilful illumination of his legacy.

Patience (After Sebald) is released in the UK on January 27th 2012

Respected Afro-British director John Akomfrah’s haunting film The Nine Muses is an unusual, genre defying, literary based contemplation of migration, memory and the power of elegy.

The Nine Muses
★★★

On Distant Shores by Laura Bennett

CAUTION: Here be spoilers

In simple terms John Akomfrah’s The Nine Muses can be summed up as an unlikely trilogy of Homer’s Odyssey, the African diaspora and the bleak and beautiful landscapes of Alaska. Combining these three elements, renowned Ghana-born director Akomfrah’s latest film is broken up into nine overlapping musical chapters mixing archival material and a narration of texts from some of the behemoths of classic European literature: Dante, Shakespeare, Joyce and Homer himself, to name a few you “might” have heard of.

Pure white Alaskan landscape scenes feature large. Figures are few and far between; the apparent emptiness is occasionally broken by a distant kayak or a primary-coloured, hooded, anorak-wearing standing figure gazing out into the beyond. The colours and tones are exquisite; different depths and shades of blacks and whites jostle for attention in a world that appears anything but monochrome, and belies the technical challenges of shooting in such a harsh and extreme environment. The faces of the figures themselves are never seen; the standing figures are always shown from a distance, with their back to the camera.

By his own admission obsessed with archival material, Akomfrah breaks the pure white of the still Alaskan landscape scenes with a wealth of different clips from between 1940 and 1970 that must betray a huge number of hours spent trawling footage, equivalent perhaps only to the writing of an epic poem. The seamless flow of movement between the monumental, constant, timeless landscape of frozen nature and the human stories of migration, natural disaster, ethnic diversity, war and social dislocation provides a blunt contrast, throwing the human condition sharply into relief.

The aim of this artful construction is a re-examination of the past using building bricks from a variety of sources; a Proustian attempt to take another look at our recent history, drawing parallels with an ancient age that is definitely not quite so recent but still offers deep resonance. A founder member of the Black Audio Film Collective in the UK in the late 1970s/early 80s, Akomfrah’s history is about more than epics and heroes however, as these share focus with thousands of unacknowledged, unnamed players in history who themselves set out on their own epic sagas across continents and history. On arrival in the UK we see them struggling to adjust to a world so different from the one they left behind. Striving to “say something new about a story everyone claims to know” was key for Akomfrah, a door into one’s own past in search of “images, ideas, writers and music”.

Music is a key element of the “song cycles” adding both a depth and traditions that assist the rolling waves of the film’s structure. These include works by the Estonian composer, Arvo Pärt, a favourite of Akomfrah’s, and the score is heightened by pieces by the Gundecha brothers, the supreme exponents of India’s oldest musical form, the Dhrupad, intended to bring the mind to a settled and meditative state.

A quest for knowledge and identity, at times The Nine Muses is undoubtedly more about a visual composition of images rather than a narrative sequence. Akomfrah’s artistic vision, referred to by the director himself as a “hybrid”, is perhaps not for everyone and can boarder on the impenetrable. Perseverance is rewarded nonetheless and The Nine Muses takes its place among a currently strong offering of Afro-British art and culture.

The Nine Muses is released on 20th January 2011 in the UK

Michael Fassbender is at his leg-tapping best in Steve McQueen’s Shame, a tale of lonely frustration, sexual addiction and grim redemption.

Shame
★★★★★

Sinnerman by Mark Wilshin

CAUTION: Here be spoilers

While Hunger wasn’t so much about the hollow, echoing sensation of life without food as its political and cultural significance in Northern Ireland and beyond, Shame is very much emotion down and dirty on the personal level. It may not flag every blush-red wince or burning flush, but charting a course through the tawdry exploits of a sex addict, Steve McQueen’s second film Shame culminates nevertheless in the irreversible breakdown of an irrepressible hedonist. Like a junky obsessed with his next fix of prostitutes, porn and pick-ups, Michael Fassbender is a magnificent blend of charming and frightening in this superb story of the sexaholic Brandon who just can’t escape his loins.

Any doubts that Steve McQueen, the Turner Prize winning artist, couldn’t leave the art world behind can here be cast aside. There are no artistic, decorative circles of smeared detritus here. Which isn’t to say Shame is an artless film, it’s certainly not. It’s a handsome balance of evocative location, sublime photography, rich performances and nuanced script. And both Carey Mulligan and Michael Fassbender are fascinating, she as the chaotic and sometimes-suicidal lounge singer Sissi and he as Brandon, the orgasm-obsessed control freak. For some, there won’t be enough backstory to explain away Brandon’s extreme behaviour, only a hint of teen trauma in the siblings’ conversation;  ”We’re not bad people, we’re just from a bad place.” But like his protagonist, and to the chagrin of the more psychoanalytically-inclined viewer, McQueen prefers to keep us focused in the present too, in the sexiness of the here and now.

That said, Shame is about as erotic as a prostate exam. Brandon lives in a clinical white cube, where the ebb and flow of call-girls is punctuated by blinds being raised every morning and messages checked on his answering machine every night. The rhythm of Brandon’s libido runs more uptempo than a daily swing of the metronome though. On the subway, he’ll cruise a newlywed wife with a flirtatious grin and a shameless stare. The computer at the legal practice he works at is busting a drive, filled with hard-core pornography and viruses, while his working day is marked with a satisfying, between-meetings trip to the toilets. And after-work drinks culminate in pressing up against a sharp-suited siren in a dark alley, or getting his fingers wet in a bar, women weakening under Brandon’s well-honed charms.

He tries to give up, throwing away an archive of jazz mags and even giving relationships a go with a female colleague, but he finds them too hard. Or rather, not hard enough. He’s a control freak, reliant on the one-sided gratification of masturbation or a professional temptress. He’s happy not to have to worry about the pleasure of others, wrapped up in an isolated, tight cocoon of self. Or perhaps, more precisely, each petite mort is an obliteration of a self that keeps springing back up. The only risk to his self-annihilation is his sister Sissy, Carey Mulligan in probably her finest hour to date. Not only are they polar opposites, Sissy open and flamboyant, Brandon cool and detached, she’s also a reminder of Brandon’s own history, a family bond that ties him  to his self. Their intimate moment on his sofa which descends all too rapidly into an argument steals the show with Brandon’s sudden violence and ugly anger when Sissy tries to revoke her brother’s long embalmed past life. Desperate to be alone, Brandon runs through Manhattan’s streets in a gloriously illuminated scene, before he finds himself being fellatioed in a dark room. To call it a gay twist would be to accord emotion to Brandon’s dalliances. Instead, it’s more sinister than modernly metrosexual. Like the scene in which Sissy interrupts him masturbating in front of the bathroom mirror, he sees only himself.

Shame ends with a final fling, a threesome encapsulated in a soundless coda, like a cinematic frieze on an erotic Greek vase. Almost dropping with exhaustion, Brandon ploughs on, his satyric face scarred with the ugliness of desperation and shame. And crying as he comes, sex here is elevated to the spiritual, the rock bottom on which to build a new self. Michael Fassbender’s performance is electric, simultaneously beguiling and repulsive, and he offers a windows into Brandon’s plight while keeping the mysteries of addiction and identity behind closed blinds. There are moments of shocking rawness and unexpected pathos, as well as a diaphanous hope for redemption that just about penetrates the gloom at the end of a very stygian tunnel. But with its visual flair and its two leads’ mesmerising performances, Steve McQueen’s Shame is a glittering gem. A shimmering diamond that cuts like a knife.

Shame is released in the UK on 13th January 2011

The Dirty Dozen

Hm, the January blues. It’s enough to make you want to curl up inside a darkened room. Which is fortunate, as there were so many great films in 2011, there’s a lot of catching up to do. Most shamefully, I missed out on Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, and perhaps most painfully, Gianni Di Gregorio’s follow-up to Mid-August Lunch – The Salt Of Life. But there were some unexpected highlights along the way, not only from London’s Gay And Lesbian Film Festival, the London Spanish Film Festival and the London Film Festival, but also some serendipitous finds, such as Sophie Heldman’s Satte Farben Vor Schwarz, Aureliano Amadei’s 20 Sigarette, André Téchiné’s Impardonnables or discovering Bernardo Bertolucci’s Before The Revolution.

Of course, Terrence Malick’s The Tree Of Life won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and seems to prop up most critics’ top-tens. But it’s not on mine. It’s stunning, both with its cinematography and its levitating Jessica Chastain, but beauty does not a dinosaur-compassion story make. Instead, and in no particular order, Berlin’s Golden Bear winner A Separation, Asghar Farhadi’s simple tale of the complexities of domestic politics in Iran, remains one of the highlights of 2011 for the sheer quality of the performances and its humble script. The sublime poetry of Michelangelo Frammartino’s Le Quattro Volte wins me over every time, with its thought-provoking association of ideas and wacky unpredictability. And Xavier Dolan’s Heartbeats is also a rare joy. It might be playfully indebted to both Jules Et Jim and In The Mood For Love, but it’s full of enough vim, vigour and venom to lift it off the screen and into our still beating hearts.

From the UK, Andrew Haigh’s Weekend has been for me the most outstanding British film this year, a great new voice able to combine a thoughtful script with perfectly poised performances and all wrapped up in an alternative love story. From one low-beat story of impossible love to another overwrought one, Terence Davies masterly adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s play The Deep Blue Sea. Centred around three great performances, with a career best from Rachel Weisz, The Deep Blue Sea is an infidelity melodrama with tragic undertones and also intensely moving. And almost like François Ozon’s 5×2, Blue Valentine is a bittersweet journey in reverse, from acrimony to romance. Derek Cianfrance’s great direction and Andrij Parekh’s beautiful cinematography make it an overwhelming foray into love’s highs and very deep lows.

Two of the best performances were Lubna Azabal’s in Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies, a fantastic exploration of family, memory and the Middle East, and Tilda Swinton’s in Lynne Ramsay’s adaptation of the Lionel Shriver novel We Need To Talk About Kevin, a haunting, suffocating look at maternal guilt and painful dispossession. Violence is also the driving force behind Susanne Bier’s In A Better World in which two boys’ thirst for justice isn’t borne out in the civilised world of forgiveness and cowed weakness. And of the comedies, Potiche is probably the finest. An onscreen delectation of Deneuve and Depardieu, François Ozon’s film is an exuberant masterpiece of delightful ridiculousness. Similarly, and most recently, there’s Michel Hazanavicius’s fabulous The Artist, a celebration of cinema in all its forms with the comfortable familiarity of a golden oldie and the freshness of a modern masterpiece.

It’s been a good year all told, with too many other films to do them all justice, but special mentions go to the gothic Black Swan, the doleful Biutiful, the faultless The King’s Speech, Franco fests 127 Hours and Howl, the stunning Norwegian Wood,  the utterly perplexing The Skin I Live In, the politically honest Tambien La Lluvia, the riotous Troll Hunter, the wet wool of Wuthering Heights, the lazy sunset of Oslo August 31st and the apocalyptic grip of Take Shelter. Phew… And while Tabloid and Black Power Mixtape were some of the best documentaries I’ve seen for a long, long time, it’s a toss-up between We Were Here and This Is Not A Film for the most moving doc of 2011.

Luckily, this year’s set to be just as good – perhaps the pride before a fall when funding cuts start to bite. But not only are there some anxiously awaited blockbusters, including the next Bond film – Sam Mendes’ Skyfall, Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained and Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, but there’s also some favourites from the London Film Festival due for release in 2012. Steve McQueen’s Shame and Roman Polanski’s Carnage lie just around the corner, and Norwegian film continues its steady climb with Headhunters, so funny there’s already an American remake in the pipeline. Well, that’s what Scandinavian films are for, isn’t it?

Michael Haneke’s Amour and the Dardennes brothers’ The Kid With A Bike are set to be big, along with Aki Kaurismäki’s Le Havre, already a hit in France, if it finds a distributor. My own personal must-sees for 2012 include Play, Ruben Östlund’s follow-up to Involuntary and a devastating look at contemporary racism, Marco Berger’s Ausente, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon A Time In Anatolia, Xavier Dolan’s Laurence Anyways, Giorgos Lanthimos‘ Alps and Markus Schleinzer’s eerie thriller Michael. And the list goes on. But with so many treats in store, 2012 will be light enough to brighten many a dark day.

Prolific Franco-Chilean director, Raúl Ruiz’s penultimate film, Mysteries of Lisbon, is a labyrinthine, pan-European, Proustian epic that twists and turns across the generations.

Mysteries of Lisbon
★★★

The Art of Memory by Laura Bennett

His final fully-complete film finished not long before his death, aged 70, in August 2011, Mysteries of Lisbon is Ruiz’s swansong and crowns a supremely accomplished legacy. A historical journey focusing on the lives and loves of the early-nineteenth century Portuguese aristocracy, Mysteries of Lisbon’s complex intrigue mirrors the dense alleyways of the Portuguese capital’s Moorish Alfama quarter. Lasting a full four and a half hours, free rein is given to Ruiz’s creative vision with this adaptation of the novel of the same name by the writer Camilo Castelo Branco. The plot pivots around the initially unknown ancestry of an apparently orphaned boy, Joao, accompanied throughout by his protector, the nonchalantly multi-lingual priest Padre Dinis, who slowly reveals the truth and, it later transpires, also has a story of his own to tell.

Mysteries of Lisbon provides us with a glimpse into another world, a world of honour, loyalty, manipulation, chivalry, passion, and love. A world in which a murderous peasant can set off to make his fortune in the New World and return to seduce the most beautiful and eligible women in Paris and Lisbon. A world in which an intransigent father forbids his daughter to marry the man she loves due to his social standing, sending her off into a convent when it becomes clear she is carrying his child. A world that seems boundless in terms of geographical borders, stretching across Europe and as far as North Africa, but with class boundaries that are not so easily overcome.

Like the cardboard figures in the small puppet theatre so beloved by Joao and Padre Dinis, the characters’ lives are intertwined as if part of some wider plot controlled by an omniscient being, perhaps harking back to the director’s previous career as a playwright. Ruiz creates a furtive, almost spy-drenched ambience; we see the characters from behind doors left ajar, through shutters, peeping around curtains, or reflected in mirrors or glass table-tops. Playing with angles and viewpoints, Ruiz positions the audience in the role of an eavesdropping maid, in possession of the bigger picture that remains obscured to those who long to see it most.

Much of the narrative is recounted through memories. Characters sit down to reminisce together about times-gone-by, or one unveils the truth about their previously concealed past to another. These memories drive the plot, making it ebb and flow as each episode blends into another, constructing a multitude of overlapping layers that often come full circle as connections between each section are revealed by the appearance of characters that have already figured in a different place, time or guise. Equally frozen in the realm of memory, there is much to compare Mysteries of Lisbon to Ruiz’s masterful 1999 adaptation of Proust’s classic, Time Regained.

Beautifully recreated with immaculate sets and costumes that do much to immerse the viewer in the film’s world, Mysteries of Lisbon is a feast for the eyes. With a typically avant-garde approach to genre, Ruiz also conceived the film as a TV series with six 1-hour episodes each focusing on a particular character and storyline. This allows some plot strands cut from the film to develop further, as certain episodes come to light. In one of his last interviews, however, the director claims to have preferred the feature-length format, its multitude of narrative threads heading off in a variety of different directions, appealing to his sense of rhythm and structure.

With well over 100 films to his name, Mysteries of Lisbon is a more than fitting culmination to this remarkable director’s career. Although seeing this film through to its end is undeniably a significant time commitment, it’s certainly a rewarding one that draws the audience in, transporting them to a plethora of different times and places, in Lisbon and beyond.

Mysteries of Lisbon is released in the UK on December 9^th 2011

With dazzling performances from Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo, Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist is a vibrant homage to silent films and the talkies’  falling stars.

The Artist
★★★★★

Modern Talking by Mark Wilshin

CAUTION: Here be spoilers

There’s no getting round it, The Artist is a silent movie. And as we enter the third age of 3D, let alone talkies, the absurd anachronism of making a silent film has its own curious charm. It’s no doubt been done before, in comedies like Jacques Tati’s Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot and Mel Brooks’ satirical Silent Movie or more recently Guy Maddin’s Brand Upon the Brain! and Aki Kaurismäki’s Juha. And yet The Artist’s self-reflective stomp around the transition from silent to talkie, playfully and acrobatically incorporating sound and speechlessness into its narrative, makes it something of a homage to a lost art and its fallen matinee idols. Despite being rooted in the past with its fatalistic Sunset Boulevard sensibilities, The Artist still has something to say about the seismic shifts in the landscape of cinema, as the battle for 3D rages in multiplexes around the globe. And while The Artist has a joyful joie de vivre, 3D is big, bold and brash. Just like Norma Desmond. It’s just the pictures that are getting small.

Which isn’t to say The Artist harps back nostalgically to a bygone era. It’s a spectacular tribute to the silent age, but also so much more. Its stomping opening evokes the black-and-white movies of Hollywood’s heyday, albeit in a slightly bleached-out grayscale, with its rip-roaring score and jocular intertitles. The Artist draws back its curtains on a film within a film – the premiere of A Russian Affair, starring Tinsel Town darling George Valentin as the derring-do hero, caught in an electrifying scrape and a neatly wrapped finale, in which he escapes with a girl, a gun and a free Georgia. And as we cut between the film and its audience’s reactions of shock, awe and laughter, the soundscape, with its swinging accompaniment, remains unapologetically non-diegetic. Until George, behind the silver screen, awaits and is finally enraptured by the crowd’s unheard applause. And so the game begins.

But first we’re treated to some good old-fashioned mime antics. And Jean Dujardin makes a fantastic leading man with his brillantined hair, his pencil-line moustache à la Douglas Fairbanks and all the top-hat and terrier elegance of The Thin Man. His whole body acting hits just the right note, impressing the crowd and hogging the limelight with his doggy double act, his routines good-natured and charming enough to melt all hearts except that of his wandering wife. His silent antics offer a humorous romp into a forgotten world of winking and eyebrow raising stopping just the right side of mugging as he bumps into Peppy Miller outside the theatre. Appearing on the front page of Variety the next day with the headline “Who’s That Girl?” it’s not long before the perky Peppy wiles her way into a dancing job on George’s next film. Making eyes at each other across the Kinograph Studios, Peppy and George kick step together blindly, their anonymous legs concealed by a screen. And as Bérénice Bejo sidles into George’s dressing room to say thank you and make love to his coat rack and tails, romance seeps into celluloid rushes, with George and Peppy redoing take after take, unable to complete their dance scene or release each other from their onscreen gaze.

And there’s politics too, as Valentin upstages director-producer Al Zimmer, a stand-in for star-creator Louis B. Mayer, when the star forces the director to keep the young upstart in his film. Or the silent movie idol’s fall from grace with the advent of sound, reminiscent of Douglas Fairbanks’ own plunge into obscurity. And with the public baying for new faces and new voices, the sequence of Valentin’s nightmare is a breathtaking show-stealer. He dreams a nightmarish vision in sound, where glasses placed on counters suddenly do make diegetic noises, and where foley artists sync up footsteps and laughter. Only George can’t speak. And it’s this bravura dream sequence which provides the emotional backdrop to the rest of film culminating in a mute scream; George is incapable of making the leap into the brave new world of talkies.

The nightmare becomes a reality, as Pepper Miller climbs up the title card and George Valentin ends up slipping off the marquee billing. In the end, he resorts to producing his own silent films, spending his fortune on The Tears Of Love, an old-fashioned adventure that sees George sinking up to his neck in not just metaphorical quicksand. The film goes head to head with the Black Tuesday stock market crash and Peppy Miller’s The Beauty Spot, her grease-painted freckle George’s own creation – something to make her stand out from the crowd. But mired by his film’s sudden anachronism, George loses his wife, his chauffeur and all his worldly goods. And as the plot follows its own vaudevillian rags-to-riches, washed-up actor story, its narrative is paralleled by the titles of its films’ posters, from Thief of Her Heart and Pennies From Heaven to Lonely Star and Guardian Angel. It’s a love of cinema in all its forms that pervades The Artist, riffing on its haunting rearrangement of Bernard Herrmann’s score of the Love Theme from Vertigo, or Bérénice Bejo’s stairwell whistling that recalls Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast At Tiffany’s.

And while The Artist’s cartoonesque melancholy is sometimes enough to recall Sylvain Chomet’s The Illusionist, there are other great self-reflexive moments too, like the terrible, shocking silences that dominate the screen noiselessly. There are the humorously ironic questions too when George’s wife repeatedly asks him, “Why do you refuse to talk?” It’s the million-dollar question that haunts the film – will he or won’t he? And in the end, The Artist deftly avoids the corny trap of having him speak while deftly folding in a neat resolution. As the couple dance with all the gusto and aplomb of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire in the tap musical Sparkle Of Love, The Artist ends on the sound of their anxious breathing before John Goodman finally breaks the silence with “Cut! Perfect! Action!” But agreeing to a second take, in almost a second ending, George does speak, but it’s offscreen and incidental and with such a throwaway quality it saves the ending from clumsy mawkishness.

With the recent slate of minimalist and virtually dialogue-free films, such as Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff or Pablo Giorgelli’s recently released Las Acacias, the time feels right for a silent film. And with its own structural rigour and cheerful exuberance The Artist fits the billing perfectly. It’s intelligent and charming, and with all the feel-good comfort of a Hollywood golden oldie. Its story is perhaps a little off-the-shelf, strung together with brilliant set-pieces that help the B-movie plot slide by unnoticed, but with its Citizen Kane high angles and its Sirkian mise en scène, The Artist is a joyful homage to all types of cinema, whether silent, talkie or musical, adventure caper or melodrama. It might not have any 3D sequences, but Hazanavicius is certainly here to face the music. And dance.

The Artist is released on 30th December 2011 in the UK

A slowly elegant meditation on intimacy and friendship, Pablo Giorgelli’s Las Acacias will have you screaming from the back seat with glee,”Are we nearly there yet?”

Las Acacias
★★★

Rolling Family by Mark Wilshin

CAUTION: Here be spoilers

The South American road movie follows its own path. Unlike its counterpart north of the border, it’s down to earth and minimalist – no showboating rebel-rousing or iconic landscapes here. Walter Salles’ The Motorcycle Diaries and upcoming adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road are the closest it gets to Hollywood, the road movie as a journey of self discovery. Argentinian films though, like Carlos Sorín’s Historias Mínimas and Bombón El Perro or Pablo Trapero’s Familia Rodante are more reminiscent of Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy, intimate journeys of hidden politics and ruminating friendships. And Pablo Giorgelli’s Las Acacias is no exception.

Opening on a forest clearing in Paraguay where chainsaws thrum and acacias crash to earth, Las Acacias immediately calls South America’s enormous deforestation problem to mind. The Chaco region of Paraguay is particularly affected, losing hectares, habitats and tribal homes every day. It’s strangely shocking and political in a way the rest of Las Acacias isn’t, the acacia leaves burning while trunks are chopped up and hoisted onto Ruben’s truck. But it’s perhaps the tree’s thorns that suggest the title – the barbed path to friendship and the rising sap of a pair of scarred and damaged wild woods cut down in their prime.

Driving back to Buenos Aires, Ruben is joined by an acquaintance of his boss, Jacinta and her five-month old daughter Anahi. And it’s their almost silent relationship that forms the trunk of Giorgelli’s story. To begin with, you might wonder if the ice will ever break between this taciturn pair, keeping each other firmly at a distance with swigs of a  maté and tearful glances over the countryside rolling past. At first, Ruben treats her with disdain, resolutely silent, impatient at her daughter’s hungry tears and even enquiring after a bus ticket to Buenos Aires for them just to get them out of his cab. But slowly he softens. Previously tight-lipped, he starts to make conversation, even going so far as to carry her bags and open the truck door for her, putting out his cigarette for the sake of the baby or sharing his tea.

Estranged from his son and his sister, he has no family to speak of and it’s not long before Jacinta and Anahi become a kind of family by proxy. He holds her daughter and  gives Anahi his thermos cup to play with and keep – a gesture not only to remember him by but also to stay the moment of their parting. Filled with moments that plunge their relation deeper, like the sudden crack of a felled tree, Las Acacias is an elegant portrait of the dynamics of friendship – the bond between them deepening with every revealed intimacy. Each sequence builds inexorably on the previous one, ring upon ring, branch upon branch, until the tip appears above the clouds and a further show of intimacy must be dared tto allow a more permanent relationship to take root. After Jacinta’s flirtation with a fellow Guarani from Paraguay, Ruben fails to take their relationship to the next step during their drive to the capital. But parked outside her cousin’s door and with the threat of never seeing Jacinta or Anahi again looming, finally he dares and wins.

Like Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman, there’s a couched look at Argentinan politics here too, the morose and lonely European rejecting, slowly accepting and ultimately falling in love with the Amerindian woman and her daughter, a perhaps all too neat encapsulation of Argentinia’s future. A film of hypnotic night-time headlamps, hardshoulder cigarettes and balletic turning chassis, Las Acacias is all the same a funny kind of road movie. The drive towards romance and optimism runs counter to the film’s geographical arc – from rural deforestation to the wood-guzzling, steak-eating metropolis, from the tribal forest to the city.  It may be a politically acute reflection of indigenous peoples flushed out of their lands, but with hints of a bad past and a rose-tinged hope for a better future,  Las Acacias reveals a strange kind of hope where people can come together, but in a land without trees.

Las Acacias is released in the UK on 2nd December 2011

Our man in the Vatican, Nanni Moretti’s We Have A Pope delights both in the vibrant ritual of the papal conclave and rattling its cardinals’ chasubles.

We Have A Pope
★★★

The Vatican Cellars by Mark Wilshin

CAUTION: Here be spoilers

While the recent history of the Holy See may have been blighted by silence on child abuse and allegations of money laundering, Nanni Moretti takes the death of Pope John Paul II and the election of Pope Benedict XVI as the inspiration of his papal satire. A series of wishful-thinking what-ifs, Moretti climbs inside the Vatican’s closed doors, not as a documentarist but as a fiction filmmaker. With thousands of extras and astonishing dominance over St Peter’s Square and the Sistine Chapel, it’s tempting to think at least part of We Have A Pope was shot in 2005 – a 35mm documentary of Cardinal Ratzinger’s inauguration. But with comic asides, such as the dense journalist who mistakes black smoke for white, and the papal conclave suspended in disbelief while their elected candidate disappears, reduced to a frustrated in-house squabbling, pushy psychoanalysts and clerical volleyball, we’re in a Moretti kind of wonderland.

With none of the left-wing politics, psychological introspection or foibles of filmmaking in Aprile, Il Caimano or The Son’s Room, We Have A Pope is almost utterly unlike Moretti’s previous films. Of course, it stars the director in a prominent role, this time as the atheistic psychologist brought in to analyse the newly elected pope and guide him back to his vocation with science. And there’s a familiarly witty kind of insouciance, satirical and carefree – the conclave assembled in the Sistine Chapel steal glances, scribble and tap like anxious schoolboys, desperate not to be receive the heavenly calling. But above all, it’s a Moretti film in its moment out of time, its hiatus in the everyday. Here it’s an extended period of inbetweenness in which the world waits for a new earthly Father, while the Pope disappears with Shakespearean gusto into the populace incognito.

Michel Piccoli turns in a great performance as the reluctant octogenarian foisted onto the papacy, screaming and groaning his way through indecision and sidling away from the balcony where the faithful and an irreversible fate await him. Instead, he escapes into the city, coming face to face with Romans, seemingly, for the first time. Donning a new persona and reinventing his history as an actor, Cardinal Melville escapes his isolation, befriending a troupe of actors performing Chekhov’s The Seagull. Meantime, a portly Swiss Guard beefs up on His Holiness’ rations and performs nightly curtain-twitching duties at Jerzy Stuhr’s request, duping the conclave into believing the Pope is still in residence. But, whipped up by Moretti’s psychoanalyst, the bored cardinals are ripe for the director’s own personal style of affectionate mockery. Mummy’s boys at heart, the Italians cry for mama as they snooze while the belligerent Australians, frustrated by their confinement, are unable to sample Rome’s delights, its trattorias and Caravaggio exhibitions.

Moretti, as both director and fictional therapist, amuses himself twisting the conclave into unimaginable shapes, encouraging the elderly sages into a volleyball tournament – a riotously incongruous tangle of cassocks and colourful gilets. But at least it’s not prison dodgeball. The Vatican is a rich, powerful and well-oiled institution in which Moretti’s character often finds himself both outside and outmanoeuvred. His games come to an anticlimactic halt when the Pope’s spokesman reveals Melville’s retreat to a theatre, and the conclave sorties en masse to retrieve the wandering idler. But it’s Moretti’s plasticine approach to the Vatican, complemented by his a capello renditions of Mercedes Sosa’s Todo Cambia, which reveals most about his political intentions. Despite its softly-softly satire, We Have A Pope isn’t anti-papal or even anti-ecclesiastical, but rather a plea for change and for an injection of Melville’s humanity into the holy sea of red chasubles.

A gently humorous romp, We Have A Pope tries for neither mordant satire nor documentary illumination. Suspended in time, Moretti’s papal conclave is instead subjected to the director’s whims – finger-poking and wishful-thinking fantasies. In fact, they’re served up the same scandal twice, once as the newly chosen pontiff refuses to accept the papacy and again when he decides to abdicate. There is, perhaps despite himself, a vaguely theistic undercurrent to Moretti’s film, the clerics’ lack of a pope akin to God’s absence. And between the heavenly antechamber of the conclave and the Chosen One with a parental deficit coming down to Earth to exist among its people, there are plenty of metaphors to choose from. And while there’s hope that maybe one day a Pope will choose to abdicate, perhaps the most shocking conclusion We Have A Pope comes to is that a celestial being might just want to disappear. Like its Latin title, Habemus Papam is kind of outdated in its toothless wit, but all the more enjoyable for it.

We Have A Pope is released on 2nd December 2011 in the UK

With thunderous performances by Jessica Chastain and Michael Shannon, Jeff Nichols’ Take Shelter is a mind blowing twister of mental illness, austerity America and the apocalypse.

Take Shelter
★★★★

A Mighty Storm by Mark Wilshin

CAUTION: Here be spoilers

A storm is coming. Or is it? A storm is coming. Or is it a dream?

You might have thought that a lack of distinction between reality and dream sequences might get repetitive or boring. But when it’s a film about paranoid schizophrenia, the absence of clarity feels strangely appropriate. The hallucinations and delusions Curtis suffers from all start with a mega-storm which brings an oily rain that turns loved ones and strangers alike into violent attackers. And as the twister season starts in Ohio, worlds collide as reality and dream dovetail each other and leave our lonely hero lost  in a storm.

Curtis’ recurring nightmares begin to make his average Joe life increasingly unlivable. He wets the bed, sneaks out to the library to borrow books on mental illness and starts refitting his tornado shelter with a plumbed-in toilet and pedal-powered lights. His premonitions put his family in jeopardy – his marriage starts to fracture under the weight of his undisclosed disorder, their house becomes collateral against risky home improvement loans and his deaf daughter’s cochlear implant, paid for through health insurance benefits from his job as a drill rigger is threatened when he borrows a digger from work and gets the sack. But amidst the brewing storm, the most charged squall is the crack with his buddy Dewart, who he cuts loose at work and ends up in fisticuffs with at a social.

The scene is electric as Curtis prophesies a mighty and terrible storm in full fevered born-again fervour. His inescapable visions of the apocalypse collapse into tears, as he catches his daughter’s eye, the innocent he yearns to protect. And as such, Take Shelter is a sensitive but powerful exploration of mental illness – the hold of fantasy, the slow estrangement from his family and the brain storms that visit him nightly. But it’s also a fascinating glimpse of Obama’s America – fears of the economy looming large while assault paranoia and man’s god-given right to protect his family surge forth. As long as you don’t end up foreclosed, that is.

There are many strands of tension coursing through Nichols’ film. And after the family take flight one night into the storm shelter, wearing gas masks as protective totems against the raging unknown, only to emerge the next morning to a bright sunny day with only a few branches to clear up, Curtis is forced to admit his delusions are wrong and he needs help. But Nichols’ double ending is like thunder after the lightning. On holiday in Myrtle Beach the twisters gather and with a grim inevitability, oil drops from the sky. It’s a cruel vindication, there’s no comfort in being right, just a desperate fight for survival and a hurried flight back to the safety of the shelter. But with Curtis no longer able to trust his emotions, he’s reduced to a child, making sandcastles on the beach with Hannah and turning to Samantha to make the final decision.

With brilliant performances by Michael Shannon and Jessica Chastain as the caught- in-a-storm parents clinging together, Take Shelter treats its dual themes of paranoid schizophrenia and the implosion of the American dream with tender sensitivity. Shannon’s fearful glances and reluctant mouth ticks seed an empathic interest in the viewer, almost willing the end of the world to come so that Curtis can be proved right. Visually stunning, in both Adam Stone’s cinematography and its visual effects, with birds careering to earth and flapping unwinged to death. With the narrative potential to dissolve into man-eating zombies and Armageddon, Nichols’ film is intelligently restrained – a caution which might disappoint some. But as a taut, sanity-questioning identity thriller,   Take Shelter  takes the end of the world by storm. 

Take Shelter is released on 25th November 2011 in the UK