Features The Times BFI 50th London Film Festival
In contrast to many of last year’s relatively sedate, old fashioned gala screening choices, the big films at this year’s London Film Festival feel achingly modern. It has a lot to do with the current cultural and geopolitical climate, but Western cinema in particular seems bent on exploring themes of war, loss and grief, confronting the issues head on.
The big world premiere at this year’s festival is Lions For Lambs, an all-star Washington talkathon in which Tom Cruise, Meryl Streep and director Robert Redford discuss the moral issues of the War on Terror in a series of dimly lit, oak-panelled rooms. Also on the home front, Grace Is Gone features John Cusack as a grieving, everyman war widower struggling to explain events to his family. Taking a more direct approach are two films which combine documentary and fiction: Nick Broomfield’s ironically titled Battle For Haditha utilises eyewitness accounts to re-enact the infamous civilian massacre, while Brian DePalma’s Redacted combines testimony, youtube videos and media coverage to tell a fictitious story based on similar events.
Another popular contemporary theme for this year’s crop of filmmakers is the culture of celebrity and image. I’m Not There is Todd Haynes’ fractured and episodic attempt to tell the Bob Dylan story, and although the images look extraordinary some of the performances have already drawn criticism. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is another revisionist autopsy of a popular American idol, filtering the conflict between ‘hero’ James and ‘villain’ Ford through the lens of the modern star-fan relationship. Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely uses the phenomenon of look-alikes to explore some of the same themes, with Diego Luna as a dejected Michael Jackson escaping his grim life in Paris to join a Highland commune of similarly afflicted nonentities.
In the new Europe, a recurring motif seems to be migration. Festival opener Eastern Promises takes a slam-bang look at Russian organised crime on the streets of London, while Import/Export explores the hardships of immigrants fleeing the post-communist East. Asif Kapadia’s Far North tells the story of two Arctic women escaping an invasion of their homeland, while Julio Medem’s kaleidoscopic thriller Chaotic Ana follows it’s central character through past lives and across entire continents.
In the world cinema category, the number of topics and themes covered is almost as plentiful as the countries represented: Let’s Finish!!! explores the phenomenon of Korean suicide cults while the ravishingly monochrome Frozen follows the troubled adolescence of a girl in remotest Himalayan India. The World Unseen deals with the conflicted lives of Indian women in apartheid-era South Africa, while La Zona explores themes of privilege and equality in modern day Mexico.
But it isn’t all violence, hardship and self discovery. As with last year’s event, there are a number of films both for and about children. In the former category we find the welcome return of Jerry Seinfeld with the computer animated Bee Movie, and a dark and intriguing take on Sandinavian folklore in Island Of Lost Souls. In the latter comes Son Of Rambow, in which a pair of violence-obsessed English preteens attempt to make a sequel to the eponymous 80’s classic, and Shotgun Stories, about a fatherless family of boys growing up in rural Arkansas.
The festival runs from October 17th – November 1st, 2007 at venues across London. Please refer to this page during the coming weeks for reviews of select festival films.
From the very first seconds its clear we’re in familiar territory—the credits come rushing through a rainswept nighttime cloudscape, to the sound of a portentous John Williams-ish orchestral score. We descend to a remote farmhouse, where a secret band of hooded wizards are performing an ancient ritual designed to fight evil. So far, so familiar. But although such cues are derivative almost to the point of cliché, the film acquits itself with such style, charm and vigour that it becomes impossible not to be carried along.
Everything about Garage feels considered, from the excellent casting to the spare but involving script, from the near-absence of music to the very particular choice of locations. The photography is simple but effective, utilising long, mostly static camera positions, isolating the actors within the barren landscape. The film is not easy viewing—a slow, deliberate but essentially lighthearted first half gradually gives way to a sense of bleak desperation.
For the past decade, Penny Woolcock has been quietly building a reputation as one of the UK’s most innovative writer-directors: her operatic John Adams collaboration The Death of Klinghoffer was nominated for several international festival awards, while last year’s Mischief Night was a hot ticket at the 50th London Film Festival. But on the evidence presented by Exodus, it’s very hard to see what the fuss is about.
In a year stuffed with comedies exploring the diversity of masculine relationships and male bonding (most of them starring either Will Ferrell or Seth Rogen), one of the most surprising and enjoyable is this debut feature from Spanish writer-director Antonio Munoz de Mesa. Shot on the fly and on a microbudget, the film makes the most of an intriguing setup, a witty script and some likeable central performances.
We Want Roses Too is clearly a very personal project for Marazzi and her collaborators. It tells a heartfelt but universal story, and reminds us how far we’ve come in a relatively short time, thanks to a group of dedicated and brave people who tried to drag the world, kicking and screaming, into the light.
The outcome is inevitable, as it would be for any parent. We already know the decision Mladen is doomed to make, so the writers’ attempts to create tension out of his predicament fall somewhat flat. But once the deed is committed the film comes into focus, spinning inexorably towards a genuinely gripping climax, and a beautifully ironic twist.
Light and shadow are used to entrancing effect, and however unnecessary those naked bodies might seem, they never look anything less than perfect—there’s a painter’s eye at work here, and Ramos the director shows tremendous promise. But none of this can subtract from the frankly bizarre choices Ramos the writer insists on making.
Shotgun Stories is a beautifully judged film, taking its time to tell a simple, familiar but relevant and deeply poignant story. And though it may never scale the expressive, heartbreaking heights of films like Twelve and Holding or All The Real Girls, Shotgun Stories remains a wonderfully affecting character study, and a visually sumptuous cinemagoing experience.
With a knowledge of the facts behind the Baekeland case, viewing Savage Grace would be a very different experience. But for the unsuspecting viewer, there’s no sense of foreboding here, no hint at what is to come, beyond a few personality flaws and an odd sense of displacement. The eventual descent into tragedy is shocking and powerful, and overturns every expectation, leaving the viewer shattered and spinning.
For the most part, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is an involving and often very beautiful film, taking its time to tell a familiar story in an unexpected and believable way. And while it’s hard to imagine the film reaching the audience it probably deserves, this is a very welcome addition to the annals of the American West.
There are some films which one feels churlish for criticising too harshly—The World Unseen is clearly a labour of great love for all concerned, particularly the author-director. But Sarif makes the terrible mistake of failing to trust her audience, and feeling she needs to signpost every development, every plot turn, every emotional peak.
There are some films which one feels churlish for criticising too harshly—The World Unseen is clearly a labour of great love for all concerned, particularly the author-director. But Sarif makes the terrible mistake of failing to trust her audience, and feeling she needs to signpost every development, every plot turn, every emotional peak.
Lions For Lambs is a spectacularly toothless movie. All its targets are established now, and Redford still backs off from using live ammunition, preferring to couch his attacks in vagaries and hypotheticals. It’s a consummate example of the American liberal problem—we despise you and everything you stand for, but we don’t want to offend you by actually saying so.
Although the script condenses Petey’s story and lends it wider historical context, if anything the screenwriters undersell Petey’s significance, saying nothing of his self-started Efforts for Ex-Convicts charity, his local Emmys, or his work with the YMCA. They prefer instead to focus on his career in the spotlight: this is very much a film ‘inspired’ by true events, and probably more entertaining for it.
This is an angry and immediate film, scattershot and diffuse, the cinematic equivalent of a hastily written protest song that doesn’t quite rhyme, but gets its point across nonetheless. It’d be hard to argue for Redacted on the strength of its cinematic merits, but it is an involving, ultimately affecting piece of work.
Watching Battle For Haditha, it becomes painfully aware how little the mainstream media lets us know about Iraqi culture. Of the brace of films made so far about the conflict, Broomfield’s is the first to pay more than lip service to the civilian population, viewing them as more than just victims or Jihadis, but real, living characters.
There may be, indeed there will be some viewers who find this film charming, moving, possibly even life altering. For me it was an agonising, infuriating experience, one of the most dreadful, shallow, cringe-inducing works of pseudo-art it has ever been my misfortune to endure.
Every seemingly easy, obvious jibe, whether it be at the consumer or the art-snob, the author or her characters or even the audience, has an equally persuasive and justifiable counter argument, and Ozon juggles expertly, never allowing us to fall into simple patterns of judgment but requiring us to keep alert for each new sardonic twist.
It’s hard to decipher exactly what a teenage audience will take away from Juno, and there’s certainly nothing in the pregnancy plotline to offend even the most hardened Christian. It could be argued that this is Reitman and the studio covering their backs, but if so, why include all the swearing, divorce and general bad behaviour? It all feels slightly weird, some kind of subversive plot to indoctrinate a nation’s youth in the coolest, most enjoyably way possible.
This is Hot Shots Part Deux directed by Jim Jarmusch or The Bourne Ultimatum on heavy downers, with tongue lodged firmly in cheek. It’s the most entertaining film of Hartley’s career, and one of this year’s most pleasurable cinematic surprises.
There is really nothing to it beyond the suffering, and one longs to feel something, anything else: a flicker of warmth, an instant of humour, a flash of excitement. But such moments, if they come at all, are too few and far between to make Reservation Road feel like anything other than a bleak, dispiriting and ultimately rather empty experience.
Todd Haynes (whose Velvet Goldmine remains one of the most critically misunderstood and daring films of the last decade) turns out to be the perfect director for this subject, creating a film which is at once confounding and utterly appropriate, deconstructed but still deeply involving, a glorious fantasy rooted in real life, and dreams, and songs, and lies, and lofty ambition.
