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The Look of Love

The Look of Love

Directed by Michael Winterbottom

Written by Matt Greenhalgh

with Steve Coogan, Imogen Poots, Anna Friel

2013

The creative relationship between Steve Coogan and Michael Winterbottom continues with a biopic of Paul Raymond: owner of much of Soho, for a time the richest man in Britain, and throughout his career a scourge of the obscenity laws as a publisher of adult magazines and producer of risqué theatre. Starting in the late 50s and following Raymond’s career and family life into the early 90s, The Look of Love is entertaining, but lightweight and only cheaply fulfilling. It has a great cast and the same breezy postmodernism that made 24 Hour Party People so much fun, but that over-obvious comparison should indicate that The Look of Love fails to really distinguish itself.

In 24 Hour Party People, Tony Wilson describes himself as a minor character in his own story, an idea which describes that film’s arch stagger through the years, alighting on the various key moments that went towards building up the mythical version of the alternative music scene in Manchester. Maybe if, instead of Joy Division, you’re an aficionado of tacky erotic theatre in postwar London you’d get something of the same effect with The Look of Love. But I think it’s clear that what Winterbottom has tried to do here is actually delve into the main character, and yet hasn’t managed to reveal a great deal (both he and Coogan are on record saying Raymond was actually a little dull).

It’s a shame, because the angle gone for mainly concerns his relationship with women, and there’s a lot of potential there when the subject is a pornographer and serial philanderer who dotes on his only daughter. Early scenes depict him as a habitual womaniser taking full advantage of the ambitious young women surrounding him, with the resigned consent of his first wife, Jean (AnnaFriel). This happens with a sort of easygoing opportunism rather than any real sleaze, but it joins his business ventures in showing an attitude where women are there primarily for enjoyment. As his daughter, Debbie (Imogen Poots), grows up and wants to pursue a career in the arts like her dad, it seems for a while the main thrust of the film will be his attempt to preserve the dignity of the one woman with whom he cannot dictate the terms of their relationship. Frustratingly, it never quite takes off, as Winterbottom cannot devote enough time to it alongside the charting of Raymond’s career, and the admittedly enjoyable period details of old-school Soho, back when it was genuinely grubby. There are many ways in which The Look of Love works well, but it hangs limply between the two disparate aims of paternal introspection, and providing a fun history of adorable pre-internet obscenity laws.

Tom

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The Place Beyond the Pines

2:16 AM | Labels: Crime, Drama

The Place Beyond the Pines

Directed by Derek Cianfrance

Written by Derek Cianfrance, Ben Coccio, Darius Marder

with Ryan Gosling, Bradley Cooper, Eva Mendes

2012

People who are hoping for a stylish, Gosling-filled crime thriller are going to be as disappointed as those who watched Blue Valentine hoping for a mushy, Gosling-filled love-in. Re-uniting the star with Blue Valentine’s director, Derek Cianfrance, The Place Beyond the Pines is a highly ambitious, intergenerational drama presented with a hefty splash of social commentary. Ryan Gosling plays Luke Glanton, a semi-itinerant motorcycle stuntman who returns to his hometown of Schenectady, New York to find he has a baby by a past lover, Romina (Eva Mendes). Though determined to contribute to his son’s upbringing, he has difficulty making enough money to support himself, let alone his child, and ends up being persuaded to perform bank robberies with a friend. These robberies lead to a run-in with rookie cop Avery Cross (Bradley Cooper), about the same age and also with a small son. Their meeting has a huge effect on both their lives, and from then on the film’s focus begins to drift, first over Cross himself, and then on to the two men’s offspring, Jason (Dane DeHaan) and AJ (Emory Cohen), and how their lives are affected by the actions of their fathers.

Given the lengthy, chopped narrative, Cianfrance has to paint in fairly broad strokes, so the social commentary is a little simplistic and any points the film is trying to make are dry well before the routine ending. It's also very predictable, yet in a way that’s soobvious, for example the chance meeting of the two sons, that it feels less like a lack of imagination and more a deliberate lack of concern. Arguing that the plot doesn’t surprise you would be like complaining about how predictable it is that Jason and AJ are messed-up individuals; one of the main concerns in the film is social mobility, and so the sense that these boys are traveling down some form of pre-determined path is oddly appropriate, even if it would have been laudable for Cianfranco to find a way of doing so in a more interesting way. I’m going to single out the film’s depiction of the ageing process for criticism, as after a fifteen-year gap the only adult character who seems to have aged at all is Romina, and this is specifically because she’s had such a hard time bringing up her son. Bradley Cooper just seems to lose a little weight, despite a presumably highly-pressured job.

What I enjoyed about the film was the details, the touching quieter scenes and the strong supporting characters a result of Cianfranco’s ability to conjure depth from a few well-chosen moments, and a fairly great cast. Gosling and Cooper may seem a little A-list for what’s meant to be a challenging, meaningful film, but the former is ultimately more of an off-screen presence than on-screen, and the latter is continuing a well-advised move into playing characters that are actually intended to be not-entirely likeable. Eva Mendes makes the most of the only prominent female role – she’s good even though her character is mainly there through necessity; Rose Byrne unfortunately gets swallowed up by the essential maleness of the film. Emory Cohen, as the spoilt AJ, gives one of those performances that are so dickish that you can only be impressed, and pray he’s not just playing himself. The Place Beyond the Pines isn’t the sweeping epic it tries to be, but it’s by no means a failure.

Tom

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In the House

9:08 AM | Labels: Drama

In the House

Directed by François Ozon

Written by François Ozon

with Fabrice Luchini, Kristen Scott Thomas, Ernst Umhauer

2012

Germain (Fabrice Luchini) teaches Literature to sixteen-year-olds. With a fresh class to work with, he sets each of them to producing an essay about their weekends: a simple task so he can assess their writing ability. A failed novelist himself, his discerning but frustrated eye passes disdainfully over one lazy note after another, before he comes across a piece different to the others. It shows a vaguely unsettling fascination with the home and family of a fellow pupil, but expresses it intriguingly, and what’s more promises further installments. His attention caught, Germain reads the essay out to his wife, Jeanne (Kristen Scott Thomas) who is as bemused by it as he is. The next day he finds the author, a quiet, intelligent boy named Claude (Ernst Umhauer), and, telling him he has talent but needs to learn, begins to guide him through the next installments of his story. But as he begins to impress his own ideas on Claude (and those of Jeanne, to whom he faithfully recounts each new chapter), is he beginning to take part in Claude’s interference with an unassuming family? Or is he just revealing more of himself to Claude than he means to?

For the most part, this is a film about the writing process, full of intensely literate discussions on symbolism and different writing styles, and rather neatly raising questions on the nature of authorship and how meaning is derived from art. Yet there is more humanity – albeit of a slightly disparaging sort– and character to it than pure intellectualism. Germain, a kind of benevolent Salieri, begins to cut quite a pathetic figure as his responsibilities as a teacher start to clash with his cherished creative impulses. Luchini is very good both on his own terms and as part of two double acts within the film; he and Scott Thomas are funny and believable as a cultured couple becoming addicted to Claude’s world and inadvertently finding themselves looking in a mirror, and it is amusing to watch him with Umhauer, and to try and figure out which one of them is out of his depth.

Both the script and the direction are very deft; interweaving imaginary scenes with ‘reality’ can often be unwieldy and damage the flow of a story, but here the subject matter more or less demands it and it is done very well. Ozon, a talented director and a good judge of when to be visually playful and when to rest on the dialogue, doesn’t go in for pulling the rug from under the audience or keeping them guessing as to what’s really happening. That question remains at the back of the mind throughout the film, but the format is really used, under the guise of appraising Claude’s writing, to go over the preoccupations of the characters and what meaning they take from events. I had the same problem I have with many French films with middle-class characters, in that I’m never sure whether the endless conversations about literature, art and philosophy are intended seriously or are mocking pretensions, but in this case either way works just as well. I can’t pick out any coherent overall message, but as drama In the House is entertaining and thoughtful even if, like me, you’re left with the feeling you should have reached a deeper understanding than you did.

Tom

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Compliance

3:36 AM | Labels: Drama

Compliance

Directed by Craig Zobel

Written by Craig Zobel

with Ann Dowd, Dreama Walker, Pat Healy

2012

Stanley Milgram’s investigations into obedience to authority, referenced at the beginning of this film, don’t paint us in the most flattering light. Performed in the wake of trials of Nazi war criminals, they revealed some uncomfortable truths about the malleability of people in the right situation. Yet Craig Zobel of Compliance makes no further direct reference to Milgram; the story he tells is based on real events so odd he needs scientific evidence to back up the claim that “Nothing has been exaggerated”.

It is Friday evening at ChickWich, and general manager Sandra is preparing her unenthusiastic workforce for a busy evening. Slightly understaffed, and with supplies of various ingredients running low, her patience is fraying when the store receives a phonecall from a man claiming to be a police officer. He says he has a ChickWich customer with him who has accused one of the staff, a pretty 19-year old called Becky, of stealing from her purse while it was resting on the counter. He asks Sandra to detain Becky until the police can come and pick her up. Distracted, rushed off her feet and dismayed at the idea of having to do without a further member of staff, Sandra is cajoled, flattered, and gently threatened into complying with each of the voice’s instructions, even as they get increasingly odd.

Compliance runs on understated, detailed performances, and a script that sounds completely natural despite a lot of effort clearly having gone into accurately representing the ways such a manipulation would work. To be completely honest, I’m not sure how believable I would have found it had I not been assured it was based on real events before the film had even started. But throughout, even as you are despairing of some people’s idiocy, and wishing you could intervene and ask a few simple questions to reveal the deceit, the actions of the victims never go as far as striking a false note. Though of course mainly due to the skill of the actors (especially Ann Dowd as Sandra), it also has a lot to do with the sheer amount of detail Zobel has managed to fit into the script. Had he simply inserted as much psychological research as possible the film would have come across as dry and over-scientific, but he has taken the trouble to draw rounded characters, whose quirks and personal resentments believably inform their actions, and occasionally point you in the wrong direction as to how you think they might react to the anonymous authority. It results in a captivating yet uncomfortable psychological drama; you might watch with a growing sense of disbelief, but it will be disbelief not in the film itself, but in what people are capable - or sometimes incapable - of.

Tom

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Stoker

4:57 AM | Labels: Drama, Thriller

Stoker

Directed by Chan-wook Park

Written by Wentworth Miller

with Mia Wasikowska, Matthew Goode, Nicole Kidman

2013

Stoker is the first English-language film directed by Chan-wook Park, the South Korean behind the Vengeance trilogy (Oldboy made the biggest splash over here, mainly because the lead eats a live octopus at one point, but it is fantastic in any case), and also marks the writing debut of Wentworth Miller, that guy from Prison Break. It’s a vaguely supernatural family drama, that aims for spooky beauty but falls short on pretty much every count.

Mia Wasikowska is India Stoker, a quiet, solitary girl who claims to be able to see further and hear more acutely than everyone else as a result of “years of longing”, whatever that means. At the film’s opening it is her eighteenth birthday, but her coming-of-age coincides with the tragic death of her father, an architect, who was found in his burned-out car two states away. At the funeral, she sees a mysterious figure (Matthew Goode) watching the ceremony from a distance. He later appears at the wake and introduces himself as her Uncle Charlie, the brother of her dead father and a free spirit who has spent his life traveling the world. Her mother Evelyn (Nicole Kidman), a fragile woman struggling to cope with the death of her husband, quickly becomes infatuated with Charlie, and he elects to stay for a time, to get to know the family he has never met. Over the proceeding weeks, however, India begins to notice various odd things about her uncle, while at the same time sensing an increasingly strong connection with him. Little does she realise this connection amounts to a shocking family secret, and that everything she finds odd about herself is about to be unnervingly explained.

I couldn’t tell whether this film was over-directed or under-written – perhaps one follows the other. It is quite pretty, all fluid camera work and carefully framed details, but apart from some clumsy “symbolic” shots pretty is all it is. Going by Oldboy, Park isn’t afraid of style for the sake of it; that single-shot corridor brawl has no real purpose other than to show off, but crucially it’s so good it’s completely worth it, and in any case that film is still full of shots that are brilliant pieces of style and storytelling. Here it’s just lazy style: steadily adjusting the focus over a field of waving grass might look nice but it isn’t telling you anything, whatever portent you want to read into it. I’m inclined to lay the blame on the script, though. It’s sparcity is a mis-step given that what is there isn't anything special, and the quiet mystery Miller was clearly going for ends up sapping the film of life. I wasn’t surprised to find it was written by an actor given the amount it relies on the audience being captivated by the performances; the dialogue is just there to introduce the ideas and guide the film in the right direction, it’s very much the acting telling you what’s happening. To be fair, it doesn’t entirely fail on this count: Matthew Goode makes it work, Nicole Kidman's generally pampered, botoxed appearance actually makes her very effective playing needy with a hint of malevolence, and Jacki Weaver shows up and outclasses everyone for all-too-short a time. The main problem, and this isn’t Wasikowska’s fault, is that there’s a yawning space where there should be a main character. In a film where the whole point is discovering the main character’s true self we need to be emotionally invested in them, and a near-mute ‘beautiful weirdo’ is, in terms of them being interesting for their own sake, about fifteen years past it’s use-by date now.

Tom

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Side by Side

3:41 AM | Labels: Documentary

Side by Side

Directed by: Christopher Kenneally

2012

Side by Side battles nostalgia and respect for film with a real curiosity for the possibility of the digital world.

Are we close to the mourning of film? If so, is it for better or for worse? This seems to be the question at the core of Side by Side. The documentary opens with a strong, bustling, contradictory series of statements on film and digital, coming from the most revered names in the film industry – among others, Martin Scorsese, David Lynch, James Cameron, George Lucas, Christopher Nolan. Tracing the development of the digital in parallel to film and tackling the technical differences between the two media, Side by Side captures the exciting, controversial and fast-tracking change cinema technology is undergoing at the moment. Instead of focusing on the ‘visible’ effects of digital, Christopher Kenneally’s documentary focuses on the ‘invisible’ technical, artistic and almost political consequences of this change in medium. Keanu Reeves’s hosting is lively and intelligent, as he acts as the voice of nostalgia. Side by Side offers the viewer’s a peak behind the screen, into the battling ground of art and technology.

The strength of the documentary is in its in-depth, clear exposition of the technical characteristics of the digital medium. Kenneally is not afraid to dwell on the chemical processes of film or on the technical advances of digital cameras throughout recent years – and the audience can be grateful for that. This close-up on media and their possibilities evokes one of the major questions in art: do the medium’s limits provide an incentive to the artist’s creativity or do they act as a hindrance? Is the digital just another way of doing cinema, or will it ultimately change cinema and story-telling as we conceive them today?

If we cannot yet know whether digital will change cinema itself, certainly the medium is changing who does or rather who can do cinema. Democratisation is a strong argument on the side of digital. Costs are lower, equipment is more approachable and editing can be done on a laptop. On this regard, the Danish avant-garde group Dogme 95 is presented as the trigger for this democratisation of the medium. Yet one wonders if it tales only a cheap digital camera to become Lars von Trier.

What is most certain – and here the documentary is at its most ferocious in portraying an industry in upheaval – is that the digital is shifting, among other things, that subtle relation of power between Director and Director of Photography, and that the latter’s role is splitting into a series of post-production manipulations of the digital master image. Are DPs an endangered species? When light, colour and contrast will only be a matter of a click, will there be any value left in the understanding of light, lenses and shade of what is captured? And will this ultimately make the image lose all visual contact with ‘reality’?

As with any question entailing the idea of progress, there are those who enthusiastically embrace it to push it even further and those who are more cautious, maybe more nostalgic about the magic – and authority – of the past. In that way the documentary places ‘side by side’ not only film and digital, but also – and most of all – the people for and against one or the other medium. Perhaps the prosperity of cinema lies in this disagreement, more than in the mere technical possibilities of each media. In its deepest implications, Side by Side questions, almost in an ethical way, the essence of cinema. And the final message of the documentary is confident: what matters in cinema are the stories we are told, the how is just a mean to an end.

fiamma

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Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God

3:36 AM | Labels: Documentary

Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God

Directed by: Alex Gibney

2012

It has been said that a thunderbolt struck St. Peter just moments after the Pope’s resignation. But the real thunder to strike the Catholic Church these past weeks is probably Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God.

It took four deaf men to break the silence surrounding clerical sex abuses. Mea Maxima Culpatells the inspiring story of Terry Kohut, Gary Smith, Arthur Budzinksi and Bob Bolger as they set out to expose the sexual crimes of Father Lawrence Murphy, who repeatedly abused them and other 200 deaf children, in a school under his control. As the documentary progresses, the scope of the issue broadens and Alex Gibney ambitiously ventures into the secretive structure of the Vatican, uncovering its perverse mechanism of power, loyalty and omertà which obscures its responsibility vis-à-vis sexual crimes. The at-the-time-Cardinal Ratzinger appears as an ambivalent figure, informed and concerned about clerical sex abuses – in particular about the horrific actions of Marcial Maciel Degollado – but too loyal to the Vatican institution to take action.

Alex Gibney’s Mea Maxima Culpa strikes for its depth, rhythm and ambition. The documentary maintains throughout an incredible clarity of exposition and an objective journalistic approach to the issue, carefully selecting and effectively editing surprisingly varied sources of materials - news footage, photographs, a series of tremendous Super-8 videos, graphs, newspaper articles, archive documents and some recreated scenes. Amid the speeding rationality of the evidences, however, the strongest voice remains that of Terry, Gary, Arthur and Bob – their mute signing conveying anger, pain and emotions with overwhelming intensity.

Leaving religion and faith aside, Gibney’s approach to the issue is realistic and pragmatic. Clerical sexual abuse is a crime and should be handled as such, but because the Church encourages secrecy about these matters in order to protect its reputation, it has created the perfect environment for paedophilia to thrive unpunished. Gibney was subtle enough to leave the question of celibacy – and the much debated issue of clerical marriage – outside the picture. The Church’s omission of sexual abuses and its unwillingness to take action against priests who have been sexual offenders is the ‘lay’ problem – and civil crime – that Mea Maxima Culpa tackles.

Ultimately, the question Mea Maxima Culpa poses is a question of justice, of responsibility: why is no punishment imposed and who is to blame? What appears through the series of scandals is a troubling image of the Vatican, whose belief in its own infallibility and righteousness ultimately becomes the justification to its own corruption. Society, by granting to the figure of the priests an innocence that needs no proof and a trust that needs not to be earned, has contributed to create this undisputed image of an infallible Church. By the same token, the documentary seems to argue, people have an incredible power: that of forsaking this misconception and that of demanding justice and punishment for clerical sexual abuses.

Mea Maxima Culpadoes not advocate a change in faith; it advocates a change in culture. And it seemed a telling - maybe inspiring? - coincidence that, as the documentary had its first screening, a Pope stepped down from its position.

fiamma

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The Look of Love

The Place Beyond the Pines

In the House

Compliance

Stoker

Side by Side

Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God