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Nostalgia for the Light

Nostalgia for the Light

Directed by: Patricio Guzmán

2010

Nostalgia for the Light is the most poetic, calm and painful reflection on time, on horror and on the human spirit.

The films opens with a pure visual prologue. First the dance and noise of metal discs and screws: it is the awakening of a majestic, huge and powerful German telescope. Then the music and stilness of a planet: it is the moon, cool and overwhelming. A pause and the documentary begins. We are in Chile, with the childhood memories of director Patricio Guzmán. It is a world made of harmony, light and of an early passion for astronomy. Then the rest of the world became impassioned with astronomy and the Chilean sky, so the world's most powerful observatory was built in the Atacama desert. While the search for our origins at the far end of the universe was beginning at the observatory, hundreds of thousands of people disappeared, during Pinochet's dictatorship, into a more earthly vastness: the Atacama desert itself…

At the origin of this impressive and deep work, lies an idea, an intuition: an ill-fated correspondance between the quest of the astronomers and that of a group of women searching for the bones of their relatives lost during Pinochet’s years, both in the middle of the red Atacama desert. Although striking at first, this intuition takes an overwhelming power and resonance throughout the movie. The correspondence, slowly brought into focus by Guzmán's narrating voice, opens a myriad of questions, touching on religion, the purpose of science, the role of memory, the passing of time, trauma, death and rebirth. Despite its calm, poetic and distilled narration, Nostalgia for the Light daringly tackles quesions bigger than itself in order to face the questions that Chile still refuses to answer today. Guzmán’s work is an exercise of curiosity, bravery and poetry all at once.

It is tempting to take Pinochet’s dictatorship and the tragedy of the desaparisidos as the principal focus of the documentary. If you expect Nostalgia for the Light to be an explicative documentary, however, you might be unsatisfied. The focus seems to lie higher above, in a general reflection on the human instinct to search, the feeling of time and the experience of trauma. More than an historical or political documentar, Nostalgia for the Light is a philosophical walk, dense and vast, through a desert and beyond our galaxy. It is a line of thought which develops through moving interviews, daunting questions and breathtaking, dreamlike stunning images.

While its discussion is grounded in science, archaeology and history, the documentary takes the shape of a tale, of a dream world. The narrating voice takes the viewer by the hand, turning the pages of the film with him, making still images speak and threading that invisible net that reunites shots of the galaxy, lingering dust, small pieces of bones, enigmatic white buildings and the ruins of Pinochet’s concentration camp. Images of rare beauty and wonder leave the viewer gasping on his seat at the power, beauty and painful mystery of this world and its history.

Nostalgia for the Light is an impressive portrait of Chile, reflected into the vast mirror of human kind.

fiamma

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Searching for Sugar Man

9:18 AM | Labels: Documentary

Searching for Sugar Man

Directed by: Malik Bendjelloul

2012

A modern Cinderella tale, Searching for Sugar Man merges dingy Detroit with liberal Cape Town, a humble constructor worker with an inspiring and loved rockstar.

Searching for Sugar Man combines the mystery and excitement of a detective story with the aura and mysticism of an adored and mythic rockstar. The documentary tells the incredible story of Sixto Rodriguez, a lost and forgotten musical promise from Detroit, whose albums, at his unknown, became the soundtrack to the hot 1970s in South Africa. Director Malik Bendjelloul follows the quest of two South Africans, in which they join forces in the search of the mysterious rockstar idol Rodriguez, whose lyrics and songs they know by heart but whose story and existence remains unknown and untraceable. While all they wanted to retrieve was the past of a disappeared music talent, they end up finding much more than they expected and ever imagined...

Bendjelloul’s documentary tells the extraordinary destiny of a 1970s rockstar, but it also evokes from a very unusual point of view the apartheid years in South Africa and racism in America. While American producers speculate that Rodriguez’s first album Cold Fact flopping in the United States was partly due to his spanish-sounding name, his music responded in spirit and force to the raising anti-establishment feeling of the 1970s in South Africa. In Detroit Rodriguez was only known as a construction worker, in Cape Town he became in those years ‘more famous than Elvis’. While leaving you bewildered and mouth-open, Searching for Sugar Man makes you question how many talents and artists has history lost only because they were born at the wrong moment, in the wrong place.

If Rodriguez’s story carries much of the documentary, his figure at the end is what remains the most moving and inspiring part of the film. The first words spoken by Rodriguez on camera deliver a rare moment of humbleness, in which silences speak more than words. Bendjelloul’s composes a wonderful portrait in some breathtaking shots of the black, staggering silhouette of Rodriguez, walking against the backdrop of smokey, industrial Detroit. Much of the description of Rodriguez’s life is left to his daughters, friends and construction works’ boss. In front of the camera, however, Rodriguez still blurs feelings and certainties, leaving a spell of mystery and unspoken, but present wisdom.

It might well be that Searching for Sugar Man will bring to Rodriguez’s music the wide recognition it deserves, as the albums Cold Fact and Coming From Reality offer the soundtrack to the documentary. As you travels through this incredible story of fame and oblivion, the songs rings as uncanny reminiscences: half lost, unknown tunes and half mythic, historic pieces.

Searching for Sugar Man is an inspiring, moving and incredible story which deserves to be listen to, beyond its music.

fiamma

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Electrick Children

5:28 AM | Labels: Drama, Romance

Electrick Children

Directed by Rebecca Thomas
Written by Rebecca Thomas

with Julia Garner, Rory Culkin, Liam Aiken

2012

Electrick Children begins with the sound of its own end, cut off by a tape recorder being turned on. An interview takes place between Rachel (Julia Garner), just turned fifteen, and Paul (Billy Zane). They discuss her faith, recording the conversation onto cassette. As leader of their religious colony, Paul is one of the few people permitted to handle the electronic instrument, which is kept hidden away in a cellar along with tapes of all the ecclesiastic interviews he holds with the various inhabitants. During the night, Rachel’s curiosity leads her down into that cellar, where she selects a tape at random, only to find a mysterious recording of someone singing ‘Hanging on the Telephone’. The music, unlike anything she has ever heard before, captivates her, until she is interrupted by Mr Will (Liam Aiken), a boy her age who assists Paul in the administration of the colony. He tries to confiscate the tape from her and they are discovered tussling on the floor of the cellar. Suspicions are raised, and apparently confirmed, when Rachel is later revealed to be pregnant; a marriage between her and a suitable boy is hurriedly arranged, and Mr Will is banished. But Rachel maintains their innocence, convinced and insisting that she became pregnant listening to the voice on the tape, and before the marriage can take place she runs away to the city, bent on finding the real father of her child.

What follows is a small-scale adventure that revolves around faith and music, without being completely absorbed by either subject. Rock music in its various forms opens Rachel's eyes to the world outside her upbringing. It's something she was clearly told was the work of the devil – if it was mentioned at all – but she is open-minded enough to want to see it for herself, and it is that desire for experience that informs the film's approach to life in general and religion in particular. The fact the story takes place in the slacker mid-nineties might seem like a small point, but it gives it the feeling of a period piece, while being set now could have easily made it descend into an annoying scenester-fest. As it is, the skate parks, squats and grunge clubs feel like a faraway time in which magical things can really happen. It’s captured on camera beautifully, the thousands of coloured lights that illuminate the city standing in evocative contrast to the rustic grandeur of rural Utah and the colony. I really like the Luddite 'k' in the title; it encapsulates a philosophy where electricity seems like a natural magic that opposes religious simplicity. As Rachel and Mr Will, Garner and Aiken are a great pair: she inquisitive, he stern, both endlessly innocent and utterly likeable. Rory Culkin as Clyde, a boy who takes them under his wing when they arrive in town, strikes exactly the right balance between alienated youth and an inherent decency that just won’t allow him to be that disaffected.

Instead of taking Rachel on another journey of self-discovery, or making another condemnation of religious cults and their stifling of a person’s true nature, writer-director Rebecca Thomas, who had a fundamentalist upbringing herself, delicately weaves the two together. Electrick Children is funny, sweet, and actually religious without being remotely preachy. The ambiguity of that part of the story is so well done that you can either go all the way and interpret it as a laid-back Second Coming (not Immaculate Conception, as people keep saying; that’s something else), or just allow the theological stuff to be Rachel’s way of interpreting her new experiences. Either way, it’s touching and done with real skill, and while the ending refers to any number of romance and family drama clichés, it’s so satisfying that it gets away with it entirely. More than that though, at a time when religion can hardy ever feature in a film without becoming part of a debate, Thomas's use of faith and religious tradition simply to imaginatively inform and enhance a fictional story is a breath of fresh air.

Tom

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The Hunter

6:20 AM | Labels: Mystery, Thriller

The Hunter

Directed by Daniel Nettheim
Written by Alice Addison and Wain Fimeri

with Willem Dafoe, Frances O'Connor, Sam Neill

2011

Willem Dafoe plays Martin David, a mercenary hunter who we meet just prior to being employed by a biochemical company called Red Leaf. His task is to track down and kill a Tasmanian tiger. Although it has been officially extinct for three quarters of a century, there have been enough suspected sightings to convince Red Leaf to go hunting for the supposed last specimen, in the hope of harvesting valuable genetic material for cloning and chemical engineering. Arriving in the Australian state in the guise of a zoologist, he finds himself in the middle of a conflict between the logging industry and conservationists. Seeing he is an outsider, the loggers immediately give him grief as one of the “greenies”, a belief he is unable to contradict out of convenience. The family he is lodging with, a doped-up mother (Frances O'Connor) and her two young children (Morgana Davies and Finn Woodlock), are healing after the disappearance months before of the conservationist father; a mysterious figure who had one of the claimed tiger sightings to his name. Martin initially keeps his distance, but his own interests move him closer and closer to the family unit and the values of the conservationists, to the point where he begins to question the mission he has been sent on.

Dafoe is an unusual star. The roles he appears in seem to be those of a character actor, but actually, when you look at his work, he doesn’t have that range. It’s only when he’s covered in make-up, as in Shadow of the Vampire, for example, that he really seems to be a different person, otherwise he’s just Willem Dafoe in the same way that Jack Nicholson tends to be Jack Nicholson. What he does have is an incredible believable range within that one persona, imbued with an intelligent ferocity that makes him seem just as at home posing as an academic as grabbing a large Australian manual labourer by the throat and snarling in his face. In The Hunter, he steadily drives the film forward; distant but human, and compelling throughout.

The script is very tight, smartly building a picture of a complex situation and weaving in a puzzle that is gradually solved through storytelling rather than exposition. The bushwhacking scenes, with David wandering the Tasmanian wilderness showing off his survival skills and killing wallabies, are largely without dialogue and similarly efficient. The one aspect of the film that I found to strike a false note was in David’s relationship with the young family he stays with, the Armstrongs. His growing attachment to them is important to the narrative and to his character development, but I found the decision to go down the surrogate husband/father route overly predictable, and awfully heavy-handed considering how unnecessary it was. The same emotional effect could have probably been achieved in a less clichéd fashion by sticking with the grumpy outsider finding a heart, instead of all the conspicuous filling-in of roles the missing father should have been doing. At least it’s mitigated by a surprisingly brutal twist.

Although it’s fairly even-handed in its approach to the loggers and their livelihood, there’s no doubting which side of the argument the filmmakers come down on. The Tasmanian wilderness is shot to give its awesome beauty as much impact as possible; from swerving aerial shots over its forests and lakes right down to the level of the animals living among the rocks and shrubs. Damp and teeming, it’s as far away as possible from the burning wasteland that appears in most people’s minds when you mention Australia, and also places the film firmly in the “greeny” camp. It doesn’t take this view simplistically, however, but examines how such motives can hide darker ones, or become corrupted in other ways. The elemental subject is that of self-interest vs altruism, and the interplay between the two. This is most clearly stated in the tensions between the loggers and the environmentalists, and can be seen further in the operations of Red Leaf, whose desire to find a final specimen of an extinct species thinly veils a questionable money-grabbing scheme. But it also functions as the film’s engine, as we watch David’s self-interest in finding the tiger lead him directly to caring for the Armstrong family; while they may hold the key to the discovery of the specimen, they also embody the human fallout from quests such as these. The Hunter is a thoughtful mystery that engages with some relevant and topical questions without being pushy or too assertive, and wraps them in an effective and good-looking thriller.

Tom

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Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry

2:06 PM | Labels: Documentary

Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry

Directed by: Alison Klayman

2012

In a century in which all art claims to be ‘political’, i.e. providing a certain critique of the time and society we live in, Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry reformulates the question in dramatic, yet ambiguous terms.

Conceived as the portrait of one of the most controversial and outspoken artists in modern

China

, Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry traces the ascent to fame and dissent of Ai Weiwei. While gaining access to the artist’s private life, the documentary records along the way his major artistic achievements abroad and most daring critiques of the Regime at home. Digging in Weiwei’s past and family, as well as capturing on camera the most recent events (the documentary closes on the artist’s current house arrest) the film really feels like the work of a director who had the chance to not only record on the spot over the years, but who also grew close to the subject.

Director Alison Klayman found for her documentary a tone which is intimate, without being voyeuristic; engaged, without being propagandistic; respectful, without being obsequious. The documentary has thus been presented as the ‘perfect portrait’ of Ai Weiwei. Yet, what the documentary shows, I believe, is that it is impossible to squarely define who Ai Weiwei is. And that is what matters. Is he a post-modern, post-NewYork artist? Or a disguised activist? A famous blogger? A Tate-blockbuster name? Or a tweet addict?

On a purely theoretical point – and one which may be relevant only to art historians – there is the question of the relationship between art and politics. Are Wei’s actions art or political resistance? There is no doubt that Weiwei’s show So Sorry in Munich, centred on the tragedy of the Sichuan earthquake, was perceived as art. An art political enough to please the highbrow art elite, but approached in the secure white-washed frame of the museum. It is another story, however, to see Weiwei documenting the tragedy in China with a camera, defying the local authorities to declare the number of children who perished because of the lack of secure public infrastructure. The two poles gain strength off each other. It is because it is political that Weiwei’s art attracts the attention of the West; it is because they are art that Weiwei’s actions can survive – to a certain extent – in

China

But if the debate art/politics, and artist vs. activist remains open to discussion, another point is forcefully made by the documentary: whatever art or politics, or whoever artist or activist, Weiwei’s work rests its force and impact on the power of the digital era. Blogging, Twitter, video cameras, e-mails outreaching to a mass audience seem to be Weiwei’s real weapons. More than as an artist, Weiwei should be praised for having understood the subversive power of the Internet under authoritarian regimes. A great shot on this regard is when we see, in a sort of pixels duel, one of Weiwei’s collaborators filming from behind a police officer filming Weiwei.

What Weiwei did was to tune artists’ need to speak for the rest of us to the viral digital speed of Internet. Among all the questions that Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry successfully raises and leaves with no certain answer, emerges the figure of someone who – for the better or for the worst – refuses to be silenced.

fiamma

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Dark Horse

8:07 AM | Labels: Comedy-Drama

Dark Horse

Directed by Todd Solondz
Written by Todd Solondz

with Jordan Gelber, Selma Blair, Christopher Walken

2011

Abe (Jordan Gelber) has very few redeeming features. He’s in his thirties and lives with his parents, he only really has a job because he works for his father (Christopher Walken), he’s overweight, immature, not particularly bright, and his bedroom is full of pop culture memorabilia. His younger brother Richard (Justin Bartha) was apparently unaffected by having such an uninspiring role model as a child and has succeeded in every way Abe has failed. His parents treat him with combination of exasperation and unhelpful over-protection. Meeting Miranda (Selma Blair) at a wedding provokes him into proving his life can still go somewhere, and he begins to court her incompetently. You can tell from a mile off that she is as hopeless as him in her own way, and she gives in for pragmatic reasons. The title Dark Horse refers to Abe in as much as he sees himself as a late starter, someone who appears to be going nowhere at first but then finds their calling and comes out on top. The film questions whether this is a valid approach, or if he’s just wasting his life and using it as an excuse to do nothing.

Gelber performs well in a role that’s pretty thankless and inconsistent, every endearing quirk and social faux pas countered by an act of utter petulance. He’s not exactly likeable, but you want to find out what happens to him. Everyone else feels like a stock character, which isn’t to say the acting is bad, just that writer-director Todd Solondz doesn’t give them much to do. Obviously all the characters are there to critique some aspect of Abe's life: that’s the whole point of the film. But they could have been written together in a way that didn’t feel so much like they were being wheeled on to provide another unflattering contrast or highlight another of his defects.

The black humour and parodying of empty consumer culture is recognisably a product of Solondz, but the general thrust of the film – breaking out of monotony, being self-reliant and making something of yourself – hasn't been an original one for decades, if it ever was. Solondz gives the fairly standard subject matter a twist by negating the usual aspirational tone and running with failure instead of achievement, and by pushing his characters’ humanity right back behind a screen of modern alienation, where friendships and family relationships are almost totally consumed by social expectations. It works in as much as it makes the film feel more original than it actually is, but this illusion collapses as soon as you give any real thought to what you’re watching. Two sets of parents making soul-destroyingly dull smalltalk about traffic and roadworks feels as tired as the atrophy it is meant to be riffing on. As a whole, it’s quite funny in places, but the insistently bleak approach makes the film nothing more than a pitiless joke at the expense of the pathetic lead character, and ultimately feels as pointless as his life.

Tom

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Killer Joe

11:20 AM | Labels: Drama, Thriller

Killer Joe

Directed by William Friedkin
Written by Tracy Letts

with Matthew McConaughey, Emile Hirsch, Juno Temple

2011

Even my knowing in advance that the same director made The Exorcist didn't stop Killer Joe being surprisingly discomforting. It replicates many of that film’s shock tactics, a combination of extreme images and insidiously ruptured family relationships. Joe himself, a suddenly respectable Matthew McConaughey, is the antithesis of Father Karras, a cold malevolence who manipulates and threatens others into the worst depths of behaviour. It is also possible to detect similarities in Friedkin’s keen use of space in the respective environments of Reagan’s bedroom in The Exorcist, and the trailer in which much of his new film takes place. Beyond this, however, Killer Joe is its own film: funny, twisted, and unexpected. And it’s perfectly cast, each of the small raft of actors throwing themselves into their role and embracing – especially Gina Gershon – some pretty debasing material.

The story is almost totally devoid of decency. Only a handful of acts or interactions are motivated by anything nobler than self-interest, and those are under suspicion. It opens on a father and son plotting to murder the son’s mother and the tone stays more or less constant. Chris Smith (Emile Hirsch), a violent lowlife, owes a lot of money to people of the type you don’t want to owe money to unless you’re really sure you can pay back the loan, and has hatched a plan to have his hated mother killed so he can save himself with the life insurance. The complicating factor is that the sole beneficiary of said insurance isn’t him, or his father Ansel (who’s resentful of this despite the fact they’ve been divorced “longer than they were married”), but Dottie, his spaced-out younger sister (Juno Temple). Seeing as she lives with their father (Thomas Haden Church), he is obliged to bring him in on the plan, promising to split $30,000 of the $50,000 payout between them. The other $20,000 must go to “Killer” Joe Cooper, a detective who moonlights as a hitman. Engaging his services proves to be more complicated than they anticipate, and they wind up allowing the killer right into their already corrosive family unit. As the key to a windfall, Dottie becomes a coveted prize that Chris and Ansel must protect from the attentions of Joe, while simultaneously dangling her in front of him for their own ends.

Predictably, some of its content has caused Killer Joe to be branded misogynistic, particularly the destined to be infamous fried chicken moment which has become the "controversial" promotion point of choice. I wonder if it appeared in the stage play the film is based on, as the idea of watching it live is even more uncomfortable. But I think that in deciding if a piece of fiction is misogynistic, you can’t forget the question of what spirit the material is intended in. I’m not going to labour the obvious point about the attitudes of a character not necessarily being those of the piece as a whole. That part of the film is perverse and nasty to watch, and I think the gender thing was deliberately used to enhance that; it might be exploitative and cheap, yet I wouldn’t say it was any worse. While the film is shot through with the use and abuse of women, it’s very much there to further condemn the more malignant males. In any case, the humiliation of any particular character simply becomes subsumed into a general tapestry of debasement. One way of considering the film is as a depiction of the fear of death, and the lengths people will go to save themselves from it. In letting “Killer” Joe into their house, the Smiths bind to a force that threatens to destroy them all, and as the threat grows they strip themselves of all dignity, honour, and loyalty in the name of self-preservation. This is a dark family tragedy that will make you laugh and wince.

Tom

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Nostalgia for the Light

Searching for Sugar Man

Electrick Children

The Hunter

Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry

Dark Horse

Killer Joe