On the Road

9:39 AM | Labels:


On the Road
Directed by Walter Salles
Written by Jose Rivera
with Sam Riley, Garrett Hedlund, Kristen Stewart
2012

Jack Kerouac, as represented by Sal Paradise, played by a raspy-voiced Sam Riley, is suffering from writer’s block. Dean Moriarty (Garrett Hedlund) is a free-spirited embodiment of everything Paradise finds most fascinating in the world, and becomes a source of inspiration for him, encouraging him to go “on the road” to see America as it really is. This works, as evidenced by the existence of the book, but Paradise is exposed to both the wonders and the dangers of that lifestyle: Moriarty is charming, captivating, and liberating, but also destructive, inconsistent, and psychopathically self-centred. A string of broken hearts, ruptured families and abandoned loved ones are the un-ignorable fallout of his relentless hedonism, and ultimately Paradise is forced to acknowledge the discrepancy between his romantic notion of freedom and his own instinctive values.

A book coming with as much cultural baggage as On the Road will never be satisfactorily communicated through a film. On the other hand, cinema may be the perfect medium for Kerouac, able as it is to convert his rambling tapestries of prose into a stream of images, and augment them with the sounds he must have heard as he wrote: the music, the people, vehicles on the highway and the empty noise of a wide open space. This film has the same sense of a beginning, of heralding something much bigger on the approach, that Salles so effectively conjured in The Motorcycle Diaries. But in revering the source material to the degree that it does, On the Roadturns one of the Holy Texts of counter-culture into prestigious, Indiewood affair; as it is essentially an elegantly wasted period piece, fans of the book and Beat-Generation disciples might find it too shiny and mainstream.
Tom

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To Rome with Love

5:03 AM | Labels:

To Rome with Love
Directed by Woody Allen
Written by Woody Allen
with Jesse Eisenberg, Penelope Cruz, Roberto Benigni
2012

I’m not well versed in Woody Allen’s work, but as soon as I heard about this film I accurately guessed it would be an ersatz Fellini homage arranged around some lazy home truths about romance. OK, so the assumption it would be a romantic comedy wasn’t especially insightful, but when someone who’s seen two-and-a-half of your films can prophesy the references of your next one, that’s something to think about, isn’t it?

To Rome with Love is a lazy, multiple-strand story based around finding love of different kinds in the “Eternal City”, lazy in that the switching between short narratives comes across as an inability to come up with a full length one more than any other device. Experience guides youth through romantic upheaval, small town newly weds get caught up in fantasies only the big city can provide, and Roberto Benigni stars in a totally unnecessary mini-update of Le Dolce Vita. Allen himself makes an increasingly rare appearance as one half of an American couple visiting Rome to meet their daughter’s fiancé; a retired opera producer, her finds a hidden gem in the singing voice of the father of his future son-in-law. To be fair, this sequence of events leads to the one piece of imagery that might live up to the film’s pretensions.

You can tell this film came off the back of Midnight in Paris: it’s another New World love letter to an Old World centre of culture, with half the dialogue stemming from the characters walking around talking about how wonderful it all is. This is by far the most irritating thing about the film – living in London I hear enough cultural criticism regurgitated by tourists from a book, and when I go to see a film I don’t want the dialogue to be outshone by what you hear hanging around the National Gallery. Allen always includes one figure meant to satirise middle-class intellectual pretensions (in this case Ellen Page’s attention-deficit actress), but the problem is that to me they never sound that distinguishable from all the other characters. That’s unless they say something especially grotesque, in which case instead of laughing I just curl up inside. Allen’s claim that he just makes films for himself in order to keep busy is very easy to believe here.
Tom

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Untouchable

4:21 AM | Labels:

Untouchable
Directed by Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano
Written by Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano
with François Cluzet, Omar Sy, Audrey Fleuret
2011


A buddy comedy about a paralysed aristocrat and the ex-con he impulsively employs as a carer; it sounds sentimental and predictable, and to be honest is both those things. This doesn’t stop Untouchablebeing one of the most satisfying films of the year. It goes through all the clichés you’d expect: a wildly inappropriate job candidate impresses through their attitude and gets given a chance; the guy from a rough part of town shakes up a wealthy, restrained, and proper household; there’s even a cultural exchange – the old stand-by – as Philippe (François Cluzet) tries to introduce Driss (Omar Sy) to classical music, and Driss retaliates by taking over a staid birthday celebration with Earth, Wind & Fire.

Writer-directors Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano show that clichés can still be worked into something effective, and I think the main reason for this is simply that they don’t make a big deal out of them. They have managed to make a film where the plot is secondary to the relationship of the two main characters (which I suppose is the definition of a buddy comedy), and so the details of how they come to meet and the various trials they go through are unimportant compared to just watching the friendship develop. The whole relationship is fairly uncomplicated and amiable, a mutual respect present from the start and both men becoming fond of each other quite quickly. As that’s what makes the film as enjoyable as it is it means no pressure is put on the enjoyment, and the rest of the story drifts past charmingly. Extremely likeable rather than brilliant, but outstanding in terms of storytelling.
Tom

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Holy Motors

3:57 AM |

Holy Motors
Directed by Leos Carax
Written by Leos Carax
with Denis Lavant, Edith Scob, Kylie Minogue
2012

At no point does this film fully reveal itself, but there’s something in it that keeps you watching and even draws you in. In terms of what’s happening here, the best I can do is that there is a man known as Monsieur Oscar (Denis Lavant) who works for some kind of illuminati-type organisation, whose job is to be driven around Paris in a limousine attending “appointments”, which involve his acting in a particular role at a specific time and location. Sometimes these involve kindness, other times incredible cruelty; sometimes they are public acts, sometimes they occur in private where no-one could possibly know about them, others yet involve no-one but a person who is revealed to be a member of the same organisation as him, acting out an obscure little dialogue for no apparent purpose. He murders himself twice.

These performances make no logical sense – exactly what kind of role Oscar is fulfilling and what happens to those identities once he is done is never made clear. They cannot be part of a deus ex machina scheme as many have no effect on anything but himself and his colleagues. The conclusion that has to be made, and which gives a function to the initially inexplicable opening scene, is that the audience for his work is us, the one on the other side of the fourth wall. We could extrapolate from that and say that Holy Motors is about the (increasing?) artifice of cinema, and perhaps life itself, but really you have to go see it for yourself.

I think the reason this film succeeds despite itself is that the surreal elements are firmly rooted in a mundane Paris. This accentuates the weirdness while making the viewer more likely to be intrigued as to what is actually going on, and maintains a sense of conspiracy about Oscar’s actions as opposed to making them merely deranged. The fact that the story remains esoteric up to the end will clearly put off a large section of the potential audience, but it’s also funny, endlessly striking and imaginative, and experimental without completely (note italics) disappearing up it’s own arse. Lavant is nothing short of astonishing to watch; he has no less than eleven parts in this film, of such variety that it’s almost an entire acting career packed into a single, literally multi-faceted performance. Also, there’s a musical interlude involving a street band, an empty church, and at least five accordions – I actually lost count of accordions. I'd re-watch it for that scene alone.
Tom

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