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Admittedly, there’s also a trio of underwhelming Francophone films, led by Racer And The Jailbird from Michael R Roskam, which boasts stars including the ubiquitous Matthias Schoenaerts, and Adele Exarchopoulos (from Blue is the Warmest Colour) in the lead roles of Gigi and Bibi, yet fails to get into top gear as it uses overfamiliar heist plots, and hints at redemption for Schoenaerts’ jailbird con-man character. 9 Fingers from FJ Ossang starts by looking fabulous in black and white, even hinting at The Third Man with its use of shadows in a tunnel, then Lady from Shanghai with its aquarium scene. But in truth it evolves into a bit of a sprawling mess as a gang of misfit criminals are trapped on a container ship with cabin fever. Poised between homage and pastiche it isn’t quite the sum of its parts (many walkouts in my screening).
The genre-mashing, animated French/Japanese Mutafukaz from Run and Shôjirô Nishimi feels like a crime comic strip, as its weird bunch of characters get inextricably involved in violent turf wars, and again feels like style over substance.
From its cool title sequence through its opening scenes set in a very near future of overachievers – from schoolkids to business people – Austrian feature Life Guidance pushes at the boundaries, stylishly. Director Ruth Mader shows that everyone is fine in this world as long as they follow the rules and accomplish what’s expected – otherwise an outsourced agency (‘Life Guidance’) will intervene, kind of like a snooping G4S. In this Orwellian, Kafkaesque world, even the satnav tries to control our hero, played by the marvellous Fritz Karl. Superb and unsettling.
German feature Casting, from Nicolas Wackerbarth, is piled high with in-jokes for those who work in TV and film production, taking us behind the curtains to reveal hierarchies and endless bitchiness as the casting process unfolds. Co-produced with Israel, The Cakemaker is Ofir Raul Graizer’s sweet debut about a male baker in Berlin and an Israeli widow linked across the continents – as they both loved the same, now deceased man. They find themselves drawn to each other, but will he disclose his connection? A charming confection.
If you’re seeking a thriller with an ecological bent, including late blossoming romance and much wit and humour, then the Berlin prize-winning Spoor from Agnieszka Holland, starring Agnieszka Mandat (superb), ticks all those boxes. Set on the edge of woodland wilderness, it poses a succession of interlinked questions… Why are canines and humans going missing? Who’s at the heart of the nearby town’s endemic corruption? What are the hunters really up to? Who is watching whom?
Joanna Kos-Krauze and Krystof Krauze’s Birds Are Singing In Kigali is set in 1994 in the midst of the Rwandan genocide, as the Tutsis are being wiped out. When Polish ornithologist academic Anna returns home, and takes in refugee Claudine, they are both trying to shake their horrific memories. We see vignettes of their lives before, then follow them as they end up back in Rwanda, where yet more suppressed memories surface. Harrowing and deeply affecting.
From Hungary comes Árpád Sopsits‘ Strangled, based on a true story, and one of those films that surprised and gripped me. At times it feels like a lurid dramatization of a real-life 1950s and 60s serial killer, but it also looks at the deeply-flawed justice system, as investigators appear to judge the dead female victims as much as the murderer. Have they got the right man? Have attitudes towards victims changed much? Quietly powerful and absorbing.
From Finland comes Mikko Makela’s strong debut, A Moment In The Reeds. Leevi has come home to help his widowed dad do up their old summer house – encountering uncomfortable memories and reopening old wounds. Syrian labourer Tareq arrives to assist, but doesn’t speak any Finnish, so Leevi must interpret… and his frustrated dad eventually pushes off. Working alongside each other, the two younger men get closer, sitting and chatting in the sauna, before becoming intimate and exploring the differences and similarities that bind them, as their relationship evolves.
Indian epic, Beyond The Clouds is directed by Iranian Majid Majidi and thrusts us into the world of the dispossessed in Mumbai, who fight for survival for themselves and their families every single day. There are flashes of brilliance and occasional surges of redemption amid the crushing hopelessness and poverty of the narrative, but it doesn’t quite work. However, Chinese crime thriller, Wrath Of Silence, from Xin Yukun does exactly what you’d expect. An old, violent vendetta, dodgy lawyer, henchmen, a meat-slicer, two missing children and corruption propel the plot inexorably towards a climax that a mute anti-hero cannot control.
The 100th feature from Japan’s Takashi Miike, Blade Of The Immortal delivers a revenge story starring Takuya Kimura as samurai Manji. It starts in black and white, then transforms into colour at the precise point where Manji’s wound is healed by bloodworms from an old crone. Once he teams up with a young girl whose father’s been murdered, the plot ratchets up into non-stop, almost comic violence accompanied by crunching, scything, wince-inducing sound effects, leading to a set-piece showdown. His fans will love every second.
Beauty And The Dogs is the accomplished fiction debut from Tunisia’s Kaouther Ben Hania, shot in a succession of single takes, each telling part of the story of a young woman’s battle to be heard after she’s been assaulted. Unsympathetic hospital staff, threatening and undermining police, and the endless pushback against her fight for justice make this a hard, but necessary watch.
There’s a fine thriller seam running through The Nile Hilton Incident from Egypt’s Tarik Saleh. The Cairo cops are accustomed to cover-ups and bribes when they investigate the murder of a woman found with her throat cut, and they’re encouraged not to look too deeply, but put it down as suicide. Then one man, Noredin (Fares Fares), who usually looks the other way, suddenly gains a conscience and starts probing properly. Does the crime go all the way to the top? It’s an intriguing plot made more potent by setting it precisely at the time of Mubarak’s fall from power.
The much-touted Israeli film, Foxtrot, by Samuel Maoz, constantly plays with perceptions of reality, going so far as to place young army conscripts on a border crossing where even their living quarters are slowly sinking. The nightmarish scenario of mistaken identity leading a family to believe their son is dead, an unnerving stillness, the everyday matter-of-factness of life and death, the looping of time back to the beginning, and some memorable surreal scenes don’t quite add up to a wholly satisfying feature, but show immense promise.
Lucrecia Martel’s Zama – based on a novel and financed by a collection of South and Central American countries – sounds like it must be the bees’ knees, but turns out to be a mess. Initially it looks fabulously epic, but is weighed down by its dialogue and ponderous exposition in telling the story of 17th Century Spanish officer Diego de Zama across two hours. At the opposite end of the scale comes endearing Colombian comedy Bad Lucky Goat from Samir Oliveros, shot in Creole patois and with an ace reggae soundtrack and tiny budget. The main story shows a couple of sibling teens who accidentally run over a goat, but cannot decide what to do with it. Should they chuck it in the sea? Maybe sell the carcass but keep the skin? Making the whole odyssey around the island of Old Providence even more surreal is the fact that they’re travelling by pushbike – with the dead goat – encountering multiple characters in their scrapes and japes.
Perhaps Brazil will be the place to seek out cinematic inspiration in years to come. Araby from Affonso Uchoa and Joao Dumans is another Odyssey-type tale, with its story told through a found notebook, containing another man’s life, his mistakes, loves, and transient journey. It’s a clever framing of the narrative of a man whose life would otherwise go unrecorded, and the lovely soundtrack includes Brazilian tunes and Townes Van Zandt.
Finally, the frankly uncategorisable Good Manners (right), from Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra. Rich, white, expectant mother Ana hires a poor black woman, Clara, to help her before and after the birth. Both are alone, but who is the boss of whom? So far it seems like a domestic drama with undercurrents of class and race. Then the women unexpectedly fall for each other… so you’re now into another genre… until every time there’s a full moon, Ana turns into a disturbingly vampiric sleepwalker, who wakes up the next day with no recollections. So we enter rather grisly magical realism territory… then there’s an animated and musical section… before it shifts into another kind of movie. Bold filmmaking, not for the fainthearted, that takes a massive turn halfway through. Don’t say I didn’t warn you…
Coming up in Part 3: Not only our rundown of the very best (and worst) documentaries, but also our annual Virtual DVDfever Film Awards for 2017…