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GLOBAL HOTSPOTS…
London Film Festival 2012 Part 2 (Oct 10th-21st 2012)
Hola, bonjour, guten tag, g’day and welcome to the second part of DVDfever‘s London Film Festival retrospective. In part one we looked at the US and UK. In this part we’re looking in just about every other corner of the world. Need some tips on European cool, Asian style, and fresh talent from everywhere? You’ve come to the right place. And we’ll also tip you off on the very best documentaries heading your way.
South America and Africa had some particularly strong movies on offer this time – though each also had at least one pretty dreadful embarrassment of film. But let’s not hang about. Let’s get on with the rundown – starting with the best film of the festival, and arguably the entire year, in my not-so-humble opinion…
France
Previously best known for award-magnets like Hidden and The White Ribbon, Michael Haneke has surpassed himself with Amour. The subject matter is timely, but in other hands could be mawkish and sentimental. For this is an intense, no-holds-barred, close-up study of a loving elderly couple from the moment that one of them starts to go downhill. Jean-Louis Trintignant is the devoted, dogged husband, and Emmanuelle Riva is the wife, who has spent her life immersed in a world of music, teaching piano, and suddenly cannot do the simplest thing for herself. One or two carers and friends appear, and the couple’s property-obsessed daughter Isabelle Huppert doesn’t quite know what to do when she visits. But this is all about Trintignant and Riva, who put in immaculate, quietly effective, and utterly heartbreaking performances. Haneke can’t resist a couple of tricks, revealing the ending at the very beginning of the film, and including one particularly vivid dream sequence, but otherwise he directs the duo unflinchingly. Oh, and though set in Paris, the film was made jointly with Germany and Austria.
Rejoice, all Kristin Scott Thomas fans, for she’s the co-star of In The House, another of her French language triumphs. Directed by Francois Ozon in typically detached, yet dramatic style, this is the story of a gifted, precocious teenage pupil, Claude (the brilliant Ernst Umhauer) whose inventive prose intrigues his bored literature teacher, Germain (Fabrice Luchini on top form). Encouraged by Germain, who takes the stories home to read to his wife (Scott Thomas), Claude gets more daring with his voyeuristic narrative. In each episode of his story he worms his way further into a targeted schoolfriend’s perfect home and family, and ends up making not only Germain, but also ourselves as an audience, complicit in his deceit. But is he writing fact or fiction? Has Germain’s interest spawned a monster? Clever, witty and playful, Ozon’s film is based on a play by Juan Moyoraga, but transforms it into something fresh. And along the way he also manages to satirise modern art and skewer bourgeois, middle-class marriage. Lots of fun.
Punk is a nihilistic, 21st Century voyage of the damned within a French sub-culture. They may call themselves punks, but in truth the kids in Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire’s dark drama feel like look-alikes. And even as they’re trying to recreate the original punk ethos, the same old factions and splinter groups divide and rule. On the plus side, there’s a great lead performance from Paul Bartel, with the divine Beatrice Dalle as his mum.
Tango Libre, from Frederic Fonteyne, was made along with Belgium and Luxembourg, and offers a wonderful mix of cultures and regimes. Prisoner Fernand (Sergi Lopez, aka Kristin Scott Thomas’ love interest in previous festival drama, Leaving) is only too aware that he’s losing touch with his wife, Alice (Anne Paulicevich, who co-wrote the film), while he’s locked up. As for their son, Antonio (Zacharie Chasseriaud, one of our stars to watch in 2011’s The Giants), well, he’s drifting apart from both of them. What transforms the film – and the characters – is the use of dance, specifically the tango. Alice has been partnering her husband’s prison guard, JC, in dance class; Fernand asks the macho Argentine prisoners to teach him how to tango to win her back; and fights break out when big, burly prisoners start dancing all over the place, from the exercise yard to the corridors. The tango sequences are electrifying, passions run high, the moments of violence are brutal, yet the whole film is uplifting.
Directed by Ursula Meier, Sister is set in an upmarket Swiss ski resort towards the end of the season. 12-year-old Simon (the superb Kacey Mottet Klein) is a cheeky artful dodger, just about keeping himself and his sister solvent by stealing skiing equipment to order. He gets caught by a resort chef (the equally cheeky Martin Compston), who chooses to help his criminal endeavours rather than inform on him. And Simon is also charmed by Gillian Anderson and her skiing family, but always needs to focus on getting enough gear to sell… until he does one robbery too many, gets beaten up and even finds his central relationship with his sister under threat. A very promising drama.
Romania
Based on actual events, Beyond The Hills is also Cristian Mungiu’s eagerly awaited follow-up to 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days. Like its predecessor, this is never an easy watch, but is all the more compelling for that. We are taken into an isolated, orthodox religious community, almost primitive in its beliefs and practices, along with Alina, who is visiting her dearly beloved young friend, Voichita, who is now a nun there. Alina is desperate for her friend to leave with her, but Voichita is now passionate about her own vocation in the church. Meanwhile her fellow nuns scurry around them and the priest like a flock of black crows, following his every word to the letter. They feel threatened by Alina’s godlessness, and believe that her sickness, sins and confessions as intertwined. And when Easter approaches and the nuns don’t want the visiting congregation to witness anything troubling, their actions show there is a thin line between salvation and persecution. Strong stuff, but strongly recommended.
Denmark
Those who saw Thomas Vinterberg’s previous masterpiece, Festen, will have justifiably high expectations of The Hunt. It stars Mads Mikkelsen as Lucas, everyone’s favourite kindergarten teacher, and focuses on how quickly his life unravels when an incriminating accusation is made against him by one of the children, Klara, who also happens to be the daughter of his best friend. All the jovial bonhomie of his hunting friends, the closeness of his neighbourhood, his supportive colleagues – once the accusation is made, these ebb away, only to be replaced by suspicion, hysteria, rising panic and finger-pointing. Mikkelsen is fantastic, the film is a devastatingly good thriller, and fans of The Killing will be pleased to hear that there’s some fantastic knitwear on display, and that Bjarne Henriksen (better known as Theis Birk Larsen) plays the child psychologist. Highly recommended.
The co-writer of The Hunt, Tobias Lindholm, is also the writer/director of another Danish thriller, A Hijacking, which stars a mixture of actors from The Killing and Borgen. So, amongst others, Soren Malling (Sarah Lund’s sidekick Jan Meyer in The Killing 1) plays the CEO and Pilou Asbaek (Borgen’s spin doctor, Kasper Juul) is the cook on the captured ship. So the meticulous detail of Borgen (which Lindholm also writes) is underpinned by the immediacy of The Killing throughout – with authenticity guaranteed by using confiscated guns, hijacked ships, and casting someone who used to work in hostage negotiation. Cutting back and forth from the sweaty ship and ailing crew, hijacked by Somali pirates, to the sterile offices of the company HQ back in Copenhagen, the tension and sense of fear escalates, and the viewer gets sucked into the moral dilemma. Emphasising the togetherness of the cast and crew, actor Dar Salim (another Borgen star) says: “It’s just like a little jazz band and I’m proud to be a part of it.”
Spain
If you like your comedy dramas dark, then let me recommend Telmo Esnal’s Happy New Year, Grandma! Made in the Basque language, it stars Monserrat Carulla (from The Orphanage) as manipulative, scheming granny, Mari. She is wearing out her long-suffering daughter, Maritxu, who is also her carer, not to mention driving her son-in-law, Joxemari to distraction. When the couple finally go on holiday to Majorca, they leave Mari with their granddaughter and her husband, who put her in a home, unbeknownst to Marixtu, but with Joxemari’s blessing. And the plan looks good until granny escapes and they are forced to actually look after her – and she causes mayhem. The plot and tone veers wildly, but the performers always make it feel entirely credible… just.
Italy
From the cinematographer of Vincere, Daniele Cipri, comes his first feature film as director, It Was The Son. Beautifully shot, using Hitchcock-style music when imagination and dreaminess kick in, this is a tragic family drama based on a famous novel. A family in Palermo, Sicily (also Cipri’s native town), is trying to keep afloat, but is drowning in mounting debt, not helped by the well-meaning patriarch, Nicola (the ever-lugubrious Toni Servillo), accompanied by constant domestic strife, and punctuated by operatic violence. Cipri also shot DORMANT BEAUTY, directed by Vincere’s Marco Bellochio and based on a real-life, emotive event: should a woman who has been on life support for 17 years finally be allowed to die? Stars include Toni Servillo (again) and Isabelle Huppert (again), with intersecting stories and characters – from protesters and parents to politicians and patients – plus a little romance to lighten matters.
Then again, if you really want to see a masterclass in filmmaking, you won’t go far wrong watching the restored, 1954 black and white classic from Roberto Rossellini, Viaggio In Italia. Starring Rossellini’s wife, Ingrid Bergman, and George Sanders as her buttoned-down English husband, this is seamlessly, gorgeously directed and acted. Despite their love, the marriage is on the rocks, and you can feel them moving inexorably apart even as they drive around the tourist spots of Europe.
Go to page 2 for more films in the look at the London Film Festival 2012 Part 2.