Film Review: Blitz (dir. Steve McQueen, 2024)

 

The two films made by Steve McQueen last year - the 4 hour WWII Amsterdam documentary Occupied City, and Grenfell - were hardcore art-house projects not much seen beyond the festival circuit or the gallery. With Blitz, though, McQueen now returns with a much more mainstream proposition, one that continues Occupied City's exploration of Second World War experience (this time set in the city where McQueen was born rather than the one where he currently lives). But, as McQueen told Sight and Sound with disarming frankness last month, Blitz also seeks to put "bums on seats." 

I hope he succeeds - although, sadly, given that the film is soon to be on Apple TV+ after a short, limited UK theatrical release, those seats are more likely to be sofas at home than ones in cinemas. Photographed by the great Yorick Le Saux, Blitz really deserves the big screen. It's a terrific entertainment in which McQueen draws on varied traditions of British WWII-centred filmmaking - from Humphrey Jennings' Fires Were Started (1943) to John Boorman's Hope and Glory (1987) to Terence Davies (a communal Tube shelter sing-along here is straight out of The Deep Blue Sea [2012]) - while also taking the tradition forward. The film isn't aggressively revisionist and it's definitely not anti-'heritage'; indeed, it's rather old-fashioned in its surface contours. But in placing a biracial protagonist - Elliott Heffernan's  9-year-old George - at the centre, it inevitably broadens the scope of World War II representation - sometimes heavy-handedly, but for the most part affectingly and excitingly.

The plot is a quest narrative in essence: it follows George's attempt to return to his Stepney home after being reluctantly evacuated by his single mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan), a munitions factory worker and  amateur singer. George never reaches the destination of his evacuation: rather, he leaps off the train in the countryside and immediately starts his perilous odyssey back to London. 

George's journey allows Blitz to create a kind of picaresque panorama of WWII Britain that works at both epic and intimate levels. Whether sharing jam sandwiches with a trio of fellow-runaway brothers, bonding with the nice Nigerian blackout warden Ife (Benjamin Clementine, adding some true feeling to a saintly characterisation), or being pressed into criminal service by a gang (Kathy Burke and Stephen Graham in full-on Dickensian mode), George is constantly alerted to the kindness and the cruelty that the war brings out in individuals. 

Flashbacks sketching out elements of the character's past - the racist bullying that he can't  quite tell his family about; the relation between his mother and Grenadian father - are elegantly integrated without inhibiting the momentum of the quest. If the characterisation often seems heightened, then that's in keeping with the child's-eye view the film gives us. There's a 'Boys' Own Adventure' spirit at play here, but McQueen is at his sharpest in the fleeting details George observes: the legs of a Punch & Judy puppeteer; a sexual encounter in the crowded Underground shelter (a space the film uses quite brilliantly throughout, right up to its most harrowing sequence). 

At times Blitz doesn't trust the audience as much as it might. Just like Ellen Kuras' Lee, it also thinks that we need to have what the Blitz was explained to us - although at least here that information comes in the shape of an opening title rather than in thuddingly exposition-heavy dialogue. The film is at its weakest when it most obviously defaults to the binary simplifications of US-influenced contemporary identity-politics. George's Obama-evoking assertion "I am Black!" after his encounter with Ife provides him with a role model means that the film participates in the contemporary marginalisation of mixed as a category. 

Heffernan's excellent performance - a very assured film debut - compensates for the simplification, though, conveying George's tenacity and vulnerability, and a constant, contending sense of connection and set-apartness, with great skill. The young actor creates a lovely, fond family dynamic with Ronan and with Paul Weller (in a belated, effective acting debut as George's grandfather). From the unstressed warmth of these early scenes we understand why the threat of evacuation is particularly traumatic for George. The casting is canny across the board and the film feels fully inhabited, with Leigh Gill a diamond as the firebrand Mickey Davies and Linton Kwesi-Johnson briefly glimpsed as a street-corner poet. Harris Dickinson's role, as a returned soldier with an affection for Rita, seems an afterthought, but the actor brings a likeable spirit to the underwritten part, sweetly dogged and a little bit dopey. 

In its details and textures, Blitz feels convincingly rooted in working-class wartime experience, and from its jolting opening sequence, it captures the confusion, chaos and panic of the bombing in a visceral way that puts the viewer right there. There are simply beautiful moments, too, such as the sequence in which Rita sings a song at a BBC broadcast at the factory (a convincing retro McQueen/Nicholas Britell/Taura Stinson composition titled "Winter Coat"), while the camaraderie between her and  her fellow-workers (Hayley Squires and Sally Messham), and the women's dynamic with their Boss (Joshua McGuire), are perfectly judged. 

The showiest sequence - an elaborate camera swoop around a Café de Paris-esque club - seems overly calculated to make a class point (see the rich people enjoying themselves while the world burns!) but the cut to the aftermath of the bombing of the club is chilling. And McQueen allows himself one avant-garde reference that really works: intermittent inserts of black-and-white images of daisies from Man Ray's Emak-Bakia (1926): an emblem of hope and possibility in the midst of the conflict.

From conversations at London Film Festival, where Blitz premiered last month, it's clear that some viewers found McQueen's film too conventional in its trajectory and wanted it to go darker or weirder. But I think it's a considerable achievement - a rich evocation of our wartime past made with care and love. 

Blitz is in UK cinemas from today.

Film Review: The Vow (Sucsy, 2012)

“Can a once-in-a-lifetime love find a second chance?” This is the teaser posed in Michael Sucsy’s The Vow (2012), a poorly written, execrably executed piece of romantic piffle starring two of Hollywood’s drippiest, Rachel McAdams and Channing Tatum. Sucsy’s film is so feeble that it makes you think back affectionately (well, almost) to Nick Cassavetes’s The Notebook (2004), which seems, in memory at least, like a pretty spirited piece of movie-making by comparison. “Inspired” by a true story, The Vow is something of a Random Harvest for the 2010s (just what the world needed, right?). It focuses on a married couple, Paige (McAdams) and Leo (Tatum), whose perfect young love hits the buffers when Paige awakens from a post-car-crash coma unable to remember anything about Leo, their marriage or the last five years of her life. Paige is soon pulled back into the orbit of the parents she’s been estranged from (Sam Neill and Jessica Lange), with Leo relegated to the sidelines. “I gotta make my wife fall in love with me again,” he resolves. After all: “It only took her two weeks the first time.”

I watched The Vow in the interests of Jessica Lange completism. But flitting in and out of the movie, looking either smug or disapproving, Lange is barely there. One of the most vivid, inventive actresses of our era is given practically nothing to do, with only one meagre scene that she’s able to make her own. And as expected, the leads can’t come up with anything fresh to compensate. McAdams’s one-emotion-at-a-time shallowness isn't exactly adequate to convey the confusion of a woman experiencing a serious identity crisis, and Tatum matches her for blandness scene by scene. He’s a chunk of nothing, and Sucsy resorts to having him remove his shirt at intervals to sustain audience interest. Scott Speedman shows a little bit of spark as Paige’s former beau. But his big confrontation scene with Tatum - it takes place at a wedding, natch - is such a contrived, generic encounter that you end up embarrassed for him, too.

There’s scarcely a believable interaction in the whole inept, insufferably glossy movie - the scenes range from fake to plain screwy - but my favourite bad moment comes early on, in the sequence in which Paige and Leo exchange their pivotal pledges. “I vow to help you love life, to always hold you with tenderness… To live within the warmth of your heart and always call it home,” Paige breathes. Leo offers: “I vow to fiercely love you, in all your forms, now and forever, and to never forget that this is a once-in-a-lifetime love.” Are these the kind of vows anyone in their right mind would want to hear, even once? Well, Sucsy and his screenwriters (Abby Kohn, Marc Silverstein and Jason Katims share the credit) must think so, since we get to experience these gems a further two times in the movie. The Vow might have had something going for it if its cornball premise had been jazzed up and played for laughs, but what’s resulted instead is wet pap that might have been laughed off the screen seventy years ago. Change the “c” in “Sucsy” for a “d” and you’d have quite the most appropriate name for a director in the whole of film history.

Review of 2011: Cinema - 10 Favourite Films

Cinema-memories, 2011.

Texan boyhoods. Parisian chimes at midnight. The end of the world. On Tresco, a painter gives a young man some advice. In Nottingham, two men meet, connect, part. Somewhere, a wedding reception goes off the rails. A Roman hero in a Balkan warzone. A novel use for Viagra. A mother and daughter ponder loss. A portly fantasist turns up in someone else’s fantasy. A waiting cat gets philosophical. Christophe Honoré goes p*rn... Not quite a movie year to match 2010 for me, but, even so, 2011 offered some incredible cinema experiences, many of which demonstrated film’s ability to encompass the domestic and the cosmic as no other medium can do.

                                                         Archipelago (dir. Joanna Hogg)

Joanna Hogg’s tender, funny chamber drama, revealing under-the-surface tensions (and under-the-surface love) on a family vacation on Tresco, makes most other films this year look heavy-handed and overstated by comparison. Beautiful work from Tom Hiddleston, Kate Fahy, Lydia Leonard, Amy Lloyd and Christopher Baker. 

                                                      Weekend (dir. Andrew Haigh)

Well, here’s a surprise. Not one but two British films ending up on this year’s list... Haigh’s Nottingham-set boy-meets-boy romance is perfectly scaled, beautifully observed, brilliantly acted, and convincing in every detail.

                                                        Elena (dir. Andrei Zvyagintsev)

Oh boy. My favourite film of the London Film Festival was Zvyagintsev’s third movie, a subtle but bracingly intense drama that explores issues of class and social status in contemporary Russia through the story of the title character (brilliantly played by Nadezhda Markina). A Tarkovsky for those of us who (confession time) have been bored by the majority of Tarkovsky’s work, Zvyagintsev is as philosophically-inclined as his illustrious predecessor but without losing sight of character and narrative. Elena is a marvellously assured piece of filmmaking: beautifully rhythmed, rich in unstressed details, and full of spaces for the viewer’s involvement and interpretation.

                                                    A Separation (dir. Asghar Farhadi)

I don’t know anyone who didn’t love and admire this: Farhadi’s splendid, complex drama seemed to grip and involve everyone who saw it.

                                                    Melancholia (dir. Lars von Trier)

It’s the end of the world as they know it. And Lars’s characters feel… well, not exactly fine.

                                                 The Tree of Life (dir. Terrence Malick)

As divisive as Melancholia. Sure, “that” montage is a chore and the ending is soggy. But Malick’s grandiose evolution opus has the most wonderful stretches: piercingly evocative scenes of Texan boyhood that strike many deep chords. Risible at its most expansive, then, but singularly affecting at its most personal and intimate.

                                                     Midnight in Paris (dir. Woody Allen)

At which American audiences finally renewed their love affair with Woody Allen. And indeed who could resist Allen’s completely charming and generous-spirited time-travel comedy, a valentine to Paris, an ode to living in the now? Less loved, Allen’s You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger (2010), which got its British release this year, also had its merits, not least a lovely performance from Gemma Jones.

                                                        The Future (dir. Miranda July)

A few very inventive and original movies emerged from America this year, among them Miranda July’s The Future, a brilliant meditation on time that made me exclaim an enthralled “Wow!” on two occasions.

                                                        Dark Horse (dir. Todd Solondz)

Toning down the misanthropy and the shock value a notch Todd Solondz produced in Dark Horse one of his most involving and resonant films, one that follows its portly protagonist into a very odd liaison - and even further into his even odder fantasy life. Its narration unravelling as the protagonist unravels, Dark Horse takes some wonderfully confounding twists and turns as it progresses, culminating in an exquisite  final shot. And few filmmakers can match Solondz’s unnerving ability to capture the sheer awkwardness of human interaction on screen.

Coriolanus (dir. Ralph Fiennes)

And wait a minute ... is that a third British film on the list? Ralph Fiennes’s big ‘n’ brawny adaptation of one of Shakespeare’s least-loved tragedies doesn’t win many points for subtlety. But it's still one of the most memorable Shakespeare adaptations seen in many a year.

Honourable mentions and 2010 releases not seen until this year:

Rabbit Hole, True Grit, Homme Au Bain, A Simple Life, Li and the Poet, Bal, A Screaming Man, Farewell, Animal Kingdom, Potiche 



Film Review: The Deep Blue Sea (Davies, 2011)

Terence Rattigan’s centenary has been commemorated by several major stagings of the playwright’s work this year - including London revivals of Flare Path and Cause Celebre, and an excellent season at Chichester which presented The Deep Blue Sea and The Browning Version alongside new plays inspired by Rattigan’s life and work.  Apart from a series of films and TV adaptations screened at BFI Southbank, cinema has been slower to celebrate Rattigan’s achievements, however, despite his close association with the medium throughout the 1940s and 50s. 

So the news that Terence Davies would be making his first fiction feature in eleven years with an adaptation of The Deep Blue Sea starring Rachel Weisz, Tom Hiddleston and Simon Russell Beale in the lead roles was a particular cause for celebration, especially for those of us who admire Rattigan and Davies just about equally. Unfortunately, though, and despite some striking and affecting individual moments, the meeting of Terry and Terry hasn’t quite resulted in the perfect marriage that might have been anticipated.

Along with The Browning Version and The Winslow Boy, The Deep Blue Sea is recognised as Rattigan’s most flawlessly-constructed work - the epitome of the “well-made play,” indeed - its water-tight three act structure presenting the final few hours in the affair between Hester Collyer and her younger ex-RAF lover Freddie as they play out in a shabby London boarding house.

Resisting the idea of “just photographing the play,” Davies has - unsurprisingly and justifiably - transformed that structure, developing a non-linear narrative that presents episodes from Hester’s past with Freddie (Hiddleston) and her husband William (Russell Beale) in counterpoint with her present situation, and that clearly reflects Davies’s own abiding concern with the workings of memory. (Unlike the play, the film presents the events entirely from Hester’s point-of-view.) Always strong on ambience, Davies evokes the drear of 1950s London with the feeling with which he conjured 50s Liverpool in Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992), Florian Hoffmeister’s misty, soft-focus cinematography and James Merifield's production design sustaining a distinctive - though not precisely pleasurable - oppressive mood. The opening is masterly: a nine-minute sequence scored to Samuel Barber’s gorgeously intense Violin Concerto that pans from the Ladbroke Grove street up the front of the boarding house to find Hester in the throes of her suicide attempt. Davies-land (milk bottles on the doorstep, sounds of “the wireless”) and Rattigan-land form a perfect synthesis here. And the ending - a beautifully-judged reverse of this sequence - is similarly strong.

It’s in the middle that things get a little sticky, at times. For it’s hard not to conclude that, in re-jigging the play’s structure, Davies has removed the material’s dramatic motor. The film drifts and dribbles, tension (and humour) dissipating in sequences that sometimes feel stilted and look posed. And the new scenes and characters that Davies has devised don’t, for the most part, seem like improvements upon those he’s excised. Especially ill-advised is a bogus early sequence - striving for bitchy wit and missing the target - that finds Hester facing off with her monstrous mummy-in-law (Barbara Jefford), the latter helpfully underlining the societal forces that Hester is up against when she intones “Beware of passion... It always leads to something ugly.” (The first part of that quote has become the film’s tagline.) As Hester’s parson pater the great Oliver Ford Davies is wasted in a similarly superfluous scene in which Hester seeks his counsel (in church! Wouldn’t he grant her an audience at home?) only to be rebuffed. Such moments seem, for Davies, atypically crass ways of ensuring audience sympathy with Hester, and emphasising the rebelliousness of her actions.

Elsewhere, the director’s movie-ardour leads him into a few unfortunate indulgences too, including a Blitz flashback that seems to express nothing more than the filmmaker’s pleasure at devising an elaborate tracking shot, and a Brief Encounter homage for Hester’s second suicide attempt. (It might have been more fun if Davies had had Hester and Freddie duck into an illicit matinee at one point - to watch Alec and Laura ducking into their illicit matinee in Brief Encounter, perhaps?)

There's a crucial piece of miscasting, too, I'd argue. Weisz's commitment to the role is evident in every scene, and she acquits herself admirably throughout. But even in her strongest moments here (such as a great final scene) her performance never completely transcends the fact that she seems about ten years too young for the role, an issue that, I think, does diminish our sense of Hester's transgressiveness in falling for Freddie in the first place. (“She looks younger than he does,” mused my companion at one point.) And the re-ordering of the scenes impacts upon the arc of the character: as Davies has re-arranged the material, Hester becomes more hysterical when Freddie storms out for the evening than she does when he announces that he’s leaving her for good.

Even though he’s been directed to overdo Freddie’s RAF-slang and his belligerence (especially in an over-pitched argument scene set in an art gallery), the engaging Hiddleston comes through with a good performance. Two pub singalong scenes - quintessential Davies moments, of course - turn out to be two of the finest innovations here, adding more to our sense of Freddie and Hester’s relationship than most of the new dialogue does.

And, playing William the cuckold, it’s great to see Simon Russell Beale in a decent screen role for once. Hester and William's scenes here may lack the deep sense of complicity and history that other actors have brought to them, but Russell Beale conveys William’s predicament with touching understatement. And Davies succeeds in bringing out the poignancy of this triangle, made up of three protagonists who all desire different kinds of love.

But apart from Harry Hadden-Paton, who’s likeable in an expanded role as Freddie’s friend Jackie Jackson, the supporting roles feel somewhat mismanaged. As Miller, Karl Johnson suffers the most from the cuts, his pivotal role - which, according to Davies, “no-one is convinced by” - reduced to a bit of disgruntled comic business. Ann Mitchell portrays the grimmest Mrs. Elton ever seen before being transformed into a sentimentalised salt-of-the-earth font-of-wisdom towards the end, replacing Miller as the person to shift Hester’s perspective on her situation with the pearl: “Suicide? No-one’s worth it.” (Now how about that as the movie’s tag-line?)

Davies’s two previous adaptations - the underrated The Neon Bible (1995) and the great The House of Mirth (2000) - seemed like pretty seamless, dynamic mergings of his highly distinctive sensibility and those of the creators of the novels. Here, in contrast, the director’s admirable but sometimes heavy-handed drive to cinematise Rattigan’s material proves less successful overall. There are, to be sure, many elements to admire in Davies’s Deep Blue Sea. But along the way a level of intensity seems to have gone missing.

Film Review: Weekend (Haigh, 2011)

Beautifully observed characters, nuanced performances, shrewd writing and unobtrusive style are some of the features of Andrew Haigh’s wonderful Weekend (2011), which charts the relationship between two young men, Russell (Tom Cullen) and Glen (Chris New), who meet in a Nottingham bar and spend two days - before Glen’s departure to the States to study - getting to know each other. Haigh’s second feature, following the documentary, Greek Pete (2009), is a work of remarkable confidence, intelligence and intimacy, and one that feels all of a piece - even the font in which the film’s title appears on the screen is somehow reassuring.

Equal parts talky and tactile (a few sequences demonstrate an Ozon-esque sensitivity to filming the body), Weekend’s closet cousins would appear to be Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004). And it may be the movie’s fate to be viewed as a “gay variant” on those films. But the naturalism and believability of Weekend ultimately surpasses that of both of Linklater’s movies, in my view. As the combative Glen and the quieter, more circumspect Russell connect, slowly opening up and sharing, testing each other’s tastes and sensibility, the movie brilliantly conveys the variously frustrating and exhilarating business of getting to know a new person. Small moments suggest wider resonances, and as the two protagonists get to know each other we feel that we’re getting to know them, too, and modifying and changing our judgements. There’s a wonderful complexity to the characterisation here: we’re allowed to perceive Russell and Glen as strong and vulnerable, honest and self-deluding, open and self-absorbed, by turns.

Written, directed and performed from observation (in a way that Brokeback Mountain [2006], say, so very clearly wasn’t, to me) scene after scene here includes recognisable, resonant details, from morning-after etiquette to whether or not to include an “x” in a text message. But nothing feels forced or stressed. Haigh’s funny, sharp, insightful and soulful movie is one of the strongest contemporary-set British films in years - the finest since Michael Winterbottom’s Wonderland (1999), perhaps. In sum, a great pleasure. More, please.

Film Review: Elena (Zvyagintsev, 2011) @ the London Film Festival

The best film that I saw in an altogether strong first week at this year’s London Film Festival was Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Elena (2011), a movie that fully confirms the Russian director as one of the most vital talents in contemporary cinema. Zvyagintsev follows The Return (2003) and The Banishment (2007) with an intimate, subtle but bracingly intense drama that intelligently and feelingly explores issues of class and social status in contemporary Russia. It does so through the story of the title character (played with blinding brilliance by Nadezhda Markina). Elena is a woman caught, essentially, between two worlds: that of her poor son and his (ever-expanding) young family and that of her wealthy second husband Vladimir (Andrei Smirnov), who’s none too sure that he owes Elena’s brood any financial favours at all (“I married you, not them”). The manner in which the protagonist opts to resolve this dilemma leads her into some unforeseen territory indeed.

A Tarkovsky for those of us who (confession time) have been bored by the majority of Tarkovsky’s work, Zvyagintsev is as philosophically-inclined as his illustrious predecessor but without losing sight of character and narrative. Elena is a marvellously assured piece of filmmaking: beautifully rhythmed; rich in telling, unstressed details; and full of spaces for the viewer’s involvement and interpretation. It also proves - if proof were needed - that Iris Murdoch’s dictum that “language is soaked in the moral, literature is soaked in the moral” may be applied with equal relevance to film. The thorny ethical dilemmas that result from Elena's predicament are many. But for me perhaps the most resonant question that the movie asks might be: does the notion that “the last shall be first” refer, these days, simply to the opportunity to watch trash on a wider screen TV? But there's no overt proselytizing going on in this movie. All of the characters are viewed with a very clear eye indeed, and the expert way in which Zvyagintsev allows our allegiances to shift (and shift again) as the story develops is one of the deep satisfactions that his film offers.

As our heroine progresses through identities in her daily encounters - from wife-cum-nursemaid to bourgeois matron, cuddly babushka to criminal - so the movie shifts discreetly but dynamically through genre codes, moving from quiet observational character study to suspense drama, propelled at times by hypnotic snatches of Phillip Glass, and arriving at an ending that dispenses the kind of subtle chill you may find it difficult to shake off. Thrillingly good.  Trailer here.

Post-script: In terms of other films screened so far at the LFF, kudos, too, to Miranda July’s The Future, a gloriously quirky, heartfelt and surprising meditation on time that made me exclaim an enthralled “Wow!” on two occasions, and Andrea Segre’s tender Li and the Poet, about the relationship between a Chinese immigrant (Zhao Tao) and a fisherman (Rade Serbedzija) on the Venetian lagoon island of Chioggia. Time permitting, I’ll hope to write detailed appraisals of these and other films in the LFF next month.

Film Review: Coriolanus (Fiennes, 2011) @ the London Film Festival

Seldom regarded as one of Shakespeare’s most profound or popular tragedies, Coriolanus is a work that has, nonetheless, frequently been raided for contemporary parallels by directors and adaptors across the centuries. The play’s slippery dissection of democracy - its concern with “people power,” the challenges of leadership and what constitutes “good” rule - has left it open to multiple, often contradictory interpretations. Nahum Tate’s 1682 adaptation was set against Whig-Tory rivalry, while later adaptations referred to the 1715 and 1745 Jacobite Rebellions. In the 20th Century, the Nazis extolled the heroism of the protagonist and drew favourable comparisons with Hitler, while Brecht’s 1953 version surprised no-one by portraying the masses as heroes.

Ralph Fiennes’s big, brawny new film adaptation strives - sometimes astutely and sometimes ham-fistedly - to chime with the times. The tale of the warrior-hero who, when conspired against, turns his back on Rome to join forces with his arch-enemy, the Volscian general Aufidius, is the tragedy of a man who, though a notable success on the battle-field, is entirely unable to flatter or charm the populace. Tipping its hat to the title of John Osborne’s 1973 adaptation, Fiennes’s film locates the action in “a place calling itself Rome” - a Balkan war-zone - and the early scenes in which the citizens besiege the Senate and are beaten back by riot-police certainly gain an extra frisson in the light of the London riots and current worldwide anti-capitalist demos.

Making his directorial debut here, Fiennes has done a mostly commendable job of work. And returning to a role that he first played on stage in 2000, he also delivers a compelling central performance that has genuine gravitas. But his approach sometimes betrays a certain amount of insecurity in relation to the material. The film strives so hard to be cinematic - jittery camera-work? check; ear-splitting sound? check - that it’s occasionally a little embarrassing. The opening scenes suggest a particularly hyperbolic advert for a Panorama Special, and the decision to present the conflict between the Romans and the Volscians through the language of TV news media (yawn) feels all too predictable. (How fresh this device seemed when it book-ended Baz Lurhrmann’s 1996 Romeo + Juliet; how totally shopworn now. The nadir here is a Jon Snow cameo.) As director, Fiennes also seems to have taken instruction from some of his previous collaborators: the over-wrought action scenes find him doing his best Kathryn Bigelow impersonation (Barry Ackroyd, who shot The Hurt Locker [2008], is the movie’s cinematographer), while the presentation of the Citizens as a very motley crew recalls the 2005 Deborah Warner production of Julius Caesar in which Fiennes played Mark Antony.

This tendency towards over-emphasis does result in admirably lucid story-telling, though. The film is thoughtfully paced and structured, with Coriolanus’s rejection of Rome taking place almost exactly at the movie’s mid-point. Hollywood’s favourite screenwriter-for-hire John Logan has done a skilful job of paring back (and simplifying) the text, although some elements and supporting roles do suffer the consequences of his tinkering. While Brian Cox is able to come through with a finely modulated performance as Menenius, the work of Paul Jesson and James Nesbitt as the conspiring tribunes ends up seeming obvious at times. And, more problematically, the association between Coriolanus and Aufidius (Gerard Butler, adequate) never quite strikes the sparks that it initially promises to. The homoerotic implications of the relationship which have been highlighted by some directors aren’t stressed here, although the movie does boast a slightly bizarre night-time sequence in which the Volscian camp seems momentarily to have morphed into a gay club.

The most genuinely exciting moments are those in which Fiennes stops proclaiming “Look! I’m making a MOVIE!” and opts for more sparsely staged scenes that allow Shakespeare’s language to do the work. Coriolanus then offers some memorably taut encounters, and some eloquent and expressive images, too. Fiennes’s scenes with Vanessa Redgrave’s strong, seductive Volumnia are especially fine; Redgrave (who gave even her hokey dialogue in Letters to Juliet [2010] the weight she might give to a bit of prime Shakespearean verse) delivers her best screen performance in years as the ambitious, manipulative matriarch. And she and Fiennes look wonderful together - a pair of Roman statues in the making, indeed - their intense close-ups offering the thrill that the theatre can’t provide. Volumnia’s final supplication scene is brilliantly sustained - the movie’s highlight - and its impact mitigates some of the more questionable, obvious ideas that mar the film’s opening sections. This Coriolanus isn’t, overall, everything that it could have been. But at its best it’s a vivid and gripping account of this now seldom-staged play.

Film Review: Dark Horse (Solondz, 2011) @ the London Film Festival

In Dark Horse (2011), Todd Solondz has made a film without rape, paedophilia and masturbation because, in the director’s words, “it’s always good to challenge yourself.” Toning down the shock value a notch, Solondz has produced in Dark Horse perhaps his most easily digestible feature to date, albeit one that leaves some space for the perverse and disturbing elements that are the director’s stock-in-trade.

Dark Horse charts the experiences of one Abe Wertheimer (a star-making turn by Jordan Gelber). Zipping around town in a yellow people-carrier, with obnoxiously upbeat pop as his soundtrack, this portly 35-year-old considers himself a cool, capable and desirable chap, despite the fact that he’s hardly a success story in conventional American terms, living as he does with his parents (superb Mia Farrow and Christopher Walken) - in a bedroom filled, amusingly, with Thundercats and Gremlins memorabilia - and working ineffectually in his father’s industial real-estate firm. Abe’s underlying frustrations manifest themselves in juvenile tantrums and petty squabbles with all and sundry. But he knows - or at least thinks he knows - how to turn on the charm. And when this self-satisfied fellow sets his sights on a distracted-seeming woman, Miranda (Selma Blair), whom he meets at a wedding, he’s soon approaching her with marriage in mind.

As Fernando F. Croce has noted, Dark Horse suggests Solondz’s caustic rejoinder to the endless parade of "adorable arrested development" comedies featuring the likes of Seth Rogen and Adam Sandler. There’s also a touch of Coens comedy to the movie’s tone, but the brothers can’t match Solondz for emotional insight and don’t come close to rivalling his unerring ability to capture the sheer awkwardness of human interaction on screen. Its narration unravelling as the protagonist unravels, Dark Horse takes some wonderfully confounding twists and turns as it progresses. It becomes, ultimately, a movie about an individual’s dream/fantasy life, and, in particular, an exploration of the role that other people play as protagonists in such fantasies. If the movie’s did-that-just-happen-or-not? game-playing becomes somewhat wearisome towards the climax, its shakier stretches are redeemed by a final shot of staggering eloquence and poignancy, one which beautifully transforms the fantasised into the fantasiser. 

Film Review: Melancholia (von Trier, 2011)

I saw Melancholia (2011), Lars von Trier’s latest piece of provocation, in Łódź's Kino Charlie back in July. And while it would be an exaggeration to say that it’s taken me over two months to formulate a response, it’s certainly true that von Trier’s film is a tough one to sort out your feelings about. I think that’s because what’s good and what’s not so good in Melancholia is very close indeed, sometimes to the point of being indistinguishable. For that reason alone, I’d place von Trier’s movie alongside Terrence Malick’s recent evolution opus The Tree of Life (2011). Like Malick’s film, von Trier’s variously lush and stately, urgent and contemplative offering often teeters on the cusp of being a ludicrous, pompous folly as it scores the end of the world, ever so picturesquely, to Wagner. But, also like The Tree of Life, Melancholia is possessed of an ambition, audacity and singularity of vision that it’s hard not to admire and, ultimately, embrace. (And, boy, what a truly cosmic double-bill these two pictures would make!)

One of the exciting elements of von Trier’s output has been the way in which it has fused literary and theatrical elements into a thoroughly cinematic form. Melancholia’s thoughtful, elegant structure divides the film into two chapters that focus on two sisters, Justine (Kirsten Dunst) and Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg). We encounter Justine on her wedding day to Michael (Alexander Skarsgard) - at a reception that, even from the opening moments, fails to go as smoothly as planned. After all, the presentiment that a planet called Melancholia may be on a collision course with earth is hardly likely to get a girl in the mood for her nuptials, though in truth there seem to be a few reasons other than the prospective end of the world for Justine’s sudden dose of cold feet. The second section then shifts the focus to Claire, who, some time after the wedding, is attempting to deal not only with Justine’s melancholia but with her own increasing anxiety about the planet Melancholia’s approach.

For all the exasperating, contrived and over-obvious elements present in this scenario, the assurance of von Trier’s handling of the material comes as a relief after the risible art-film-meets-torture-porn miscalculation Antichrist (2009), a true folly. Indeed, even as you’re stifling groans, you’re likely to find yourself caught up in Melancholia, an “atheist’s On the Beach” - to borrow Michał Oleszczyk's brilliant description. Felicities abound, not least in the performances of the cast, from Charlotte Rampling’s caustic cameo  to amusing bits of business from Udo Kier and John Hurt, neat work from Kiefer Sutherland, and the wonderfully intense characterisations offered by both Dunst and Gainsbourg. (This is another only-in-von-Trier ensemble if ever there was one.) It’s debatable that the movie’s portentousness adds up to any kind of profoundity: perhaps the director is doing little more than working out his own depressive condition here. Melancholia makes its impact, though: it certainly feels quite unlike any other film released this year. See it, love it, hate it, argue about it. But do see it.

Film Review: The Skin I Live In (Almodóvar, 2011)

Following the intriguing but finally confused (and slightly smug) Broken Embraces (2009), a film that never quite added up to the sum to its parts, for me, everyone’s favourite Spanish provocateur returns with The Skin I Live In (La piel que habito)  (2011), his 18th feature. I approached The Skin I Live In with a certain amount of trepidation, especially since a friend of mine described it as “a new low for Almodóvar.” It’s true that the new film falls into some of the same traps as Broken Embraces, notably an excess of plotting and "back-story," and a rather wearying tendency toward self-plagiarism. And yet this elegantly lurid horror/comedy exerts a fascination. It’s Almodóvar’s craziest work in some time and one that sometimes touches the erratic gaudy splendours of Átame! (1990) or High Heels (1991).

Adapted very freely from the late French crime novelist Thierry Jonquet’s 1984 novella Tarantula, The Skin I Live In mashes up elements of all kinds of “mad scientist” texts (from Frankenstein to Franju’s classic Eyes Without A Face [1959]) to tell the story of Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas), an eminent plastic surgeon who is holding captive a young woman named Vera (Elena Anaya) in his palatial mansion on the outskirts of Toledo. In a lengthy series of flashbacks, the nature of Robert and Vera’s history gradually becomes clear.

The film’s manic mixing of moods as it swerves between farce and thriller, sci-fi, noir, horror and melodrama is more skilfully achieved than it was in Broken Embraces in which the shifts between genres proved jarring. Here, helped along by some particularly deft work from his regular collaborators (Alberto Iglesias’s score is especially luscious) Almodóvar once again proves himself a master of the sustained set-piece and, against all odds, the film even wins its way through to emotion in a couple of scenes.

The tactility of the film also seems likely to inspire a raft of essays on haptic visuality in Almodóvar, or at least a chapter in a new edition of Laura Marks’s wonderful The Skin of the Film. (In Broken Embraces, a TV screen featuring an image of a lost object of desire was carressed; here a screen gets licked.) Indeed, it’s television that provides the salvation for one character, in the film’s most emotionally affecting sequence.

The cast do well. Reuniting with the director for the first time since Átame! Banderas gives a well-controlled and menacing performance. Anaya (in a role originally intended for Penélope Cruz) combines sensuality, vulnerability and steely resolve to compelling effect, and it’s a special delight to see Marisa Paredes on screen again, bringing inimitable gravitas and “morbo” to her role as Robert’s housekeeper. Playing her son, Roberto Álamo strides into the film - hilariously - in a tiger costume, only to become the protagonist of the most outrageous and disturbing sequence here, a riff on the notorious “comic” rape scene in Kika (1993).

Like Broken Embraces, The Skin I Live In gets sillier the more you think about it, and there is, finally, a hollow quality to its sensational revelations (especially its central one) that makes it seem increasingly unlikely that we’ll ever get a work of the depth and beauty of, say, Talk to Her (2002) from Almodóvar again. Still, scene by scene the picture holds the attention. It's bad fun if you’re in the right frame of mind, proof that this director’s movie-struck universe is still a diverting place to live in, every once in a while.