Bravo, Monsieur Ozon

Happy to see that Ozon picked up the Special Jury Prize at San Sebastian for Le Refuge. I'll be even happier when (if!) we get to see the film itself over here.

Genova

Colin Firth's most interesting performances seem destined to go unheralded. As Joe, in Michael Winterbottom's Genova, he digs deep into the role of a husband attempting to make a new life for himself and his kids following the death of his wife (Hope Davis) in a car accident, and comes up with a nuanced, subtle performance. Unfortunately, the film hardly surfaced in British cinemas but it's well worth seeking out now on DVD. It re-teams Winterbottom with Laurence Coriat, the writer of what is, for me, the director's best work: the beautiful tough-but-tender portrait of London loneliness and London connection, Wonderland (1999). Though quite different in tone, Genova retains some of that film's intimacy, spontaneity and truth. Joe takes up a teaching post in Genova, taking his two daughters with him. When the family arrive, they have a month to spend together before the new term starts and the film charts their response to the town and its effect upon their grief. While older daughter Kelly (Willa Holland) quickly finds a kind of solace in the company of other teens (albeit one that brings her into conflict with her father) Mary (Perla Haney-Jardine) is haunted by what she feels to be her role in her mother's death, and begins to experience visions of her mother walking in the streets. Employing a skeleton crew, Winterbottom and cinematographer Marcel Zyskind shoot the film mainly handheld; the scenes have a loose, natural rhythm. The city is presented evocatively but unostentatiously and the film wears its Don't Look Now parallels lightly. The conventional child-in-peril ending is a little pat but Genova remains a gem.

Irina Palm

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June Tabor @ Queen Elizabeth Hall (18/09/2009)

Though she keeps up a fairly consistent touring schedule these days, a London appearance by June Tabor has become a rarity and, therefore, something to be treasured. Tabor has been performing live for over thirty years now and remains a thoroughly commanding, singular stage presence. Her concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall last Friday brought Topic Records’s 70th anniversary celebrations to a wonderful close.

Tabor has often organised her concerts (and sometimes her albums) into suites linked by themes, and the concept for this evening was songs reflecting upon the relationship of the British people to the sea. The selection of material was solid and in some cases surprising, including many songs that Tabor has not yet recorded, and encompassing the dolorous and the humorous, the intimate and the epic, the ancient and the contemporary. Tabor was surrounded by a superlative quartet of her regular musicians - Huw Warren on piano, Mark Emerson on violin/viola, Andy Cutting on accordion and Tim Harries on double bass - and supplemented the songs with instrumentals and a couple of poems and prose pieces, all thoughtfully and elegantly sequenced. She opened with Cyril Tawney’s moving “The Grey Funnel Line” (featured on her 1976 debut Silly Sisters album with Maddy Prior), before offering a dynamic war-at-sea suite including “Polly on the Shore” and “The Fiddler.” Les Barker’s sublime song about the Highland Clearances, “Across the Wide Ocean,” brought the first half to a thrilling close, while other highlights came in the form of an evocative version of “The Lazy Wave” and a chilling, gothic take on “The Brean Lament.”

Despite her unwarranted oh-so-serious reputation, Tabor has always excelled at delivering comic songs. Here she offered a superbly funny rendition of a Les Barker parody of generic folk-song tropes and practically acted out a sailor’s plea not to be eaten by his starving shipmates in the Thackeray ballad “Little Billie.” “Some songs about potential cannibalism at sea,” she quipped, by way of introduction.

The antidote to a million sweet-voiced folk-singers, Tabor’s extraordinary, expressive vocals sounded richer than ever and, as always, allowed her to dig deeper into the material than many of her contemporaries and descendents have managed. There’s never a moment in which you feel that she’s skating over the meaning of a lyric or is less than fully committed to communicating the emotions in a given song. Her spare, jazz-and-classical-inflected approach to the tradition, coupled with the mixture of burning passion and cool detachment that defines her singing style, makes her sound quite unique - on the folk scene and beyond. She ended the show with the classic ballad “Sir Patrick Spens” - in its dramatic, perhaps definitive wide-screen arrangement from her 2003 masterpiece An Echo of Hooves - while a gorgeous, slowed version of Ian Telfer’s tender “Finisterre” (the final track from her 1990 collaboration album with Oysterband) provided the encore. “The tale we told each other has an end,” Tabor sang, a mixture of hope and sorrow coursing through her voice. Far from a wash-out, this was a thoroughly exhilarating evening of songs of the sea.

Mother Courage and Her Children @ the National

Fiona Shaw swaggers magnificently through the first half of Deborah Warner’s thrillingly messy production of Mother Courage and Her Children, which opens (a few days later than scheduled, due to tech hitches) at the National Theatre this month. Warner loves stage detritus and her scattergun approach has a certain grandeur to it; it’s far more effective here than it has been in some of her staging of classical drama. There’s a sense of experiment and danger to a Warner production; you’re never sure what might get thrown at you next. (Literally so, if you happen to be occupying the front row.) Seventy years on, Brecht’s great play of war, profit and loss retains its power, its “relevance.” For this production, Tony Kushner contributes a lithe if tediously profane translation, while the songs of Duke Special (who mingles with the actors throughout the evening, sometimes duetting with them) bring added energy and soul to the piece - this in a play in which the heroine declares “I have no soul.” And dig Gore Vidal's deeply sinister-sounding narration! But Shaw’s the star of the show, honouring every step of Mother Courage’s journey with skill and intelligence. The cart here is an extension of Mother Courage’s physical and emotional being. At the beginning she rises triumphantly out of the Olivier stage upon it; by the end, she’s a stooped figure, effortfully dragging it alone. We see what war hath wrought.

The Backlash Bites: Lesbian Vampire Killers

Phil Claydon’s Lesbian Vampire Killers is a film so blatant in its misogyny and homophobia that it almost has a quaint charm about it. Almost, but not quite. This cheerfully crass, amateurish movie might have been devised by the editors of Nuts magazine. It’s the sort of film that probably shouldn’t be watched sober, but it raises a (very) few (very) guilty laughs anyway. “There’s a 15-year-old boy inside all of us who made this movie,” comments Claydon. Too true. Jonathan Ross contributes an enthusiastic cover quote.

For Gavin and Stacey fans, the chief - only - attraction of LVK is its pairing of Matthew Horne and James Corden. They play pals who, seeking respite from a neurotic girlfriend and ball-busting female boss respectively, head off for a weekend hiking trip, only to end up in a hamlet called Cragwich in which all the women, at age eighteen, are reborn as lesbian vampires.

Horne and Corden are resourceful, talented chaps; they try their best with Claydon’s shoddy material and play off their G&S personas fairly amusingly. But there’s nothing of the TV show’s quirky wit and warmth in this amalgam of sex comedy and (spoof) horror flick. (Sample banter: “Bottoms up! Cocks in” and “You are a penis.”) The height of hilarity here is Paul McGann’s Vicar saying “Fuck.” “Even dead women would sooner sleep with each other than get with me,” wails Corden’s character at one point.

The film’s sexual politics is its most noteworthy aspect. Lesbian Vampire Killers is about as explicit a fulfilment of Faludi’s backlash as you could (n)ever wish to see, a film in which women who dump men deserve death and lesbianism is presented as an abomination equal to vampirism. The Cragwich girls’ penchant for blood-sucking is, according to this movie’s logic, simply a disturbing extension of their sexual orientation: lesbianism - or being “a lover of the vagine” - is blithely presented throughout as “a curse”, an evil perversion “fuelled by a hatred of men”. “Massive tits, never speaks” - that’s this film’s version of the ideal woman. Yes, the movie possesses a “feisty” heroine but only one spared the “curse” of homosexuality. The hysterical girlfriend gets what’s coming to her and the “psycho bitch vampire queen” Carmilla can only be vanquished by an encounter with the ultimate phallic object: a sword with, oh yes, a penis-shaped handle. The piss-poor finale proposes a greater horror: a gay (ie. limp-pawed) werewolf.

As a dramatisation of hetero fears and fantasies Lesbian Vampire Killers certainly has its fascination, but as a horror-comedy it is sadly under-par. It’s a pretty bad indictment of the UK film industry that a film of this ineptitude gets such a wide distribution. Memo to Terence Davies: if hoping to secure funding for your next film, some lesbian vampires (or in-vogue TV stars) might just help.

Broken Embraces (Los Abrazos Rotos)

Broken Embraces starts stodgily, builds to a spectacular middle, and then unravels at the end. The film’s pairings, doublings, frames-within-frames and films-within-films are fairly absorbing scene-by-scene but there’s ultimately a sense of anti-climax to the enterprise. After the relatively streamlined Volver, Almodóvar resorts to his old bad habit of piling on the plot and the final sections sink into a sea of exposition; pity poor Blanca Portillo, saddled with delivering some of the hokiest “revelations” that Almodóvar has yet devised. For Almodóvar buffs, it’s interesting to see the director revisiting Women on the Verge … with new muse Cruz replacing old muse Maura. But these sequences more than any others point to the film’s masturbatory, even self-congratulatory tone.

As usual, much has been made of the film’s genre blur - the shifts between comedy, melodrama, and noir - but the result isn’t the dynamic synthesis that Almodóvar has achieved in the past. There’s a distanced quality to Broken Embraces, and its swerves between genres are jarring. Lluis Homar’s Mateo and Penelope Cruz’s Lena go through a lot in this movie (blindness, beatings), but Almodóvar seems uninterested in the implications of their suffering - especially, it must be said, Lena’s. To some extent, Almodóvar uses Cruz here as he used Gael Garcia Bernal in Bad Education: more as prop than personality. She’s great to watch but remote, somehow. I’d have liked to have seen more of Angela Molina (who, in a few scenes as Lena’s mother, floods the film with emotion), and Lola Dueñas, whose sublime cameo as a lip-reader made me laugh out loud.

Nonetheless, we should be grateful that Almodóvar does more with the blind-director scenario than Woody Allen did in Hollywood Ending. He can still construct the kind of vibrant sequences that galvanise the viewer: Jose Luis Gomez’s Ernesto pushing Lena, Kiss of Death-style, down the stairs; Lena dubbing herself to Ernesto Hijo’s silent footage. The director also comes up with an indelible haptic image: the blind director touching the screen image of his lost beloved. Following the atypically asexual Volver, it’s pleasing to find Almodóvar feeling his oats again here, and showing his wit in an expertly filmed (if gratuitous) early sex scene. Yet, unlike the tempestuous couplings of Law of Desire and Live Flesh, Mateo’s love for Lena ultimately feels more like a simulacrum of passion than the real thing.

But of course Almodóvar’s characters have always lived through and by film, and Broken Embrace’s true subject is the romance of the reel. There remains, even now, a movie-struck energy and excitement to Almodóvar's work that few directors can match. For sheer exuberant visual pleasure, Broken Embraces takes some beating. I swooned more than I groaned.