Smash Palace

New Zealand | 1981 | Directed by Roger Donaldson

Logline: A former Grand Prix driver and obsessive auto mechanic resorts to desperate measures in order to maintain custody of his young daughter after his wife walks out on him and takes his close friend as her lover.

Roger Donaldson would go on to direct the excellent Hollywood political thriller No Way Out, but his second movie is my favourite New Zealand feature. There’s a spare momentum that drives the narrative, and a deep sense of melancholy that permeates the characters. It also happens to be filmed in a region very close to my heart; near Mt. Ruapehu in the volcanic plateau of the North Island.

The "Smash Palace" of the title refers to a massive, sprawling auto cemetery (in reality the legendary Horopito Motors); a junkyard owned by Al Shaw (Bruno Lawrence) who lives there with his French wife Jacqui (Anna Jemison) and their 8-year-old daughter Georgie (Greer Robson). A mate Tiny (Desmond Kelly) helps out in the main garage, while local police officer Ray (Keith Aberdein) is Al’s drinking and snooker pal.

Jacqui, however, is not a happy woman. Al doesn’t pay her enough attention, too absorbed in his vehicular tinkering. He’s got an important upcoming race and he wants his beautiful machine in perfect condition. So Jacqui finds interest elsewhere; Ray, to be precise. Al takes things badly.

With a stunning score by then-popular Kiwi songstress Sharon O’Neill and beautiful cinematography from Greame Cowley - the opening scene is brilliant; (the gaffer, Stuart Dryburgh, would go on to become the best cinematographer New Zealand’s ever seen), Smash Palace captures a lingering sense of rural loneliness that becomes a subtle metaphor for the breakdown of Al and Jacqui’s marriage and the alienation that threatens Al’s sanity.

The screenplay, co-written between Donaldson, Peter Hansard and Bruno Lawrence is tight and effective balancing scenes of emotional fragility, lighthearted frivolity, and when the moment serves, intense drama. There’s also a surprisingly erotic sex scene, and in the movie's most disarming scene, an equally frank moment of full-frontal nudity from Lawrence (Bruno was never shy about getting his gear off for the sake of a good story).

Apart from the powerful thematic elements to the movie, it is the central performances of Jemison and Lawrence that give Smash Palace such resonance. There is chemistry between them, even if it’s already dissipating from movie’s start, and you genuinely feel Al’s frustration and rage, as well as Jacqui’s own frustration and anguish. Caught in the middle are Georgie and Ray. Not to forget young Margaret Umbers amusingly irritating, brief role as a hysterical pharmacy counter girl whom Al takes hostage.

A curious aside: In New Zealand there was a division; the police, and as a separate law enforcement body, the traffic cops. The fuzz were in blue and white cars and the “coffee traps” (as my father used to call them) were in black and white. Eventually they merged as one long arm of the law.

Wake In Fright

Australia/USA | 1971 | Directed by Ted Korcheff

Logline: An English Outback teacher on route to Sydney finds himself trapped and out of his depth in a small township, caught up in the local pastime of drinking, gambling, and aggressive hospitality.

Based on a blistering first novel by Kenneth Cook written in 1961, with an excellent screenplay from Evan Jones, and helmed by the man who would direct the under-rated Rambo movie First Blood, Wake In Fright is a descent into a Dante’s Inferno of temptation and ridicule; a Dionysian-tainted nightmare where a naïve, mild-mannered man is forced to learn a few hard truths about the darker side of his own psyche.

It’s a terrific-looking picture, with stunning cinematography from Brian West (the opening 360-degree pan is a knockout), superb location shooting in Broken Hill (for all the exterior scenes set in the fictional township of Bundanyabba), and expressionistic editing from Anthony Buckley. The casting and acting is all top-notch: Gary Bond as the hapless English teacher, Donald Pleasence as his nemesis, Jack Thompson (in his feature debut), and Aussie legend Chips Rafferty (in his last movie). There’s also memorable support from a myriad of other actors, including the hilarious monotone receptionist (Maggie Dence), the beer-guzzling hotel proprietor Charlie (John Meillon), and a brief exchange from Outback legend Jacko Jackson as a truck driver (“Ya mad, ya bastard!”)

With his earnest intent on rendezvousing with his Bondi surfer girlfriend John Grant (Bond) is inadvertently thrust into the dark heart of the Aussie machismo machine affectionately called the ‘Yabba. It’s a crash-course odyssey in Two-Up and West End tinnies, a listless and toey woman, a stodgy ‘roo breakfast, broke as a bicycle seat, and surrounded by the ever present stinking hot, filthy, dust-laden long arm of Murphy’s Law.

The dialogue crackles with a ferocious authenticity, but it can now be appreciated as a fantastic date-stamp of a different era (6.30pm closing time for starters). Still, the key themes are timeless and universal, and the kangaroo hunt is just as confronting and shocking, despite the disclaimer at movie’s end stating emphatically that the kangaroo scenes were legitimately staged hunts by professional marksman.

Savage ‘roo hunt (and boxing) aside, Wake In Fright is a sensational dramatic-thriller and seethes with cult status, standing alongside Nic Roeg’s Walkabout and Peter Weir’s Picnic At Hanging Rock as Aussie desert gems. How the original negatives ended up in a Pittsburgh bin marked for destruction is crazy! Thankfully, after Anthony Buckley's discovery and lengthy negotiations with the American rights owners of the original film materials, they were shipped back to Australia to be held at the National Film and Sound Archive, which is where the 2009 digital restoration took place.

Wake In Fright was titled Outback in the States, with the only other difference being an early morning scene where Bond has his gruts on instead of being totally starkers. It's a bona fide Australian classic. Yes, technically a co-pro, but it's most definitely my favourite piece of Ocker cinema. 'Struth mate.

Burning Man

Australia | 2011 | Directed by Jonathan Teplitzky

Logline: A young father struggles to keep his job, his various relationships, and most importantly his sanity from falling apart as he deals with a personal crisis.

Grief can do terrible things to a person. It is also a powerful emotion capable of transcendent healing. Love can do wonderful things to a person. It is also a dangerous emotion capable of blurring one’s vision and causing irrational and reckless behaviour. Cinematic narrative is an extraordinary device, capable of transporting a viewer on a roller coaster ride of intense, exhilarating, and soul-wrenching feelings and emotions.

Tom (Matthew Goode) is an ex-pat English chef working in a successful Sydney restaurant near the beach, Sydney’s most famous beach in fact, Bondi. He is both driven and highly-strung. He has a young son, Oscar (Jack Henly), who he loves dearly. He also has several women in his world, some he likes, some he dislikes, some he loves, and some he just fucks. To say he’s a womaniser would be too easy a label. Let’s just say he’s complicated.

Tom has a beautiful wife Sarah (Bojana Novakovic), but there is trouble in paradise. Burning Man is Tom’s tale; a tale that wags like a dog, swishes like a cat, and is sometimes tucked between his legs. Tom is burning the candle at both ends and the wax is splashing on his skin. He is crying out. As the tagline says, “Don’t go so far out that you can’t find your way back.”

Jonathan Teplitzky also wrote the screenplay. This is his third feature and it’s easily his most accomplished work. It pulsates with a dramatic vitality and dynamic sense of narrative adventure. The key element is the non-linear narrative, this is what makes Tom’s story so compelling, so intriguing, and so satisfying to watch. Like a puzzle his joy and sadness pieces together slowly and surely. It’s a sad story, but it is punctuated with a genuine sense of humour.

Movies with such stylised presentation often come undone, or simply fall out of the starting blocks. Burning Man ignites with a ferocious energy and never lets up. Beautiful shot by Garry Phillips it depicts a Sydney not often seen, yet so familiar to those who live here. The performances are dynamite it’s hard to actually single any out; suffice to say that Matthew Goode being the fish far out of water (geographically, that is) triumphs. The cast includes Essie Davis, Rachel Griffiths, Anthony Hayes, Dan Wyllie, Kate Behan, Gia Carides, plus three Kiwis, Simone Kessell, Robyn Malcolm, and Kerry Fox. It’s a striking, talented bunch indeed.

Tom is trying to get himself together and with the help of his friends and the love of his son he might just make it back from the brink. Burning Man is one of the best Australian features of the past decade, blistered hands down, reminding us that it’s not just the story, it’s how you tell it.

Hail

2010 | Australia | Directed by Amiel Courtin-Wilson

Logline: A world-weary criminal is released from prison and reunites with the love of his life, but finds he cannot escape his inner demons, the trappings of crime, and the all-consuming spectre of tragedy.

Hail is the kind of movie that only comes along once in a dark blue moon; a tour-de-force of visual poetry, visceral emotion, and dizzying psychological intensity, yet is delivered in an intimate, but distinctly expressionist style. This is a movie of contradictions and abstraction, a raw and powerful indictment of unbridled love and rage, as out of control and indulgent as it is stripped back and honest. Hail rains down like a force of pure cinema, dramatic and uncompromising.

This is a docu-drama unlike anything you’ve seen before, certainly nothing like this has come out of Australia, and even more extraordinary is that it is the director’s first feature (having worked prior on documentaries and shorts). Basing the threads of his narrative on the stories and life experiences of lead actor Daniel P. Johns (who essentially plays himself) Amiel Courtin-Wilson (just thirty years young, but exuding the directorial maturity of someone much older and wiser) has constructed an awesome picture that deals openly and corrosively with the poison of love and hate, each organic imbibed in different doses.

Shooting on 16mm cinematographer Germain McMicking has achieved some truly astounding imagery especially in the movie’s second half when the mise-en-scene becomes entrenched in Daniel’s grief and wrath absorbing and reflecting as visual metaphor and symbolic motifs. The director favours the use of extreme close-up. One image in particular will haunt me for years to come, I’m sure; that of a dead horse plummeting to earth, the wind buffeting its neck and legs giving the illusion that the creature was still alive and writhing in abject terror.

The performances, that of 50-year-old Daniel P. Johns and his lover Leanne Letch (both of them born on the same day, month and year), are exceptional. Whilst Daniel has had acting experience with Plan B (a theatre group made up of ex-cons) Leanne had never acted before in her life. Their naturalism imbues the movie with an honesty that is profoundly affecting. The movie balances the grotesque with beautiful. Daniel and Leanne live on the fringes of society, and it is the sharp darkness that lurks close to those edges that frequently scratches, and can cut deep, sometimes to the bone.

The source music is inspired, but it is the spectacular sound design courtesy of Robert MacKenzie that pushes Hail into an audio experience league of its own. One doesn’t hear this kind of experimental assault on the senses very often, combined with Amiel Courtin-Wilson and Germain McMicking’s visuals, and the editing of Peter Sciberras, it is truly powerful, and resonates like a dream-soaked-nightmare.

One must surrender to Hail and allow Daniel’s journey of hope and promise that spirals into the darkness and violence of his despair and confusion to engulf and overwhelm you. There is reward; a genuine sense of inspiration from the uncompromised artistry of the director, his muse, and his collaborators. Hail takes no prisoners, let the elements be.

La Grande Bouffe

Italy/France | 1973 | Directed by Marco Ferreri

Logline: Four wealthy and successful middle-aged men, in contempt of their lifestyles, move into a plush villa and proceed to overeat until they expire.

There’s not a straight forward translation for this exceptionally uncompromising display of gastronomic, erotically perverse and scatological self-indulgence. In Italy it is called La Grande Abbuffata, which translates roughly as The Big One Eaten like a Pig, while in the rest of Europe, America and Australasia La Grande Bouffe is interpreted as The Big Blow-out (“Bouffe” can also be read as “eat” or “feast”). Put simply, it is orgiastic and unforgettable.

For years the movie could only be seen on late night television or if you were very lucky on a rare VHS copy. It became the stuff of legend, the movie guaranteed to put you off pâté for life. Only Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, comes close in its unholy mixture of food and sex and death.

Director Marco Ferreri has always been intrigued and compelled to portray the darker, base nature of men and women, and La Grande Bouffe brilliantly captures a primal desire to push the boundaries of good taste. It is a sweet and savoury satire, a black pudding comedy, a character study of bourgeoisie manners that will make you smirk and gag, and then gag and maybe even retch, this is the kind of Euro descent that takes no prisoners; its rich filling must be consumed with caution, then thrown to the flatulent wind.

Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni) is a pilot, Michel (Michel Piccoli) is a television executive, Philippe (Philippe Noiret), a judge, Ugo (Ugo Tognazzi) is a chef. They’ve decided enough is enough. Philippe’s urban villa will play host to their last supper, to be spread over a weekend. But they must have some human flesh to feast upon besides the animal carcasses, so three tasty whores and a plump schoolteacher are hired for dessert. It doesn’t take long for the hookers to depart in disgust, leaving rotund Andrea (as Andréa Ferreol)’s enthusiasm to match the mens’.

The performances (curiously all the lead character’s first names are their own) are exemplary, as is the art direction. The dialogue sizzles like pork crackling, the cultural references are as sophisticated as caviar, yet the consequences of their actions result in gut-churning revulsion. The combination of such extravagance and contrast makes the movie a thoroughly unique experience. It’s as if you’re watching the apes at the zoo, mimicking human behaviour with total disregard for decorum. You recognise everything, perhaps secretly (and perversely) wondering if you could indulge in the same way, just how far would you go.

This is a tragic-comedy on an intimately epic scale; the scene near movie’s end where Ugo is shoveling handful’s of pate into his mouth as he lays outstretched on the kitchen table while Andrea jacks him off is arguably the movie’s penultimate moment. Or perhaps it’s the upstairs toilet exploding? Personally I love the establishing scene where the men watch as all the ordered food arrives at the villa by truckload.

La Grande Bouffe is a surreal dish on a plate of existential sadness. The four men unwind and expire one by one; resigned to their fate from the outset, determined to be consumed by their own consumption. Could a movie of such profound indulgence ever be remade? I sincerely hope not. This is a delirious example of excess that could only have been made by the Europeans in the heady, carnal decade of the 1970s.  Cheers! Tuck in, relish, savour, and remember to belch long and hard.

Dark Star

1974 | USA | Directed by John Carpenter

Logline: The plight of four astronauts in deep space whose mission aboard the Dark Star is to dispatch bombs to destroy unstable planets.

Galactic inertia and deep space ennui forms the backbone of this strangely endearing void of cosmic (a)musing. Following the trials and tribulations of Pinback (Dan O’Bannon), Doolittle (Brian Narelle), Boiler (Cal Kuniholm), and Talby (Dre Pahich), four astronauts bored out of their minds, clutching on to whatever small pleasures and inane dialogue they can muster, whilst they inch closer and closer to the end of their twenty year mission: destroying unstable planets within the galaxy that may have been considered suitable for colonisation.

Dark Star was John Carpenter’s film school graduation project. His completed version ran 68 minutes long. A Hollywood producer, Jack Harris, saw the student film and convinced Carpenter to shoot an additional fifteen minutes. Harris then released the sixty-thousand dollar movie in 1975 and this launched John Carpenter and Dan O’Bannon’s successful careers. Carpenter edited and scored the movie, and co-wrote the screenplay with O’Bannon. O’Bannon also supervised the clever special effects (considering the budget limitations), so the project was very much a collaboration.

O’Bannon had intended the movie to be a comedy, but early audiences failed to appreciate its deeply sardonic sense of humour. The movie didn’t do very good box office, Carpenter would have to wait for the release of Halloween three years later to reap the big rewards. O’Bannon was very upset that he had failed to communicate a comedy, and subsequently his next project adapted an element from Dark Star – the alien aboard the ship – from being an amusement to being a nightmare; Alien (or Star Beast, as O’Bannon’s early drafts were called). Dark Star went on to garner a strong cult following upon its domestic VHS release (and in the wake of Halloween and Escape from New York).

The Dark Star is in the galactic sector of EB – base 2 – 90, eighteen parsecs away from Earth, a ten-year delay in communication. Commander Powell (an uncredited Joe Saunders) is in deep freeze having recently passed away. When Bomb #20 decides it doesn’t want to carry out its programmed duty, the astronauts are in a quandary. Doolittle requests advice from Powell’s half-living soul via a special electronic communiqué device and ends up on a spacewalk to discuss the finer existentialist points of life and death with the temperamental and insubordinate thermostellar device.

Talby, who spends almost all his time in the observation portal, talks dreamily of the Phoenix asteroid cluster. Pinback and Boiler squabble. Doolittle seeks solace adjusting his musical vibes. These men are terminally at the end of their tether. Only a mischievous alien creature that looks like a beach ball with clawed feet, and Bomb #20, are providing the men with any real connection with the universe’s rich tapestry, and life’s little ironies. But the stellar tide will soon turn, and Doolittle will ride that cosmic debris on the red wave of re-entry with abandon.

Dark Star is an unusual cult movie in that it is a universal censor’s rating of G: General Exhibition. There is no real violence, no profanity, no distinguishable nudity (the Playboy magazine pinups in the living room scene have been deliberately blurred in post-production), and no drug use. Yet Dark Star is by no means a children’s movie; even most young teenagers would find themselves bored and restless after ten minutes. Dark Star is for curious B-movie lovers and quirky sf freaks.

Solaris

Solyaris | Soviet Union | 1972 | Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky

 Logline: A psychologist is sent to a space station operating above the sentient oceanic planet Solaris to investigate the strange behaviour of its remaining two scientists, and is bewildered when he is visited by his wife, who committed suicide years earlier.

One of the most philosophical, perplexing and haunting science fictions ever made, often compared to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, but more in tone and feeling with Chris Marker’s extraordinary muse on memory, guilt and desire, La Jetée, Solaris is a visually hypnotic and oneiric study of loneliness and quiet desperation, a metaphysical portrait of the human mind from the perspective of the alien … or perhaps the other way around?

Based on the brilliant 1961 novel of the same name by Polish author Stanislaw Lem, yet screenwriters Fridrihk Gorenshtein and director Tarkovsky added a key element; the narrative prologue set on Earth where cosmonaut psychologist Kris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis) visits his home to say farewell to his father and watches archival footage of cosmonaut Berton (Vladislav Dvorzhetsky)’s official hearing over the death of another cosmonaut who vanished on the surface of Solaris. Solaristics (the on-going study of the living planet) has revealed that the human endeavours in understanding this incredibly advanced alien life form are proving potentially futile.

Novelist Lem (who apparently hated the movie, especially what he saw as sexual perversity) went to great lengths to describe that human science was unable to properly handle a truly alien life form; that it would be beyond human understanding. Tarkovsky, however chose to focus on Kelvin’s feelings towards his wife, Hari (Natalya Bondarchuk), his guilt over her death, and the effect space exploration has on the human condition.

In the movie Dr. Snaut (Juri Javet) says “We don’t need other worlds. We need mirrors.” It’s a powerful statement that ricochets in the mind. Essentially human kind is a naïve race, embroiled in our own psychological and emotional stew, and perhaps ultimately not intelligent enough to be dabbling the way we do, and will continue to do, with the cosmos. That’s not to say space exploration is out of bounds, but intelligent alien life may very well be our psychic undoing.

Both Lem and Tarkovsky’s intent is partly to show that we can only ever understand the universe in human terms, and even if we are presented with something ineffably strange we will inevitably humanise it. Nearly every science fiction movie that deals with an alien life gives it a form and/or personality based on something familiar on Earth, and that is an incredibly narrow-minded school of thought.

The concept of the alien planet physically manifesting the memories and fantasies of the humans who are in close proximity to its surface is an extraordinary idea, and especially fascinating is Hari’s contrasting warmth and fragility, returning to plague Kelvin in slightly different versions. It is this “spectral physicality” concept that prevails and provides the movie with its provocative, revelatory end, which is fantastic as it is deeply melancholic.

The movie is restrained in its use of special effects, but the end result transcends any limitations. Tarkosvky was adamant not have the movie tied to genre; to have a science fiction film that meant more than its generic trappings in terms of its humanity. Still, the movie’s production design is excellent in conveying the desolate and dissolute state of the space station. Kelvin, Snaut and Dr. Sartorius (Anatoli Solonitsyn) are disheveled and sweaty, and space station cluttered, yet hollow (Ridley Scott must have been influenced somewhat when he made Alien).

Solaris is very long (nearly three hours) and very languid in its visual narrative (Tarkovsky always preferred long takes, lingering gazes; the moment within the moment), so it is a demanding film. It’s not as experimental as his two later movies, The Mirror or Stalker, not as epic as his earlier Andrei Rublev, or as intimate as his last movie The Sacrifice, but in an elusive, strangely affecting way Solaris is his most satisfying movie (ironically Tarkovsky considered it his least favourite).

Steven Soderbergh made a surprisingly decent, atmospheric remake in 2002, starring George Clooney as Kelvin and Natasha McElhone as Rheya (changed from Hari).

Fallen Angels

Doh Lok Tin Si | Hong Kong | 1995 | Directed by Wong Kar-wai

Logline: In an urban nightscape the lives of a contract killer and his agent working at a distance, a drifter searching for her ex-lover, and an eccentric mute vying for attention in outlandish ways, all cross paths.

Amidst the big neon glitter, the cluttered, claustrophobic alleyways, the towering architectural sheen, and the strangely lonely bars and cafes, five lost souls clamber and mumble, peer and glance, laugh, cry, perspire, and ponder. They dream of love and desire; of connecting in a trip-hop world of ordered dysfunction, searching for that elusive creature called belonging.

Auteur filmmaker Wong Kar-wai is one of the few true cinematic poets of the post-modern age; he paints mood and texture with light and shadow, sound and image, visage and montage, joy and sorrow. He is a superb sensualist who never compromises his elliptical story-telling by pandering to conventional narrative. His stories are more about expression than reason, less about rationale and more about emotional resonance tuned by moments. Wong treats cinema like fine cuisine; it is the exquisite taste in the mouth that is most memorable, and the memory of that sensation.

Wong’s long-time visual collaborator, his cinematographer, ex-pat Australian Christopher Doyle, is a gifted lensman. Doyle has shot all of Wong’s most notable features; Days of Being Wild, Ashes of Time, Chungking Express, Fallen Angels, Happy Together, In the Mood for Love, and 2046. Fallen Angels is Doyle’s most noirish and visually affecting work. The use of blurred motion and distorted composition, colour and monochrome, of wide-angle and extreme close-up; Doyle’s control is masterfully artistic. The movie has very little dialogue, but pulsates with (mis)communication.

Wong is legendary for not working closely with a screenplay, but rather notes, eschewing the rigidity of classical scene construction in favour of building and developing narrative out of location and character. With Doyle by his side (who is director of photography as well as camera operator), Wong’s approach to mise-en-scene is an organic process. Yet, there is a distinct stylistic at play. A Wong Kar-wai film is a Wong Kar-wai movie, no buts about it. William Chang is another of Wong’s faithful; he is the movie’s editor, production designer and costumer.

Most of Wong’s moves deal with moodiness and aesthetics, no more so than Fallen Angels (the title alone hints suggestively at both beauty and corruption). The handsome hitman, played with consummate suavity by Leon Lai, and his agent who cleans up after him, played by gorgeous Michele Reis (a former Miss Hong Kong), whom the killer holds deep affection for, but by code cannot disclose his desire, so he befriends Punkie (aka Blondie aka Baby), played by Karen Mok, a borderline hysterical, but endearing young woman trying to locate her wayward ex-boyfriend He (Takeshi Kaneshiro). While floating in the middle is another beguiling, good-looking loner, Charlie, played by Charlie Yeung, a mute (after eating canned pineapple past its expiry date!) who provides the movie with sporadic narration and amusing interludes.

Fallen Angels has no real resolve, has no real anchor, and yet is a profoundly beautiful, sporadically violent, dreamlike experience that floats in the heart and mind long after the mesmerizing, shimmering, rain-soaked imagery fades from the screen. This is a night poem for the soul; sexy posing, underground chaos, jukebox punctuation, and jazzy street magic entwined, stretching, aching, breathing, stumbling …. and finally still.

My Summer Of Love

UK | 2004 | Directed by Pawel Pawlikowski

Logline: A naïve teenager, in despair over her working class father’s born again Christianity, seeks solace and escapism in a romantic fling with an upper-middle class teenage girl.

With a cast of only eight speaking parts, five of which barely have more than a line or two, My Summer of Love is essentially a two-hander; the relationship between young Mona (Natalie Press) and young Tamsin (Emily Blunt), with Mona’s adult brother Phil (Paddy Considine) playing the part of the sub-plot that occasionally interferes. It’s a classic tale of love and betrayal, distinctly English and very feminine, yet the director is an ex-pat Polish guy.

The novel of the same name by Helen Cross is a disquieting tour-de-force of adolescent mischief, familial dysfunction, coursing with intense vernacular. The narrative is through the eyes of Mona, and she’s a lonely and damaged soul. It’s not entirely her fault, but she doesn’t help matters by drowning her sorrows in booze and whiling away her hours on the village pub’s fruit machines. Her exhilarating fling with a girl-that’s-out-of-reach - the aloof, yet utterly charming Tamsin - is precisely what she needs, but in the end the trust is shattered, the bond irreparably damaged, and the consequences are dire.

I shouldn’t compare the movie adaptation – penned by Pawlikowski in collaboration with Michael Wynne – with the book, simply because it is so very different, but it’s a curiously altered affair. Pawlikowski and Wynne jettison so much of the book one wonders whether it warrants comparison at all. Phil is an amalgam of Mona’s father and teenage brother, with her sister completely written out. In the novel there is no religious context whatsoever, yet the movie makes quite a deal out of Phil’s worship, and even uses his religious fervor to work against him in a superb scene of playful, but dangerous, manipulation.

The novel has a powerful and disturbing climax and a dissolute end, which the movie dabbles with, but ultimately abandons. However, it has to be said that the movie’s ending still retains a sense of purposeful drama, strangely poetic in its abrupt jagged end. My Summer of Love is a title of sweet irony, of bitter truth, but more importantly of heartache. The cruelty of those closest to us is the deepest stab to the heart. Mona storms away in wretched disgust, leaving Tamsin floundering, still wrapped in arrogance.

It seems their romance was an opportunist infatuation, less about sex and emotion, and more a calculated contempt for surrounding men, certainly in design on Tamsin’s part, more an influenced behaviour on Mona’s part. The cruelty of Phil, of Tamsin’s father, and of Mona’s older lover Ricky is refracted like the hot sunshine through a broken piece of glass lying in the grass, while the electronic folk music by Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory, in particular the dreamy melancholy of Lovely Head, fits like hand in rubber glove.

The mid-80s heatwave that encompasses the novel is less apparent in the movie, but it’s still unseasonably warm, and superlative performances exude from Natalie Press and Emily Blunt, complimented by the always-exceptional Paddy Considine. Yorkshire has a disarming beauty, the tiny township nestled in the valley, the tiny brooks weaving through the woods, the bulging hillside covered in lavender, while two young girls glowing with Sapphic sensuality, bristling high on magic mushrooms, musky with the scent of Sapphire gin, plan their sweet escape.

The Decalogue

Dekalog | Poland | 1989 | Directed by Krzystof Kieslowski

Logline: Ten modern fables loosely based on each of the Ten Commandments, all set within different apartments in the same high-rise block.

When Polish filmmaker was commissioned to make a series of hour-long dramas for Polish television little did he know the impact his work would have on cinephiles and dramatists around the world for years to come. In fact, Stanley Kubrick described The Decalogue as the only masterpiece he could name in his lifetime. Now, that’s a compliment!

Dealing directly with the emotional turmoil suffered by humanity, when instinctual acts and morality conflict, when the pressures of society burden and overwhelm, when the little ironies and bittersweet joys and sorrows of life’s rich tapestry connect and disconnect, the tales told within the framework of The Decalogue are universal, but with a quiet (and disquieting) religious zeal. The stories may be based on each of the Old Testament’s Ten Commandments, but in the bigger picture – and more importantly – they are about the very fabric of our emotional and psychological being. At their very basic these ten tales are about life and death, love and acceptance, confusion and betrayal.

Each of the perfectly-pitched screenplays are co-written between Kieslowski and long-time collaborater Krzystof Piesiewicz, who co-wrote the masterful Three Colours trilogy with Kieslowski, as well as the melancholic Double Life of Veronique, and the Heaven/Hell/Purgatory trilogy which was to be directed by Kieslowski before his untimely death. A number of different cinematographers were employed, including Piotr Sobocinski (Three Colours: Red) and Slawomir Idziak (Three Colours: Blue), but each of them maintains a key palette and Kieswlowski’s distinct visual grammar.

The sombre, austere tone (with the exception of The Decalogue 10) and narrative efficiency of the series is firmly established in The Decalogue 1: “Thou shalt have no other Gods before me”, and it’s also one of the stand-out episodes: A university professor trains his young son in the use of reason and scientific method, using a computer to analyse data and predict circumstance. The boy’s aunt worries he is neglecting his spiritual education. The ten-year-old boy is delighted when he is given ice-skates for Christmas, especially since the computer delivered data stating the frozen lake beside the house was safe to skate on …

The entire cast is excellent, each tale only uses a handful of actors, some of which appear in more than one episode, with a mysterious figure (a young man) appearing in all of them as a kind of heavenly observer. His role changes in each of the episodes he’s in, but always a silent bystander of sorts, and his repeated presence is never properly explained .Two of the most powerful episodes (5 & 6) were completed as feature-length movies the previous year and released as A Short Film About Killing (“Thou shalt not kill”) and A Short Film About Love (“Thou shalt not commit adultery”). Both episodes were truncated for inclusion in the television series with Love having a different ending, but still retain all the dramatic and poetic potency.

Kieslowski’s subtlety and beautifully-balanced nuances of storytelling are a testament to the power of visual storytelling within the constraints of television (all episodes are shot in the 1:33.1 ratio). He delivers delicate, yet hugely dynamic elements with the hand of a consummate artist, never a shot or line of dialogue feeling out of place. There are few directors who commanded the level of respect Kieslowski garnered in the years following The Decalogue up to his death in 1996. Although curiously (and bemusedly) he saw himself as only a so-so director, content to puff on his pipe, and relax in a big armchair. It’s a shame that he died before being able to complete his final project, and his early passing was a great loss to world cinema.

Martha Marcy May Marlene

USA | 2011 | Directed by Sean Durkin

Logline: A young woman is reunited with her older sister and husband after escaping the insidious clutches of a cult, but plagued by paranoia and abnormal social conditioning she struggles to re-assimilate.

Elizabeth Olsen, once just the younger unknown sister of famous child stars-turned-tycoons Ashley and Mary-Kate, bursts with maturity beyond her years and real conviction in Sean Durkin’s debut feature, a stunning portrait of dysfunction that begins like a domestic drama, but steadily becomes something far more sinister eventually transforming into a frightening psychological thriller in its last moments.

The movie begins with beautiful young Martha (Elizabeth Olsen) stealing away from a household full of sleeping people. She makes it to a local café but is confronted by an acquaintance that attempts to persuade her to return to the fold. He leaves her, but Martha makes a fateful phone call to her sister, Lucy (Sarah Paulson), who hasn’t heard from her in two years. Soon Martha is in the safety of Lucy and Ted’s (Hugh Dancy) large upstate New York holiday house. It is here where Martha’s life really starts to fall apart.

Sean Durkin’s superb screenplay inter-cuts Martha’s struggle with trying to live a normal life with flashbacks to her time spent within the confines of a cult run by charismatic, but inherently creepy leader Patrick (John Hawkes). The brilliant editing weaves these two narratives like two snakes coiling around each other, partly in passion, partly in confrontation. Her fellow cult members sculpt Martha’s emotional naivety, whilst Patrick, who initiates a dominating sexual role, manipulates her adolescent yearnings. Her understanding of appropriate behaviour has been twisted and perverted, and Lucy and Ted are quick to pick up on this.

Lucy is distraught that her sister is acting in such a reckless fashion, and she tries her darnedest to steer her fragile sister back onto the right path. Ted, however, has less patience. But neither of them is fully aware of the damage that has been done, nor the source of her trouble, they see only the tip of an ominous iceberg.

While a deep distrust steadily rises inside poor Martha, who has also garnered the names of Marcy May and Marlene by the Manson-esque Patrick, and the young Watts (Brady Corbett), who is part of Patrick’s inner sanctum, the real dirty work is yet to come. 

It's an excellent debut feature, with fantastic performances and vivid direction, delicately balancing sensuality within the framework of something very sinister, plus a great score, and one of the best abrupt - and totally unnerving - endings to boot. 

Damage

UK/France | 1992 | Directed by Louis Malle

Logline: A married politician’s sexual infatuation with his son’s fiancée turns into a dangerous obsession which ruins his life and his family’s.

Louis Malle was fascinated with relationships, both firm and fragile, and power, both internal and external. Damage would be his penultimate cinematic dissertation on the power of attraction and the ruinous effects of obsession. Malle died in 1994. Damage features one of Jeremy Irons most affecting performances (after his dual turn in David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers) as Dr. Stephen Fleming, but the Oscar went to Miranda Richardson for her role as Fleming’s devastated wife Ingrid. Caught in the crossfire is adult son Martyn (Rupert Graves), while Anna Barton (Juliette Binoche) escapes with only minor scratches.

Malle directs with a spare elegance, allowing his cast to work the mise-en-scene with their delicate nuances of performance. Dr. Fleming seems to have it all; an excellent position in Parliament, a loving attractive wife, a devoted grown son, and a lovely young daughter Sally (Gemme Clarke). He has a spacious home and a comfortable routine. But he is restless; a creeping ennui is threatening to consume him. Enter Anna, his son’s new girlfriend. Anna has a dark and manipulative agenda, born from a terrible family secret that bears down on her like a ton of bricks.

The scene where Anna approaches Stephen at a function and stares intently into Stephen’s eyes, her own burning with a cold fierce lust, Stephen is completely thrown, yet instantly mesmerized. It is this hypnotic effect that will drive the good doctor to doing very bad things. Jeopardising, not only his career, but his family too. All he can think about is Anna, who does little to dissuade him. But when Stephen decides to turn up in Paris where Martyn and Anna have gone for a lover’s weekend, then Anna pays it on the line. Her upcoming nuptials to Martyn are the perfect foil to continue her clandestine affair with Stephen. But Stephen can’t bear hiding. He’s prepared to leave his wife. Things can only go pear-shaped, which they do, rapidly.

For a film about intense sexual desire the sex scenes are urgent, awkward, rough, even repellent. Yet there is an undeniably erotic undercurrent. Stephen and Anna bang up against furniture, grunting and panting, pushing and contorting. It becomes quickly apparent Malle is more interested in presenting these two philanderers as less than human, animalistic even (according to one report Juliette Binoche walked off set when Jeremy Irons became too physical). They are both intelligent creatures, attractive and sophisticated. But the secret union they’ve formed has turned them upside down. They have become base and destructive. For Anna her psychological baggage comes from struggling to deal with the death of her brother who she was very close to. For Stephen years of poker-faced, chilly presentation as a political figure has resulted in his emotions finally running away from him, his composure collapsing, his guard down.

As Stephen and Anna continue to pursue their sexual dalliances it becomes obvious only a catastrophe can occur to drive a wedge between them. There’ll be more than tears before bedtime. There will be blood. There will be damage, and much of it will be collateral. In Malle’s homeland the movie was re-titled Fatale (as it was also called in Canada), which indicates just how disastrous the denouement is. But the narrative doesn’t end with blood on the floor. There is Miranda Richardson’s Academy Award-winning breakdown, and finally an epilogue, a further integral part of the aftermath which shows where the disgraced doctor has ended up; lonely and alone with only memories, regret and a stale baguette.

Was the affair worth the tragedy? A silly question, of course, but in the heat of fevered desire it can be hard to dispel the harsh consequences that will inevitably present themselves. The kind of intense immoral passion harnessed by Stephen and Anna, regardless of their own reasoning, can only bring sorrow, heartbreak, and despair, as witnessed by Ingrid’s abject shock and hysteria, and as predicated by Anna’s mother Elizabeth (Leslie Caron), who warns Stephen to pull away. Anna, like some kind of beautiful androgynous demon, dissolves into the background; “Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive.”

Shame

UK | 2011 | Directed by Steve McQueen

Logline:  A thirtysomething man has his carefully cultivated private life – and sex addiction – disrupted when his emotionally fragile and needy younger sister arrives unannounced.

Steve McQueen’s second feature after the harrowing prison movie Hunger, also starring Michael Fassbender, is just as simple, just as confronting, just as powerful. Whereas religion and survival formed an uneasy relationship in Hunger, in Shame sex and love share the same bed, as entwined as they are at each other’s throats. McQueen co-wrote the screenplay with playwright Abi Morgan. Originally intending to shoot the movie in the UK, McQueen couldn’t get the financing, and instead moved the production to New York City where he shot principal photography in just twenty-five days.

Michael Fassbender delivers a career performance as Brandon, an ad rep creative by day, and a rampant sex addict whenever he can squeeze it in, either masturbating in the office toilets, in the shower at home, undressing strangers on the subway with his eyes, watching live chat sex on his laptop, fucking strangers in alleyways, paying for hookers in hotel rooms, or indulging in random sexual activity at underground clubs. Immaculately presented, smart and charming, but underneath, inside, Brandon is damaged goods.

When his troubled sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) bursts his lifestyle bubble, old wounds are scratched. The audience never finds out their background, but one can assume there was probably abuse. Both Brandon and Sissy have intimacy issues. They have a problem with self-control and self-esteem. A pivotal and key scene has Sissy performing a torch version of New York, New York whilst her brother, and his opportunist boss, sit at a nearby table sipping martinis. A tear escapes Brandon’s eye. Sissy sings with her heart on her sleeve. The scene has more subtext than you can shake an olive branch at.

Shame is a complex portrait of success and failure, a study of human need and desire, of loneliness and despair. Steve McQueen has a spare, yet utterly compelling style. Not much seems to happen, but everything does. McQueen is an actor’s director, but one with visual flair to spare. It’s fascinating to watch a movie so steeped in sex, yet the carnal knowledge portrayed on screen is remarkably refined. It’s intense without being overly graphic, although that said, Shame will no doubt be remembered for Michael Fassbender’s full frontal parade during the movie’s opening scenes.

Raw experience and human frailty, all of it captured brilliantly on Brandon’s face in one of the movie’s latter scenes when he orgasms during a swinging threesome; his face is etched in anguish and his glance barrels down the camera. It’s disturbing and honest, the man’s truth and lies colliding and ricocheting, no happy endings here, joy lies in tatters, the pleasures of the flesh are only fleeting, the repercussions of desperation continue to ache.  

Of course there is still the denouement to come, where Brandon’s shame will overwhelm him, and the epilogue where the dark circle comes full. Some truths are hard to bear. Shame is jagged serenity laid bare, bold, and brilliant. There hasn’t been a more profound journey of self-discovery and resignation, captured with such beauty and ugliness, on screen since Mike Figgis gave us Leaving Las Vegas twenty-odd years ago. 

Sonatine

Japan | 1993 | Directed by Takashi Kitano

Logline: A jaded, but suspicious Yakuza in Tokyo is assigned to take his men to Okinawa to help settle a dispute between two factions, but several of his men are killed, so he retreats to a remote beach to contemplate the situation and plan his revenge.

Beat Kitano, as he’s nicknamed, has been making his own brand of mob movies since the late 80s. Minimal, with a deadpan comedic edge, his style of realism is laced with a poetic undertone. It is with Sonatine that his preoccupation with the themes of loyalty and honour, and his penchant for sudden extreme violence come to a spearhead. The title refers to a style of folk music associated with the Okinawa region.

Kitano (who nearly always features in his own movies) plays Murakawa, the world-weary Yakuza who is embroiled in a series of incidents leading to a set-up to take him out of the powerful gang equation. It’s not until he has taken shelter at an isolated coastal property with his remaining clan that Murakawa takes stock of his predicament and slowly, but surely lays the obtuse foundations for retaliation.

Sonatine plays with rhythms, and pulses with a steady heartbeat of implicit violence that occasionally explodes with rage. There is vivid colour and spreading darkness in equal measures. Kitano doesn’t have all his cards on the table; he has a few aces up his sleeves, but you never know when you’ll whip them out. Just as his violence is unpredictable, so is his eccentric sense of humour.

Joe Hisaishi’s melancholic score is highly memorable, which frequently marries magnificently with Kitano’s stark and lonely visual narrative. I must make mention here of the striking movie poster which has lingered with me ever since I first saw it at the Wellington Film Festival when the movie was first released; it’s a brutal, yet strangely beautiful, and iconic image which seems to work both existentially and metaphorically.

Kitano’s movies rarely finish on a rounded or uplifting mood, and Sonatine is no exception. The tone of the movie is detached, yet it is also one of his most affecting movies. Murakawa is arguably one of Kitano’s most sympathetic roles, despite his inherent fatalism and nihilistic approach to life. In one of the movie’s many memorable scenes – possibly even the movie’s penultimate moment – Murakawa forces his two closest gang members to play Russian roulette after he watches them playing silly William Tell buggers compounding the fragility of life.

Sonatine is the gangster movie twice removed; a left-field transgression that bears much of the genre’s traits yet takes side-steps and behaves like a wild card. It satisfies, yet infuriates, it rewards, but leaves a bitter taste in the mouth. Ultimately the movie remains stoic and disquieting; the ironic resolution of gangster life is played to the hilt.

Romeo Is Bleeding

USA | 1993 | Directed by Peter Medak

Logline: A duplicitous NYC sergeant’s dangerous career as both witness protection guard and Mafioso informant, begins to catch up with him when he’s bribed to kill a seductive Russian assassin to prevent her from testifying.

“People think that Hell is fire and brimstone and the Devil poking you in the butt with a pitchfork, but it’s not. Hell is when you should have walked away, but you didn’t,” narrates Jack Grimaldi, as his best laid intentions for “feeding the hole” start to go seriously awry. He’s been making $65 grand a pop for playing the corrupt cop, stashing the tainted moolah in a rubbish bag in a blocked drain at the base of his garden. Jack wanted it bad, and he got it worse.

The story goes that screenwriter and co-producer Hilary Henkin’s neo-noir tale was one of the ten best unproduced screenplays in Hollywood, drifting around until eventually it landed in the hands of journeyman director Peter Medak, responsible for mostly television work. He shone darkly with this flawed diamond, providing Gary Oldman with one of his more memorably screwed-up characters.

The superb support cast has Annabella Sciorra as Grimaldi’s long-suffering wife, Juliette Lewis as his young ditzy mistress, Michael Wincott as his slick middleman, Will Patton as one of his colleagues, Roy Scheider as a cucumber cool Mob boss, and Lena Olin as the fabulously malicious Russian contract killer. Not forgetting Ron Perlman in one brief scene as Grimaldi’s attorney.

This modern noir drips with melancholy and is laced with all the best elements of the genre, from the reflective, engaging narration which has Oldman taking about his character in the third person (he’s in the witness protection program) to the lonesome jazz trumpet score from Mark Isham which fits the movie hand in cracked leather glove. The ending, which ties the story back to the movie’s prologue (everything has been a flashback), is surprisingly sorrowful. You feel for Jack, despite the fact that he was a cheating asshole.

Such a downbeat denouement where justice and virtue is trampled asunder and the protagonist seems to be doing everything in his power to scuttle his own future is not the kind of movie Hollywood generally makes, especially with a cast this incendiary. I’d kill to make a gangster thriller as rich, stylish and uncompromising as this. Well, perhaps I wouldn’t murder, but I might eat my weathered boots.

Romeo is Bleeding (the title is borrowed from a Tom Waits song) is dark and twisted and bitter and sweet, hitting you like a hefty swig from a bottle of stale over-proof bourbon while you chain-smoke past the midnight hour, absent-mindedly rubbing that slow-healing scar, and wondering if she’ll ever call you back …

Scarface

USA | 1983 | Directed by Brian De Palma

Logline: The rise of Tony Montana, a Cuban refugee who becomes an immensely wealthy, powerful and ruthless drug lord in Miami, Florida during the early 1980s, but falls prey to greed, paranoia and betrayal.

Along with Coppola’s The Godfather (Parts I & II) and Scorsese’s Goodfellas, this is the finest cinematic portrayal of American gangsters hands down; they form the movies’ holy trinity of organised crime. I’ve watched Scarface many times, and it always delivers, always packs a punch, so … “Say ‘allo to mah lil’ fren’!”

Originally intended as a straight-up remake of Howard Hawks’ 1932 classic set in Chicago, only modern day, but budgetary constraints re-directed the setting to Florida (although most of the exteriors were shot in Los Angeles). Hollywood veteran Sydney Lumet was originally slated to direct, but backed out, however it was his suggestion to make the characters Cuban and use the 1980 Mariel harbour boat lift as the movie’s starting point.

Oliver Stone wrote the blistering, powerhouse screenplay whilst battling his own cocaine addiction, and it was this expletive-laden script that compelled Brian DePalma to come on board (he was set to direct Flashdance!), stating later that the combo of Al Pacino (as the fictional Tony “Scarface” Montana) and Stone’s screenplay was the high turning point of his career (and few critics can deny that). With a stellar cast that included F. Murray Abraham, the late Paul Shenar as scary Sosa, and Robert Loggia, but also excellent performances from then unknowns Mary Elizabeth Mastranioni and Steven Bauer, and most famously, a very young (and dangerously thin) Michelle Pfeiffer.

Brian De Palma has often been criticised for a visual style that rips off Alfred Hitchcock. This stylistic is no more apparent than in Scarface, but I hardly criticise De Palma for it. It’s a director using a deliberately dynamic and hyper-real mise-en-scene (incl. close-ups, vivid colour, and rear projection), which Hitchcock happened to pioneer. It’s pure cinema, and it works brilliantly in telling the dark and dangerous tale of Tony Montana.

Pacino’s Cuban cowboy is mesmerising, from his convincing accent and dialect to his garish wardrobe. But it is the atmosphere of dread and doom permeating the movie that really resonates; an unctuous evil that seeps from the very pores of all the dodgy characters on screen. Violence is both implicit and explicit; one notorious scene involving a chainsaw and Tony and one of his men, Angel (Pepe Serna), handcuffed to a shower rail caused major controversy at the movie’s time of release. Although it leaves most to the imagination, it is far more horrific than you expect.

Giorgio Morodor’s pulsating synth-driven score provides a constant backbone of lush sleaze, whilst the mountain of cocaine – “Yeyo” as Tony calls it – on Montana’s massive mahogany desk is one of the greatest iconic symbols of utter greed and hedonism in the history of movies. Not forgetting Tony’s M16 assault rifle armed with a M203 40mm grenade launcher. The home invasion which occupies the movie’s last twenty-odd minutes is over-the-top, ballistic mayhem; an audio-visual assault of menace and brutality.

Scarface is a long and exhausting movie, but beautifully constructed and executed; a tour-de-force of direction, acting and screenwriting, but also fabulous production design. So many amazing scenes, and arguably the penultimate has a very drunk and stoned Tony at a flash restaurant embarrassing his wife Elvira (Pfeiffer) and his closest buddy Manny (Bauer) as he spouts a diatribe to the dozens of stunned patrons …

“What you lookin’ at? You all a bunch of fuckin’ assholes. You know why? You don’t have the guts to be what you wanna be? You need people like me. You need people like me so you can point your fuckin’ fingers and say, ‘That’s the bad guy.’ So what that make you? Good? You’re not good. You just know how to hide, how to lie. Me, I don’t have that problem. Me, I always tell the truth. Even when I lie. So say good night to the bad guy! Come on. The last time you gonna see a bad guy like this again, let me tell you. Come on. Make way for the bad guy. There’s a bad guy comin’ through! Better get outta his way!”

Oldboy

South Korea | 2003 | Directed by Chan-wook Park

Logline: An ordinary man is kidnapped and imprisoned for fifteen years, then suddenly released, confused and bewildered, only to be informed he must find his captor in five days.

“Laugh and the world laughs with you. Weep and you weep alone.”

Adapted for the screen from a Manga comic, Oldboy is a tour-de-force of cinematic storytelling, a stunning darkly poetic vision of identity and revenge. It is not for the prudish, nor is it for the squeamish, as it burns itself onto your weary retina and scalds itself through your tender skin like a nightmare dream of grotesque beauty.

It is the middle installment in the director’s revenge trilogy (after Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and before Kindhearted Ms Guem-Jar AKA Lady Vengeance); however its story is completely self-contained. It begins part-way through its story, and later we return to this scene, and it the movie finishes amidst the alpine pine and snow of New Zealand’s magisterial Southern Alps.

Min-sik Choi is brilliant as the tortured soul Dae-su Oh, an ordinary businessman who is abducted and held prisoner for fifteen years, never once meeting his kidnappers. Then as swiftly as he was first abducted, he’s released. The world has changed, and so has Dae-su. But he has a mission bursting inside of him. Along the way he meets a young bartender, Mi-do (Hye-Jeoung Kang), who takes pity on his plight and desperate quest, only to find herself slipping in over her head (as much as Dae-su is drowning in the deep end of a dark mystery).

Woo-jin Lee (Ji-tae Yu, quietly exceptional) is the mystery man, the man who seems to hold the answers to Dae-su’s questions, but not without running a gauntlet. Dae-su finds himself in a predicament with only five days to solve the reasoning of his imprisonment. Dae-su realizes he must plunder the past to uncover the truth. But some truths cut deeper than lies.

“Like the gazelle from the hand of the hunter, like the bird from the hand of the fowler, free yourself.”

Everything about Oldboy is beautifully constructed and executed; from the production design and art direction (at times highly stylised), to the editing and music. There are extreme moments (eating the live octopus) and scenes of graphic violence (most of which happens off-screen), but there’s a controlled chaos, a deliberate sense of order and symmetry. Oldboy ricochets with a fierce intelligence, despite its perverse machinations.

You can’t help but be impressed with a movie as provocative as this; both sensually and viscerally. A sense of humour exudes, oily and gleaming, glistening and congealing like the crimson blood spilled on the pristine marble floor of the villain’s penthouse. But just who is the villain and who is the hero? Who is the victim and who is the culprit? The character shades are grey like the timber wolf stalking the rabbit in the snow.

In 2004 Oldboy won the Jury Grand Prize at Cannes, was nominated for the Palm D’Or, and won Best Film at the renowned Sitges Festival in Spain. In its home country festival, the Grand Bell Awards it won Best Actor (Min-sik Choi), Best Director, Best Lighting, Best Music, and Best Editing. It went on to win a further ten international festival awards and another ten nominations. 

Oldboy’s thematic treatment of vengeance suggests that revenge is a dish best left uneaten as it will only destroy everything. No one escapes unscathed; the collateral damage wrought by the wrath of vengeance is wickedly cruel. Cruelty, indeed, is a significant element within Oldboy. Irony, too, casts a long dark shadow. While the serenity of the movie’s final sequence in the snow only reinforces the tragedy of the tale; a tragedy borne from the double-edged sword of a reckless adolescent desire.

The House Of Sand

Casa De Areia | Brazil | 2005 | Directed by Andrucha Waddington

Logline: The plight of a woman, and her feisty daughter, over the span of nearly sixty years, as she tries in vain to adapt to a life in a desolate landscape of shifting sand dunes.

This is a stunningly realised character study of mother and daughter, juxtaposed against a harsh, unforgiving, yet beautiful geography that reflects and absorbs the personalities of the lead characters; a meditative terra cosmos. It feels like it’s based on a richly-etched novel (echoes of Marquez), but is based on a story idea from director Waddington and Luiz Carlos Barreto, with the screenplay by Elena Soarez.

There’s both simplicity and complexity within the narrative and the way the director has cast that becomes apparent soon enough; his two lead actors, Fernanda Torres (also his wife) who plays Áurea, and Fernanda Montenegro (his mother-in-law), who plays Dona Maria, (daughter and mother respectively). However, Waddington then has Montenegro play Áurea when she’s middle-aged, and Torres then plays her young daughter Maria as an adult. Then Waddington has Montenegro play Áurea as an elderly woman and opposite herself as the middle-aged Maria. Confusing? Not so once you’re immersed in the movie’s hypnotic rhythms.

The story begins in 1910, and then moves to 1919, then 1942, and finally 1969. The territory is Maranhão, Brazil, a massive, sprawling ecosystem of huge sand dunes and lagoons that are constantly crawling and shifting. It’s a wilderness that overwhelms its characters, but never completely consumes all of them. Not a lot actually happens, but everything does. There is anguish, there is joy, there is frustration, there is hope.

Initially it is the madness of Vasco de Sá (Ruy Guerra) who has brought his pregnant wife Áurea and her aging mother from the city to Maranhão. He dies in an accident leaving the two women to fend for themselves. The striking son of a former slave, Massu (Seu Jorge), supports them with his goat herding skills. He and Áurea become involved, although she desires to leave the Godforsaken place and return to her urban roots. Chances come and go. She is destined to stay it seems.

The acting is first rate with real-life mother and daughter shining in their roles, but surly Seu Jorge is also excellent, even if he says very little. The cinematography is the real star, or perhaps it’s the landscape. It is a mesmerizing panaroma, captured gloriously in widescreen. The opening and closing images taken from the sky of the giant sand dunes stretching endlessly is like a magnificent surrealist painting, or even a photograph of a moon. The sound is terrifically evocative too, the wind rushing, the sand trickling, the human calls echoing across the expanse, while the extreme heat and cold of the desert makes a commanding presence.

House Of Sand is a sad tale, heartbreaking with a soft caress. Yet there is quiet happiness, scattered to the winds of time. A deep sensuality embraces the whole movie, at times it is raw and mischievous, other times it is innocent and playful. Waddington is a visionary director making a bold, evocative, but distinctly wistful statement of time and place seldom indulged in the all too cynical climate of modern cinema.

Only Lovers Left Alive

UK/Germany | 2013 | Directed by Jim Jarmusch

Logline: Two vampire lovers, living worlds apart, are reunited, but find themselves at the mercy of their lifestyle.

A new Jarmusch movie is a welcomed event at Cult Projections, as he is one of my very favourite directors. That doesn’t mean I adore every movie he’s made, but I relish and savour his approach to filmmaking; the atmosphere, tone, mise-en-scene are all entwined in a deliciously moody, dreamy package. He is a true auteur, if such a thing still exists in this high-concept indie ocean of cynicism and automation.

Would Jarmusch been the king of mumblecore had he begun his career in the last ten years?

Tilda Swinton plays Eve, supposedly a 2000-year-old vampire (according to Jarmusch’s first draft), living the quiet life in Morocco. She is kept out of trouble by the purloining of pure blood from one Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt), the playwright who Shakespeare stole the limelight from. Marlowe and Eve are dear old friends indeed. 

Meanwhile in downtrodden Detroit Eve’s lover Adam, several centuries young, is wallowing in depression. He is a talented musician holed-up in a decrepit old house in a deserted neighbourhood, pining for days gone, disgruntled over the current state of humanity, or “zombies” as he refers to mortals.

After a phone conversation Eve leaves Tangier for Detroit to make sure Adam doesn’t follow through with his suicidal project. Not long after they are disturbed by the arrival of Eve’s obnoxious younger sister Ava (Mia Wasikowska), also a vampire, and trouble erupts. With zombie groupies lapping at Adam’s door, it’s time to scoot.

Jarmusch has fashioned a romance in his typically droll style, with pitch perfect performances. It’s the horror movie when you’re not wanting a horror, the love story that lingers, the drama masquerading as a deadpan comedy, the metaphor for life’s bittersweet ironies. It’s probably his best movie since Dead Man (1995), certainly one of my five Jarmusch favourites, and easily the most original vampire movie since Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction (1995).

Curiously Jarmusch was asked to include more action set pieces by his European financiers (the project took many years to fund), and in response he removed the few existing ones. To add to his frustration Jarmusch was forced to shoot with digital cameras, but managed to get a filmic look through the insistence of low lighting. He’s a dying, but oh so admirable breed Mr. Jarmsuch; a purist, through and through.

Only Lovers Left Alive is very much an acquired taste. And that’s exactly how I like it. Fingers crossed Jim Jarmusch continues to find the independent funding to enable him to continue to make movies on his terms. 

Nancy, Please

US | 2012 | Directed by Andrew Semans

Logline: A PhD candidate’s life unravels after he discovers his crucial study book is in the custody of his former, seemingly-impossible-to-reason-with roommate.

Paul (Will Rogers) finds himself in a Dickensian scenario, with no easy way out. Instead he digs himself deeper. But it’s only a book that he’s lost. Well, misplaced. It turns out Nancy (Eleonore Hendricks) has it. Well, she has the book in the house Paul once shared accommodation with. So, it should be easy to get it back. Wrong. Devil’s Law resides here. Nancy has sprouted horns and hooves and there’s a red gleam of cruelty in her eye. Paul is not going to get his Little Dorrit back so easily. He’s going to have to run the gauntlet to get his sweaty palms back around its dog-eared, note-strewn pages.

Paul fashions himself into the role of victim with a kind of masochistic glee. His friend Charlie (Santino Fontana) just rolls his eyes. His girlfriend Jen (Rebecca Lawrence) quickly finds her patience wearing thin as Paul’s behaviour become increasingly obsessive, and let’s face it, downright frustrating.

We’ve all been in this kind of situation; something that is valuable to us has become caught up in the vice of someone or something else and we’re working ourselves up into a right lather trying to get it back, acting irrationally even. It is this empathy that works in Paul’s favour. Nancy appears to be a right bitch. But we’re inclined to agree with Charlie. Just get it back and stop dicking around.

What makes Nancy, Please more than just an ordinary light-hearted drama is the hints, the nods, the leanings into other genres; chiefly horror/thriller territory. There are some great moments as the fabric of Paul’s sanity begins to tear a little. But Andrew Semans holds back, never pushing too far into that realm of fantasy, but just enough to make his lead character seem unhinged enough to continue his quirky path to deliverance.

Nancy, on the other hand, is an enigma wrapped up in an icy glare. Her story is revealed right at the very end, and it adds satisfying dramatic weight, especially combined with Paul’s own final reaction. That cigarette inhale/exhale never looked so perfectly placed.

Great performances from what is essentially a four-hander, with Will Rogers holding fort, but most notably Eleonore Hendricks, who with very little screen time essentially commands the movie; both as her elusive character, and the actor’s innate screen presence. As a title alone, Nancy, Please is this indie weakest link, but as an inky comedy of errors it charms with subtle delight.

 Nancy, Please is released in Australia through Curious Film.