24FPS at LFF 2011: Plan of Attack

I've just heard that, for the second year running, I'm a fully accredited member of the press corps for the London Film Festival, so I'll be aiming to bring you expanded coverage even from the extensive coverage I had last year. Hopefully this will mean more reviews and more interviews across the four weeks that the festival runs for us (two press weeks, two full festival weeks). So, to give you a bit of an idea as to what you can expect, here are the 83 (yes, 83) films I'll be aiming to see at this year's festival with the first ten in a rough order of importance to me.

1: Alps

There is no film, none, at the festival or otherwise, that I presently want to see more than Yorgos Lanthimos' follow up to his monumental Dogtooth (which I saw at LFF 2009). I have avoided all plot details, all reviews, all I know is the 20 second clip we saw at the press launch makes me suspect that this is not just more of the same, and that I'll be disappointed if it's not the film of the year.

2: Martha Marcy May Marlene

I've been dying to see this, and Elizabeth Olsen's (sister of Mary Kate and Ashley) apparently revelatory performance, since it premiered to glowing reviews at Sundance in January. It sounds smart, dark and disturbing... right up my alley in other words.

3: Shame

Great reviews from the festivals it has played so far, and Fassbender's Best Actor award at Venice promise much for Steve McQueen's second film. I like both Fassbender and Carey Mulligan, and I always like to see filmmakers and actors exploring sex in a truly adult way. I'm hopeful that's what we'll get here.

4: Dreileben

Dreileben is actually three films by three German directors. Each film has the same starting point; the escape of a convict from custody, but each then spins its own story, linked subtly to the others. A project this ambitious will likely either be a tremendous success or a total disaster, I'm looking for ward to finding out which based on the titles of the three parts; Beats Being Dead, Don't Follow Me Around and One Minute of Darkness.

5: A Dangerous Method

I've said it before, but it bears repeating, the ingredients are fantastic here; David Cronenberg making a film about psychoanalysis, and a cast comprising Michael Fassbender, Viggo Mortenson, Kiera Knightley and Vincent Cassell. I honestly can't see how I won't love it.


6: Michael

The case of Josef Fritzl has inspired several provocative pieces of art (the bestselling novel Room being the best known) and this tough sounding film from Austria by a former casting director who has worked with both Jessica Hausner and Michael Haneke promises to be challenging. It's about a 35 year old man who keeps a 10 year old boy prisoner in his cellar. Reviews from Cannes were mixed, but Austria has turned out some impressive films and filmmakers of late, who have dealt well with difficult subject matter.

7: She Monkeys

My liking for European teen movies has been something of a running theme on this site and through the various LFF's I have attended (this is my sixth), and this Swedish example sounds promising. The story of two 15 year old girls on the same equestrian acrobatics team falling for each other suggests echoes off both Fucking Amal and Water Lilies. I can only hope She Monkeys is half as good as either of those great films.

8: Into the Abyss: A Tale of Death, A Tale of Life

In the wake of the execution of Troy Davis, whose guilt was in substantial doubt, Werner Herzog's documentary about the death penalty couldn't be more timely. Herzog is a fascinting guy, and I'm sure he'll have an interesting take on this issue, I hope the film will let all sides speak in the case it focuses on, rather than become a campaigning film.

9: Sarah Palin: You Betcha

In terms of catching the Zeitgeist, Nick Broomfield's latest may have missed its moment, but still, it has the potential to be a very funny, and not a little scary, insight into the American right wing. Hopefully Broomfield can go beyond name calling here and dig a little deeper into what makes Palin and (perhaps more interesting) her supporters tick.

10: The Fatherless

Another Austrian film, and I always seem to have one film in my main selection that for some reason I can't quite pinpoint, just calls out to me and says that it's going to be good. In 2008 it was Everybody Dies But Me, in 2009 Dogtooth, in 2010 Nothing's All Bad (all films that made my Top 10 in their years). It's about a group of grown children who have just lost their father, and their memories of their unconventional upbringing, and apparently flashes back and forth from present to past. The still above is what really stood out for me, there's just something starkly evocative about that image. I hope this one pays off.

and here, in alphabetical order, are my other Must See titles...

The Art of Love
The Artist
Asmaa
The Awakening
Back to Stay
Bernie
Better This World
The Bird
Breathing
Carnage
Coriolanus
Corpo Celeste
Crazy Horse
Darwin
The Dish and the Spoon
Dreams of a Life
The Fairy
50/50
Flying Fish
The First Born
The Forgiveness of Blood
The Giants
Goodbye
Guilty
Hara Kiri: Death of a Samurai
Headhunters
Here
Hors Satan
Hunky Dory
Hut in the Woods
The Ides of March
Junkhearts
Last Screening
Last Winter
Let the Bullets Fly
Like Crazy
The Loneliest Planet
Lotus Eaters
Low Life
Miss Bala
The Monk
The Natural Phenomenon of Madness
Natural Selection
Nobody Else But You
On The Sly
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
Oslo, August 31st
Ostende
Play
Rampart
Return
Seven Acts of Mercy
17 Girls
Silver Bullets
Sleeping Sickness
The Sleeping Voice
Snowtown
Stopped on Track
Strawberry Fields
The Student
Superheroes
Take Shelter
Tales of the Night
Trishna
Twilight Portrait
Undercurrent
W.E.
We Have a Pope
We Need to Talk About Kevin
When the Night
Wild Bill
Without
Wreckers
Wuthering Heights

There are also a few (typically three) films yet to be announced (not counting the surprise film). I would hope that at least some of these will feature: Take This Waltz (Sarah Polley's second directorial effort, starring Michelle Wiliams, Seth Rogen and Sarah Silverman), Killer Joe (William Friedkin's latest, with the brilliant young Brit Juno Temple in the lead), Himizu (The latest from cray, and prolific, Japanese auteur Sion Sono), The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (Some remake by some bloke called Fincher) and at least one film with Isabelle Huppert, given that there are several to choose from right now.

An Interview with Tomboy Director Celine Sciamma

Celine Sciamma's first film, Water Lilies, was a lyrical and beautifully executed début about the sometimes painful process of a first (in this case lesbian) crush. Her second film, Tomboy, looks at a younger character; 10 year old Laure, who, after her family moves, begins introducing herself to the other children living near her as a boy named Michael. It's another sensitive and beautifully acted film, and establishes Sciamma one of the most interesting young (she's just 30) voices in French cinema.

I was lucky enough to sit down with Sciamma on a visit to London and chat with her briefly about her new film.

My questions are in bold, Celine Sciamma's replies are in normal type.


Celine Sciamma: The Hospital Club, London. 14/9/11

Sam: To begin at the beginning; your degree is in literature, and you trained as a writer rather than as a filmmaker. So how and when did you decide to become a filmmaker, to move into that side of art?

Celine Sciamma: Well, I don't remember making a decision. I really wanted to be a screenwriter, I wrote my first script when I was in school, which was the script for Water Lilies, which became my first film. In France there is this strange... all the directors write their own movies, unlike here or in the US, there is no market for screenplays, so once you have one that you wrote yourself that really entices you to direct yourself. So that's what happened. I was not sure, but I decided, I will say yes anyway, because the movie is not going to be made anyway because it won't find money. And then everything got really fast, because we got the money, so I got to direct the movie but I don't remember taking the decision, because I was so scared.

Sam: Just something that happened because of the way the industry works in France then?

CS: Yeah, and it was really lucky that it happened because I discovered how much I loved it, but I was really really scared of doing it.

Sam: Obviously you're a young female filmmaker, and both of your first two films are to a certain degree about young women coming of age. How much personal experience do you find leaking in to your cinema, and is it important to you that that happens?

CS: I think, especially when you do work about childhood, you go to your memories, the teenage years even more so, even more vivid because it's closer. But I think you have to talk a little bit about what you know, about what is true, so that you can bring fiction [to it]. If I'm talking about a fifty year old man, I don't know anything about that, so I think It's not going to be great storytelling, whereas, talking about childhood and teenagehood, as a rookie, as a coming of age director, I feel like I can go further from my life. It's not really autobiographical, I remember how it felt, so I have the feeling and then I can build characters that are very far away from me. But of course, especially in Tomboy, there are things that are memories from my own childhood, like the relationship between the two sisters, that's really something that is mine.

Sam: The other thing that is really central in Tomboy is the issue of gender, and I think it's going to provoke a lot of debate with audiences; is she transsexual, its it just a phase? Is that something that you decided for yourself, and did you discuss that with Zoe, who plays Laure?

CS:Well, I have my own opinion of course about who she's going to become, even if it's not in the movie, the movies contains all the hypotheses - willingly - that way everybody can connect. We talked, me and Zoe, about how she felt about the character, about who she was going to become, we talked about her opinion, because that's the one that really...

Sam: She's quite young to have a defined take on that.

CS: Of course, that's why it was interesting that she really connects with the character. To her it was just a phase, and that as important for her, that it was just a phase because then she could go really deep into the phase.

Sam: Does that come from the fact that she's actually quite a girly girl?

CS: She's not that girly, no. She was kind of boyish actually. She doesn't have the short hair, she had that for the movie but now it's grown back, but she's the kind of girl who plays with the boys and she's very childish, very into childhood, not interested in boys or girls, she just plays soccer everyday, basketball, she's really an outdoor little girl. She's kind of boyish, and that's why I think she connects, and why she thinks it's just a phase, because for herself she thinks it's just a phase.



Sam: Talking of playing with the boys, you cast some of Zoe's real life friends as her friends in the movie. One of the things that fascinated me about both Water Lilies and Tomboy is that you have very naturalistic performances from very young and generally quite inexperienced actors. o how do you work with them as a director, do you stick close to the script?

CS: Well it depends. When there are a lot of children on the set and we have those group scenes it's really about directing them in the moment. So I'm picking child after child and it's not totally improv, I'm telling him 'I'm shooting you' so they always know when the camera is on them and when they have to perform or they don't. So I just let them play football and sometimes I say 'now you're gonna spit' or 'now you're gonna look at her' So it's live, live directing, because they didn't read the scene before.

But when I'm with Zoe, or the little sister, it's all written down and they have to say the right words. Of course we bring a little improv, and we do very long takes - ten to twelve minute takes. They always have things to do; playing with play-doh, playing in the bath, to get this natural feeling, and then we try to get the words that have been written.

Sam: Talking of how you shot the film, you made quite an interesting choice with the camera you used for this film, which is a stills camera.

CS: Yes, the Cannon 7D

Sam: So, how did that influence the design of the film, and were there particular challenges or advantages to the choice of that camera?

CS: I chose it mostly for artistic reasons, it's a cheap camera and everybody is shooting with it now because it's cheap, it's a good camera, but it's cheap. What I really like about it is that it resembles 35mm, regarding the field of depth, regarding the colour, and so you can really get the characters and the blurry backgrounds that you get from 35mm. So to me it was an HD camera that had a very strong cinematographic feeling. It's also lighter, and the camera needed to be lighter because when you are shooting at a child's scale, like that [indicates camera height], you have to be lighter, so that was also part of the decision.

More philosophically I like the idea that memories from your childhood, it's still pictures, for my generation and for yours, now it's going to be different. I like the fact I was shooting with a still camera, the feeling, like those memories from childhood. But it's really because the image has a strong cinematographic feeling.

Sam: I know Tomboy came together very quickly, and that you had been working on the idea but banged the script out very fast. Do you think that benefited the film, or when you watch it now do you think 'I wish I'd had a few more months to work on that'?

CS: I think it benefited the film because I knew it from the start, it was my own decision that I only had three months between writing and shooting to bring the movie to life, so I made the script thinking about that, thinking 'okay it's going to be only fifty sequences, not too many sets' because I wasn't trying to make something that big [a large gap between her hands] fit something that big [a small gap between her hands]. But of course sometimes you have regrets, but that's not a matter of scale, it's a matter of pragmatism, you know? But the whole energy of the film was like that, it's been an amazing experience but I don't know that I'll do it again. One of a kind.

Sam: You also said that you didn't expect Tomboy to be your second film. Do you have one you expect to be your third and is it getting made?

CS: [Laughs] No. I don't know yet. I wish I could do TV, I'm interested in TV series also.

Sam: To tell a story across a longer period?

CS: Yeah, to follow characters for a long time.

Sam: And just a quick final question; aside from any of your own, what's one film you would tell everyone to see.

CS: Oh... The one I'm always showing to people when they haven't seen it is Mulholland Drive.


Thanks to Celine Sciamma for sitting down with me, and to Peccadillo Pictures and Premier Pr for setting up the interview. Tomboy opens on Friday and is one of the best films of 2011 to date, and Sciamma's Water Lilies is on DVD and is one of my Top 100 films. Check them both out, and Mullholland Drive if you haven't already, she's right, it's great.

LFF 2011 Preview Part 1

Yes, it's that time again, for all us movie fans the circus is back in town, as the London Film Festival ramps up for its 55th year. This is also the final year for artistic director Sandra Hebron, whose tenure has seen the festival become a very significant event in the world film calendar. It looks like she and her team have crafted an eclectic programme again this year across all the familiar strands, and across this 3 part post I'll be picking my personal must sees of the fest.

Let's begin, then, with the festival's heavy hitters.

GALAS AND SPECIAL SCREENINGS

Opening Film: 360
Dir: Fernando Mierelles

A dynamic and moving study of love in the 21st century from the director of The Constant Gardener.

Mierelles reunites with his Constant Gardener star Rachel Weisz, and assembles a cast of international talents (also including Jude Law, Anthony Hopkins, Jamel Debouzze and Moritz Bleibtreu) for the globetrotting set of interlocking stories about couples. It's an adaptation of La Ronde (hence 360). For me, Mierelles is overrated, and this looks very middling, but as the opening film, and one of Rachel Weisz' four Oscar hopeful roles this year it must count as one of the big events of the festival.

Closing Film: The Deep Blue Sea
Dir: Terence Davies

Terence Davies' poetic and sensitive adaptation of Terence Rattigan's play, with subtly nuanced performances from its impeccable cast.

A classy British cast for a classy British director, adapting a play by a classy British writer. Yep, that's an LFF closing film. This is perhaps the expected Oscar nominated performance for Rachel Weisz, playing a woman who, in 1950's London, leaves her older husband (Simon Russell Beale) for a younger man (the very busy Tom Hiddleston), but inevitably finds that that relationship also has its problems. This looks like a heady drama with a beautifully crafted look and a standout part for Weisz.

The Artist
Dir: Michel Hazanavicius

They don't make ‘em like they used to, apparently. Well, ‘they' do now!

Set in Hollywood in 1927, this homage to silent cinema was one of the big popular hits of the Cannes Film Festival, and won lead Jean Dujardin the Best Actor prize. The Artist is, apparently, not quite a modern silent, but eschews dialogue almost completely and that, along with the crisp black and white photography, should allow us to plunge into what is now, for most, a lost world, just as the movies discovered sound. This looks like a smart, sweet and funny love letter to cinema. I can't wait to see it.

Coriolanus
Dir: Ralph Fiennes

A clever, contemporary adaptation of Shakespeare's play of political power and intrigue, directed by and starring Ralph Fiennes.

Rather shamefully I don't know Shakespeare's Coriolanus at all. That said, what we've seen of Ralph Fiennes' directorial debut doesn't exactly scream Shakespeare at you. Instead it seems that by setting this story of a Roman general in modern day and in a Balkan war zone Fiennes has come up with a muscular adaptation, combining Shakespeare's words with the ultra modern imagery that he and Hurt Locker cinematographer Barry Ackroyd have collaborated to find. Fiennes also leads a cast packed with the best of British acting talent... and Gerard Butler, who appears to be playing a man who shouts in a Scottish accent. Well, you can't have it all can you?

A Dangerous Method
Dir: David Cronenberg

Viggo Mortensen, Michael Fassbender and Keira Knightley star in David Cronenberg's compelling look at the early days of psychoanalysis.

A new David Cronenberg film is always a cause for celebration as far as I'm concerned, and it seems that, having been preoccupied with the body for so long, Cronenberg is becoming more and more interested in exploring the mind with his recent films. Here he depicts the relationship between Sigmund Freud (Cronenberg's current muse, Viggo Mortenson), Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and one of Jung's patients, with whom he has an affair (Keira Knightley). So, and adventurous and high quality cast, a script by Christopher Hampton and Cronenberg dealing with sex and psychoanalysis. Sign me up.

The Descendants
Dir: Alexander Payne


Alexander Payne is another filmmaker I find hit and miss, but this, his first film since Sideways, looks to be much more up my street than that film or About Schmidt. George Clooney plays a Dad who suddenly realises, when his wife is seriously injured in an accident, that he doesn't really know his two daughters (who are ten and seventeen). Clips suggest that Payne's comedic instinct as as sharp as ever and that Clooney is well cast. The danger is probably that the film could start to feel over familliar, or that the inevitable learning and hugging could be cloying, but hopefully Clooney's Cary Grant like charm will keep those things from becoming a real issue.

The First Born
Dir: Miles Mander

The sex lives of the upper classes come under scrutiny in this tour de force of late silent British cinema.

You're probably best off asking Pamela from Silent London about this one. The archive gala is a late silent period British film, starring Madeline Carroll, who would go on to be one of the quintessential Hitchcock blondes in The 39 Steps. Coincidentally, The First Born was co-written by Hitchcock's wife, Alma Reville. The story of a philandering husband, jealousy, miscegenation and images of Carroll taking a bath (shot in very voyeuristic fashion) must have been controversial at the time, and suggest a film that is still likely to feel adult and somewhat contemporary.

The Ides of March
Dir: George Clooney

George Clooney directs and appears alongside Ryan Gosling, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Paul Giamatti and Evan Rachel Wood in this smart, incisive exploration of dirty politics on the campaign trail.

After a misstep with charmless screwball throwback Leatherheads it seems that George Clooney is back to what he does best as a director. The Ides of March casts Clooney as a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination (who seems to carry more than a few echoes of Barack Obabma). The cast is high quality, the quetion mark will likely be whether Clooney and co-writer Grant Heslov can keep the political rhetoric from being too heavy, or, worse, the whole thing from simply feeling like The West Wing lite.

Shame
Dir: Steve McQueen

Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan star in Steve McQueen's frank study of a New York man's sexual compulsion.

I didn't like Steve McQueen's debut; Hunger quite as much as some other critics, but Shame sounds more interesting for several reasons. First is Michael Fassbender, the real standout aspect of Shame, reuniting with McQueen having gone from strength to strength as an actor since their last collaboration. Second is Carey Mulligan, whose career is so much in the ascedant right now that she could be doing blockbuster upon blockbuster, but instead she's choosing daring parts like this and finally there's simply this; when was the last time you saw an English language film that treated sex as more than something to leer or snigger at? It doesn't happen much. Truly adult films, treating adult subjects intelligently, are too rare. This looks like being one.

We Need to Talk About Kevin
Dir: Lynne Ramsay

The much-anticipated film based on Lionel Shriver's Orange Prize-winning novel.

One of the great mysteries in the film business is why, after the opening one two punch of her magnificent Ratcatcher and Morvern Callar, it took eight years (and several collapsed projects) for Lynne Ramsay to be allowed back behind a camera.

This adaptation of the novel about a woman (played by the always magnificent Tilda Swinton) trying to come to terms with the fact that her son has committed an awful crime sounds like it is right up Ramsay's particularly bleak street, and the casting also seems dead on, with John C. Reilly as Swinton's husband and the hotly tipped Ezra Miller apparently outstanding as Kevin. I just hope it's as good as I want it to be.

Final Destination 5 [15]

DIR: Steven Quale

Reviewing the previous entry in this franchise, the confusingly named The Final Destination, I declared the then nine year old franchise dead. I spoke too soon, and two years later, here we are again with the same idea; Attractive twentysomethings cheat death in a disaster (a bridge collapse this time out), then are picked off by death in a series of Rube Goldberg inspired lethal coincidences.

Here a group of work colleagues are their way to a weekend business retreat, when one of them (Sam, played by Nicholas D'Agosto) has a vision of the bridge they are on collapsing, and manages to get his ex-girlfriend (Emma Bell), some of their friends and their boss (David Kochener) to follow him off the bus to safety. Soon after, as ever, splashy violence ensues as Death rebalances the books.

I know, as do you, that at this point character isn't the most important thing in a Final Destination movie, but surely it would be nice, and asking only a little, to have characters that you could tell apart. I didn't even remember most of these people's names as I was watching the movie - though IMDB reveals that, yes, they have names, and the franchise tradition of invoking horror directors names continues with the likes of Peter Friedkin (Miles Fisher), Candice Hooper (Ellen Wroe) and Oivia Castle (Jacqueline MacInnes Wood). Again it's the leads who come off worst, some of the others have a trait (Peter is angry, Candice is nice, and likes gymnastics, Olivia is hot but - oh no - wears glasses). but Sam and Molly (Emma Bell's character) are voids, I nothing them, so it's hard to care much whether they live or die.

Another issue is that, while the build up to the death scenes, the series of coincidences that leads to each, tends to be excellent, there is often a rather listless, 'oh, that'll do' feeling to the actual deaths. The gym sequence is maybe the best example; an expertly shot and paced build up, using the space and the elements to build real tension as to what's going to happen, followed by an underwhelming, and, even by the standards of this franchise, credulity straining outcome. Another death that produces an 'oh', rather than an 'arrgghh' begins with a nightmarish medical procedure, but ends in a deeply anticlimactic fall.

This said, Final Destination 5 is largely fun. The 3D is gimmicky, but Steven Quale sees it for what it is and embraces, even revels in, the gimmick. Guts are thrust out of the screen at us on a regular basis, glass repeatedly shatters in our faces during the opening credit sequence (and how nice it is to see one of those these days) and the depth perception is used effectively - for this extreme vertigo sufferer anyway - in the inventively gory bridge sequence.

The performances are proficient, as is the direction, with Quale building up each death scene brilliantly, even if Eric Heisserrer's often tin-eared screenplay sometimes fumbles the final moments. Nothing rivals the OH SHIT impact of the first film's bus, or the sequel's fence, but the gore is as OTT and as guiltily funny as ever. What really makes Final Destination 5 stand out a bit though is its ending. There are clues (largely relating to technology) throughout the film, but a clever twist genuinely took me by surprise in the film's last ten minutes. It does mean that this really needs to be where the franchise ends, but it's a great nod to the fans, and quite a clever (and, when you stop and consider it, chilling) beat in its own right.

Final Destination 5 delivers what it promises on the label; it's dumb fun. Go with a girl who'll jump at all the right moments and consequently grab on to you, or go with a group of franchise fans, either way, though it won't change your world, you'll come out entertained.