DVD Review: The Kingdom II [18]

This review is by Contributing editor and E-Film Blog head honcho Michael Ewins

As an example of what to expect, The Kingdom II has a scene where Udo Kier, playing a deformed baby (easily approaching 10-ft, his elongated arms and legs grotesquely juxtapose with his bulging torso) attempts to strangle his real-life previous self. I should make things clearer: this previous Kier is actually a spirit, a reincarnation of Åge Krüger (I can't say who he is, it'll spoil Series One), who later sprouts devil horns. Is he Satan? Who knows, but hopefully I've painted a picture of The Kingdom II which fairly represents how utterly off-the-boil it is. Yes, Lars von Trier's cult series has gone completely mad, and turns out to be all the better for it...

There's a markedly different tone to The Kingdom II which fans of the first series might find disappointing. Series One was a full-on ghost story, dedicated to the eerie and occult, and it took time to build up an atmosphere of dread. It was basically four hours of character development, and I actually found the experience quite depressing. But those who found the first series overly sincere and boring (which, in fairness, will be many) will find a lot to embrace in Kingdom II, which develops the subtle streak of dark humour present in Series One and brings it to the forefront; indeed, against all expectations, Series Two is hilarious.

It's hard to talk about this change in tone without ruining any of the surprises, of which there are many, so let me give you some sample dialogue: "their pubic hair was dramatic", and, "I desire to become a duck, only a duck, nothing but a duck." Yes, and those are two of the saner moments, as we also have Dr. Moesgaard (Holger Juul Hansen) joining an alternative psychotherapy group hiding in The Kingdom's basement, whose leader seems to be as mad as anyone else. Hansen is hysterical in the part, kind of like the Danish Leslie Nielsen, dryly reacting to all the silliness occurring around him, seemingly a normal man suffering a deadpan breakdown in the midst of supernatural insanity.

Ernst-Hugo Järegård also returns as Dr. Helmer, still desperately trying to recover the information of the Mona case and also dealing with Hook's (Søren Pilmark) zombification, which leads to all sorts of comic evil (this isn't a spoiler by the way, it happens very early on). His stone-faced frustration and blunt hatred is still dramatically complex and oddly funny, and certainly in this series his character is played more for laughs, put into increasingly baffling situations, and his final hours - involving a mad-dash attempt to cover his tracks once and for all - is a real treat. I can't emphasize enough how welcome the humour is here; it also helps pick up the pace, which is a good thing for this terminally protracted series.

The Kingdom II feels much more confident than its predecessor and its audacity, while sometimes infuriating, makes for compellingly strange viewing. von Trier's tongue is firmer in cheek than ever, turning up as he does for a speech at each episode's end to slyly dig at the audience's expectations - at the end of the third episode he turns up holding a liver, and I'm again allowed to question how seriously anyone is taking the events of The Kingdom Hospital, which seems to be falling (literally) into the bowels of Hell itself.

A third series of The Kingdom was planned but sadly Järegård passed away in 1998 before production could begin. von Trier subsequently pursued his film career and during that time Kirsten Rolffes (who played Mrs. Drusse) and Morten Rotne Leffers (who played the male Down's Syndrome dishwasher) have also died, making the possibility of a third series now, fourteen years on, almost certainly impossible. It's a shame too, because the series' cliffhanger is one of its funniest and most thrilling moments, and a pure example of von Trier's individual genius, bound to antagonize but never to be forgotten...

The Disc/Extras
I discussed the muddy, sepia-inflected aesthetic in my Series One review, and that's back here, so it's hard to really subjectively comment on the transfer, which perfectly translates how von Trier and co. wanted the series to look, even if it that does mean it’s quite ugly. The visuals match the tone of the series perfectly though, and I know the aesthetic won't be for everyone, but the series has been handled with care, and it looks exactly how it should.

Extras are pretty solid actually, and about as quirky as you'd expect from The Kingdom. There's selected scene commentary, which is always fun, but most impressive are the featurettes, including your basic Making Of, 'In Lars von Trier's Kingdom', but most enjoyable is a 52-minute documentary called 'Tranceformer - A Portrait Of Lars von Trier', which even has the director providing commentary on his earliest experimental films, made when he was 10-years-old. A solid package.

If you'd like to buy the complete boxset of Series 1 and 2 of The Kingdom, and help 24FPS out at the same time, please use the link below. Thanks.

DVD Review: The Kingdom: Series 1 [18]

This review is by Contributing editor and E-Film Blog head honcho Michael Ewins

Have you ever wondered what happens to the patients in TV hospitals? If shows like Casualty, Scrubs and E.R. are to be believed then hospitals are places where doctors, surgeons and nurses hang out for quirky meet-cutes and primetime melodramatics, and patients are merely a day-to-day obstacle. I doubt that these are fair representations of hospital life, or are even trying to be, but those wondering about the patients in The Kingdom, Lars von Trier's cult series which ran for two seasons between 1994 - 1997, will find enough bloody mayhem to wish they'd never asked...

Right off the bat I'll make one thing clear: it's a difficult watch. Not just because the series is terminally protracted, thoroughly complex and deeply depressing, but also because of the muddied, sepia-inflected aesthetic which looks like it's been dug up from an Argentinean archive (bonus points if you get the reference). Fans of von Trier will be instantly at home with the look of the series, as it falls somewhere between The Element Of Crime (1984) and Idioterne (1998), recalling Tarkovsky as much as it does a series of home videos created by the characters in Harmony Korine's Trash Humpers (2009). The aesthetic does serve a specific purpose though, in that it adds a level of realism to the increasingly disturbing events, and enhances the dread-soaked atmosphere. For those unacquainted with the Danish provocateur, however, it may just feel like drudging through deathly treacle, and its ugliness will be off-putting.

Each episode opens on a wooden plaque reading 'THE KINGDOM', before a torrent of blood breaks through and gushes toward the screen, recalling that classic elevator scene in Kubrick's The Shining (1980). From here we explode into a none-more-90's title sequence which is about as tongue-in-cheek as the epilogue to each episode, delivered by a suited von Trier who can't decide whether to be devilishly sly or annoyingly condescending. Either way these moments always end with von Trier asking us to return to The Kingdom, where we'll need to take "the Good with the Evil", and instantly we question how seriously anyone is taking this story.

Ah, the story. It's far too complicated to fully synopsize here, but I'll give it a go. Each episode begins with a beautiful prologue detailing how The Kingdom hospital came to be built on the site of "bleaching ponds" - we always end on the same shot of hands rising from the damp ground, as if to suggest the reawakening of dead souls. Head neurosurgeon Stig Helmer (Ernst-Hugo Järegård) has recently been re-appointed to The Kingdom from a position he held in Sweden, and his plot arc follows the repercussions of a failed operation on a girl named Mona, who has become disabled from a mysterious error which he wants to keep hidden. While he clashes with the hospital staff and is inducted into the hospital's mysterious cult, The Brotherhood, a spiritual woman named Sigrid Drusse (Kirsten Rolffes) is admitted to the ward. She's not really ill, but senses the spirit of a restless young girl in the hospital, whose fate may have been murderous. Perhaps the best way of summarizing the show is to describe it as the Danish Twin Peaks, for there are great tonal similarities.

If you invest in The Kingdom from the beginning then you'll be richly rewarded. Series One consists of four episodes, totalling 300 minutes, and three-quarters of that time is dedicated to character development. The pace is incredibly slow but I appreciated the time von Trier allowed us with each character, and you'll be glad for it too by the time the final half hour rolls around, which is absolutely off-the-rails bonkers and demands a certain level of sacrifice by the viewer. What allows you to make this sacrifice is the quality of the writing and acting. Every character is fully rounded and given an engaging mystery, and you'll always be questioning their motives, which gives every scene a certain level of unpredictability. There's also a great deal of variety to each episode as it flits between austere drama and full-on horror, with the majority of time spent in dank corridors, misty locales and elevator shafts.

But what I loved most of all, perhaps, was the show's sense of humour. von Trier has always been an antic-loving provocateur, as proven by the orgy scene in Idioterne and the talking fox in Antichrist (2009). The Kingdom has an incredibly subtle streak of dark humour, which is best personified by an on-going gag about a missing head, and certainly its owner is warped to the point of uncomfortable hilarity. von Trier also makes a peculiar leap into full-on sitcom for the show's finale, as a tour of the hospital turns into a demented set-piece which has to be seen to be believed, and could only involve Udo Kier. I don't quite know what to make of it, but I know I can't wait for Series Two.

All extras will be reviewed along with Series Two.

If you'd like to buy the complete boxset of Series 1 and 2 of The Kingdom, and help 24FPS out at the same time, please use the link below. Thanks.

Daisy Diamond

DIR: Simon Staho

My first experience with Danish filmmaker Simon Staho was not good. I said that his film Warriors of Love (made after Daisy Diamond) 'consists of 93 of the most pretentious, ponderous, minutes of cinema I’ve ever sat through.' However, that wasn't enough to put me off seeing what I heard was a barnstorming performance from Noomi Rapace (who rose to international fame last year as Lisbeth Salander in the Millennium trilogy).

Daisy Diamond is a tough, tough watch, as uncompromisingly bleak a film as I have ever seen. From its bare visual style, to its confrontational depictions of sex and nudity to its parade of utterly unsympathetic characters, the film offers absolutely no respite from the emotional brutality that defines it. It centres on Anna (Rapace), a young woman in her early 20's who is trying to be an actress, but finds all her auditions disrupted by her constantly crying four month old daughter Daisy. With no support, and seemingly no parenting skills, Anna becomes desperate as her daughter is always noisily preventing her from working. One day she takes drastic action.

Though other characters drift in and out, usually as directors who are auditioning Anna, or using her in some other more direct way, Daisy Diamond is, to all intents and purposes, basically a one woman show for Noomi Rapace. For much of the running time all we see is her talking to her four month old daughter (tellingly the few loving things she says are often revealed to be audition passages, or quotes from movies). Staho has many characters tell Anna how interesting her face is, and his visual style reflects that, with many scenes played almost exclusively on a close up shot of Rapace' face, particularly in the film's most disturbing moments.

This kind of material, and this kind of scrutiny, demands a lot from an actor, and Rapace more than delivers. She clearly threw herself, body and soul, into the part (she was actually hospitalised when shooting ended, suffering from internal bleeding, apparently brought on by the stress). She has to make 180 degree emotional turns in an instant, and you believe every single one, and even when you become used to Staho's device of using audition dialogue but suggesting that it's coming from Anna herself, you still believe every last word that she says (this does create one small issue in the film; why doesn't Anna get every role she auditions for?) Rapace is especially outstanding in her scenes with the baby, after a while you get to see when Anna is rehearsing and when she's expressing genuine feeling, and the detachment with which she regards, speaks to, even holds, Daisy is chilling. It's a naked performance in every sense of the word, Rapace is explicitly stripped down physically, but much more impactful is the gradual stripping away of any emotional register (seen best in the cold, matter of fact way she relates her life story for the pimp she ends up working for).

I like to think that after 20 years and 8000 odd movies I've become a pretty decent judge of acting. Noomi Rapace' performance here may be the best I've seen in five years or more. I wouldn't hesitate to rank it with the likes of Isabelle Huppert in The Piano Teacher, Jennifer Jason Leigh in Georgia or Sissy Spacek in Badlands among the best performances I've seen by an actress. It absolutely demands to be seen.

The film as a whole doesn't quite meet that standard, largely because Staho's techniques start calling attention to themselves midway through the film, and by the end it does feel like he is gratuitously piling on the tragedy (though it's not so oversold there is a plot turn that reminded me of Precious) and almost rubbing our faces in the degradation on display. Some people will hate this film, and I can see why, it may lack the explicit violence, but for me it has a similar impact to Irreversible; a 93 minute gut punch that resonates long after the credits. It may be flawed as a film, but I can't imagine you not thinking about, not remembering, Daisy Diamond, and that, for me, would be enough to recommend it, even without its astounding central performance. It is nothing short of criminal that this film isn't available in the UK.

LFF 2010: Nothing's All Bad

DIR: Mikkel Munch-Falls
CAST: Mille Lehfeldt, Sebastian Jessen,
Bodil Jørgensen, Henrik Prip

Mikkel Munch-Falls’ first feature is one of the most accomplished debuts I’ve seen in a long time (and a lot of filmmakers took their first bows at this year’s LFF). If you want to wrap NOTHING’S ALL BAD lazily up in a nutshell then you could say that it’s a Danish MAGNOLIA, focusing on the sex lives of four disparate, but increasingly linked, characters, but that really would do a disservice to a film that is much more distinctive than that.

Each character drives their own story. There is Ingeborg (Jørgensen), a widow in her sixties who is increasingly isolated. This leads her to, one night, bring home Anders (Jessen), a nineteen year old working as a bi-sexual rent boy. Then there is Anna (Lehfeldt), an attractive woman in her early thirties, who worries that her recent mastectomy has made her unattractive and there is Anders (Prip), a middle-aged man whose drive to expose himself has seen him convicted of sexual offences. All their stories unfold separately, but they also cross paths, and draw together into an utterly compelling patchwork.

Each story is compelling in and of itself, but for me none more so than Anna’s heartbreaking section of the film. Mille Lehfeldt, who has little dialogue to work with and few scenes with other characters, gives perhaps the best performance I’ve seen by an actress this year. She’s able to communicate the turmoil that Anna is going through with a series of gestures, with the way she regards her scarred body. It would be easy to play Anna badly, any actress could scream, tear her hair out, break down in tears while feeling her chest. Lehfeldt does none of this, instead she internalizes, making the smallest of moments feel like an emotional shot to the gut. I can’t tell you where Anna’s story ends up, but it’s horrifically sad, and difficult to uderstand if you saw it written down, but Lehfeldt, with the help of Munch-Falls’ sensitive script, sells every moment.

By singling out Mille Lehfeldt I don’t wish to take away from the contributions of the other actors. These are extreme roles, going to places that are explicit and challenging, and all the actors more than rise to the challenge. Henrik Prip has perhaps the hardest job, because though not all the characters could be described as sympathetic, Anders should be utterly loathsome. The first time we see him he’s exposing himself in the park, sitting next to a pretty young woman, masturbating. In a brave choice neither the film nor Prip judge Anders, and rather than loathsome they make him pathetic, pitiable. As Ingeborg, Bodil Jørgensen sketches a moving portrait of a woman left alone after a long marriage, but not wanting to be starved of attention or affection. Her moment of realization when, after they kiss, Anders suggest the “we get the money out of way now” is especially painful. NOTHING’S ALL BAD (incidentally, a terrible title compared to literal translation “Beautiful People”) pivots around Jonas, and for a while he seems to be the thread that ties everything together. It’s perhaps the most stock role; we’ve seen this young male hustler before, but Sebastian Jessen makes him real. He’s especially good when Jonas is taken in by a middle-aged couple, becoming just another carefree teenager, until the tables turn in one horrifying moment.

Mikkel Munch-Falls, a former critic making his first film, has a firm grip on his story and characters, so much so that even the final scene, which could easily have felt trite, works. Rather than making everything okay in the last moments, Munch-Falls emphasizes what lies underneath the scene, the secrets just waiting to pop up. He never lets the dam burst, instead it plays as something that underlies every word and gesture, investing every frame with a sickly tension. Stylistically Munch-Falls favors letting us dwell in a moment, his camera moves only when motivated to, and this, along with the sedate editing, helps draw us in to these lives.

Some people will find this film horrible. Point of fact, it is horrible, but that shouldn’t blind you to the brilliant acting, the intelligent observation of the darker side of people’s lives, the way the film makes you feel for these characters without going for a single obvious mawkish moment. As is so often the case with the best thngs on show at a festival, NOTHING’S ALL BAD is yet to find a UK distributor, if it doesn’t manage to pick up one of the braver indie companies then you really should seek this film out as it serves notice of several extremely interesting talents, as well as being, quite simply, one of the best films of the year.

Review Post 35: Moon / Just Another Love Story

MOON
DIR: Duncan Jones
CAST: Sam Rockwell, Kevin Spacey



Sam Bell (Rockwell) is coming to the end of a three-year contract as the one person tending to a mining operation on the moon, and he’s looking forward to going home to his wife and young daughter. After one of the mining machines breaks down Sam goes out to repair it, and crashes his vehicle. He is woken in the medical bay by Gerty (Spacey), the computer that looks after him and assists him. Later Sam goes to investigate the crash, returning with the unconscious body of a man who appears to be Sam Bell.

The first feature by commercial director Jones, Moon is real throwback. In the last twenty years sci-fi has come, largely, to be a genre dominated by spectacle, with special effects often substituting for such small considerations as plot, dialogue and character. Moon chucks much of that out, creating an insular and believable world, using special effects only to place us in that world and to tell the story, and taking the form of an intense character study rather than a wham-bam action movie. In order for this to work, particularly given that for most of the running time he is the only person on screen, you have to have a great actor in your leading role, and Jones certainly has that in Sam Rockwell.

Rockwell is one of those actors that casual moviegoers might recognize as ‘that guy from that thing’, but he’s never, despite sterling work on screen over more than a decade now, had a real breakout role. That’s a real shame, because he’s one of the most consistently interesting actors in America right now. The role of Sam Bell was written expressly for Rockwell, and he is quite brilliant in it. He totally inhabits the guy, making him entirely engaging, which makes the film’s first 20 minutes, in which all there is to see is Sam going about his day by day routine on the base, some of its most absorbing. It’s when, a bit later, Rockwell is playing two Sam Bells that you really get to see how good he is. The two characters are totally different - he even holds himself differently - but they are also, remarkably, recognisably the same person. That’s a tough line to walk, and Rockwell walks it with skill and confidence in every scene. Kevin Spacey is also good value, vacillating between dry humour and menace in his characterful performance as onboard computer Gerty. It may be the best work he’s done in some years.

What works less well is the screenplay. After an intriguing setup the central mystery is solved rather too quickly, and the answer revealed to be the most obvious answer possible. Thereafter, though it thankfully doesn’t become a totally different film, as Danny Boyle’s otherwise excellent Sunshine did for its last half hour, Moon descends into plodding predictability which saw me ticking off sequences and plot points one after another. It’s a real shame, because for the first 45 minutes or so it seems that Moon might, potentially, be a classic.

You can’t take anything away from Duncan Jones though. Made for an astonishingly paltry £5 million, Moon looks fantastic. The special effects are easily on a par with films made for 20 times this budget, and add greatly to the atmosphere of the movie while the set design, though extremely reminiscent of Alien among others, has a sort of chilling clinical beauty to it that really works for the film. Despite budgetary and location limitations Jones makes Moon a film with a visual identity very much its own, even when the story begins to plod the film always sucks you in with its visuals. It bodes very well for Jones’ future.

Though this is far from the perfect slice of sci-fi that many reviews have pegged it as, it is an interesting film, a film with ideas. It’s also a film with an exceptional central performance, from an actor who hasn’t really got his dues, and it’s a fine calling card for a man who looks set to become an interesting filmmaker. All of these are good enough reasons to recommend, despite reservations, that you take a trip to the Moon.


KAERLIGHED PA FILM
[JUST ANOTHER LOVE STORY]
DIR: Ole Bornedal
CAST: Anders W. Berthelsen, Rebecka Hemse,
Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Charlotte Fich



Danish director Ole Bornedal’s latest is perhaps best summed up by this extract from his director’s statement. “I have attempted to create an unrestrained piece of modern drama, which - while seriously derailing - is still recognisable to us in the inner chambers of our souls.” Imagine a film noir - one, frankly, with a very unsatisfying mystery - written and directed with all the crashing pretentiousness that that statement implies and you’ve a pretty good idea what watching this film is like. The basic story sees family man Jonas (Berthelsen) find himself involved with a woman whose car crash he witnesses when he goes to the hospital to see that she’s okay, and goes along when her family assume that he’s her old boyfriend. When Julia (Hemse) wakes, blind and with amnesia, Jonas continues to say that he is the mysterious Sebastian (Lie Kaas).

On the face of it Just Another Love Story is brilliantly made. It often looks stunning, with slick and sometimes surprising visuals in which Bornedal shows off a style very much his own. The performances are also excellent, with the whole cast contributing fine low-key work, which runs counter to the film’s often overblown tone. The problem isn’t so much the constituent parts of the film as it is the way it is put together. Bornedal seems to have this need to show you everything, so rather than just let a character talk about his fantasies he has to show them to you in badly rendered and purposeless cutaways. Rather than just letting a character disappear for a scare he shows them going. Rather than just letting you realise the plot has come full circle he replays almost the entire opening scene. Rather than let you fill in the hinted at detail of a key relationship he shows flashbacks. It begins, at a certain point, to feel like Ole Bornedal thinks you are too stupid to understand his film without signposts.

It’s a relentlessly over the top film; the plot, even for noir, seems outlandish. Bornedal’s penchant for extremely literal visuals and over the top dialogue, which seldom sounds like anything real people say, makes for an odd mix even before you add in the performances. I can’t fault Anders W Berthelsen, Rebecka Hemse, Nikolaj Lie Kaas or Charlotte Fich (who plays Jonas’ wife), they each give a fiercely committed, down to earth and dramatically satisfying performance, and Berthelsen and Fich create a truly rare convincing on screen marriage, but their acting seems teleported in from another film.

I have no clue what Ole Bornedal is trying to do here. Just Another Love Story is great to look at, but as a whole it’s a confused and often irritating mess. I arrived at every plot twist long before the film did and was just bored for much of its running time.