LFF 2010: Podcast with Supermarcey

My LFF 210 coverage is (finally) coming to an end. I've got a few more review to write, and a wrap up feature to follow. Here, though, are the high and low points of my experience at this year's festival. I was joined by my good friend Marcey (writer from Arrow in the Head, Killer Film and her own site www.supermarcey.com) to discuss the fest by talking about my Top and Bottom 5 films from the 56 I saw.

As with all our podcasts it's quite long, sometimes rambling, sometimes digressive, but it was a fun conversation and should be an entertaining listen. Enjoy.

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.

LFF 2010 Review: Somewhere [15]

DIR: Sofia Coppola
CAST: Stephen Dorff, Elle Fanning

SOMEWHERE isn’t just bad; it’s so bad that it makes me wonder whether I’ve previously overrated Sofia Coppola’s other work.

To describe what little occurs here as a story is perhaps giving too much credit, but for the record the film is about movie star Johnny Marco (Dorff). He’s in his mid thirties, clearly very successful and famous, and lives in the Chateau Marmont. One day Marco’s 11-year-old daughter Cleo (Fanning) shows up; her Mother has gone out of town, so she’s going to stay with Johnny. And that’s it, that’s the entire movie, and by God it’s tedious.

Coppola’s first film; THE VIRGIN SUCIDES, had a lovely, drifting, dreamlike style, it wrapped you up in the feeling of the film so it didn’t really matter that at a story level there was very little going on. That’s not the case with SOMEWHERE, rather than creating a feeling for the film it often seems as though Coppola has plonked her camera down as soon as she’s arrived at a location, and then just left it to run. There is no better example of this than the film’s opening shot, in which we get to watch Marco’s Ferrari zoom around a desert track. Unfortunately the camera never moves, so the car is in frame for about half a second on each of its several circuits, while for the rest of the time we get to look at a blank, featureless desert. It’s an apt metaphor for the film really… an ocean of nothing occasionally enlivened by brief incident.

The first half hour of this incredibly long 95-minute film is taken up with establishing how empty and lonely Marco’s life is, and it feels like we live every mindbendingly boring second with him. In no less than two scenes we have to watch an entire three-minute routine by a pair of bored looking twin pole dancers (it’s a testament to how dull this film is that even those six minutes aren’t any fun). We watch Marco shower, we watch him check text messages, we watch him sit on his own. It’s all meant to make us feel sorry for him, but I, frankly, had trouble empathizing with the poor depressed multi-millionaire movie star. It may be uncharitable, but my first instinct was to yell “If you’re bored and lonely, get up and DO SOMETHING” at him.

Stephen Dorff (remember him? No, me either) is generally okay as Marco, within the very limited demands of the part. The character is generally so detached that his lack of expression can pass for a decent performance much of the time. However, his limits as an actor become depressingly clear in the film’s one big emotional scene. Okay Dorff isn’t helped by the fact that Marco’s midnight call to his ex-wife, sobbing down the phone, is completely unmotivated, but he’s also pretty terrible in that moment.

Happily there is one thing in SOMEWHERE that compensates to some degree for the rest of the film, and that’s Elle Fanning. Like her older sister, Fanning is a consistently impressive and mature child actress and here she’s got her highest profile role yet. Coppola does seem to work well with actresses, and from Fanning she gets an incredibly natural performance. Her relationships to the other actors work well, whether it’s the initially slightly distant, but continuously warming, relationship she has to her Father or the nicely understated way she reacts when one of Johnny’s girlfriends asks over breakfast if she’s got a boyfriend. There’s also none of that slightly eerie mini adult quality that Dakota Fanning has; this is very much a kid being a kid. Fanning energises the film a little, whenever she in it the whole is at least bearable, even if she’s always far better than what’s around her.

The main problem with SOMEWHERE is its length, as a half hour short it might have been fine, but at 95 minutes Coppola is visibly stretching it out, and I felt every last second. Shots seem to go on forever (a minute of a slow zoom on Johnny sitting under a plaster face cast, the aforementioned pole dancing), whole scenes are given over to the laughably inconsequential (watch as a man and his daughter play a whole song on Guitar Hero) and nobody with the exception of Cleo develops any real personality to mitigate against the vast acres of nothing unfolding on screen. Come the blessed relief of the ending there’s no real payoff. The emotional moment that you’re waiting for between Dad and Daughter is the exact same moment you get at the end of LOST IN TRANSLATION and the final shot revels in symbolism so obvious and cheap that it feels like Coppola shouting “GET IT?” through a megaphone directly into your ear.

SOMEWHERE will have its defenders, they’ll likely claim that the film is lyrical, deep and patient. You may think so too, personally I found it shallow, boring endlessly long and nigh insufferable, Elle Fanning’s performance is just about the only reason I didn’t walk out. SOMEWHERE? Try Somewhy.

LFF 2010: Review Roundup

I haven’t had the time (or, quite frankly, the energy) to cover everything I’ve seen from this year’s London Film Festival so, in the hope of clearing the backlog, here are some (very) brief thoughts on some of the titles I didn’t get to cover in more detail.

LIVING ON LOVE ALONE
DIR: Isabelle Czajka

This look at the life of a 23 year old woman (played by an excellent Anaïs Demoustier) drifting from job to soul destroying job and partner to casual partner until she meets a cool, handsome guy (Pio Marmaï) who says he’s an actor starts off really well. It’s slowly paced, but patiently builds two very compelling characters whose relationship is always interesting and believable. It also has some witty and true things to say about the experience of the day to day 9 to 5 grind of the job market.

Isabelle Czajka gets very strong, unaffected, performances from her leads, but unfortunately her script runs off the rails in the third act, when, with one key moment, LIVING ON LOVE ALONE seems to become another film, charging off in an unexpected direction that never really convinces. Still, the strong performances and Czajka’s naturalistic approach make this worth a look.

IT’S KIND OF A FUNNY STORY
DIR: Anna Boden / Ryan Fleck

This is definitely a tilt at the mainstream from the writing/directing team behind HALF NELSON and SUGAR, and it’s a pretty good one. It follows five days in the life of 16-year-old Craig (Kier Gilchrist) after he checks into a psychiatric ward when he’s feeling suicidal. It’s more fun than you’d think, given the subject, and what it ends up feeling most like is THE BREAKFAST CLUB in a psych ward. Boden and Fleck inject plenty of energy and variety into the film with animated sequences (very reminiscent of Michel Gondry’s work), escapes from the ward and fantasy sequences (Craig’s performance of Under Pressure is a highlight).

Most of the performances are strong, but in the lead Kier Gilchrist is a little bland. He’s not terrible, but he is shown up by the other actors around him. Best is Zach Galifianakis, who acquits himself very well in a largely dramatic role as another patient who takes Craig under his wing, while Emma Roberts makes for an effective love interest and gives her character enough depth to suggest that she’s already a better actress than her aunt Julia. Some may find this a little quirky for their taste, but I had fun with it.

THE TAQWACORES
DIR: Eyad Zahra

For better or worse, Muslims and the Muslim experience have been much more represented in media of all sorts since September 2001, but most of those depictions have tended to focus on one particular issue, whatever the angle. Perhaps the most refreshing aspect of THE TAQWACORES is that it almost entirely ignores questions of radical Islam, terrorism or the victimization of the Muslim community. Instead the focus is on the underground Muslim punk scene in Boulder, Colorado.

Director Eyad Zahra gives the film a washed out look, giving the impression that Boulder really needs this energizing music, but it is the script as much as the images that makes the film interesting. Without being heavy handed about it, and with a real sense of humour, the film looks at the way its characters sometimes struggle to reconcile their beliefs with the punk scene. This leads to a lot of thought provoking moments, especially in the prayer meeting led by Jehangir (a brilliant, charismatic performance by Dominic Rains), and to some big laughs (almost everything that Noureen DeWulf says as burqua clad Rabeya is hilarious). This is an energetic, refreshing, daring film that really throws you into a culture you probably didn’t know existed.

The only real downside to THE TAQWACORES is that the ending doesn’t quite satisfy, it feels cheap and stock, and therefore lacks the emotional punch it’s looking for, but it doesn’t undermine the film as a whole, and I really hope someone will pick it up for UK distribution so you get a chance to see it.

THE ARBOR
DIR: Clio Barnard

I don’t for the life of me understand why this film exists. It’s not that he story of the short life of playwright Andrea Dunbar (who wrote the titular play and RITA, SUE AND BOB TOO, before dying of a brain hemorrhage at just 29) and of what happened to her daughters - especially her mixed race first born Lorraine - after her death isn’t interesting, in fact it is fascinating and absolutely heartbreaking, it’s just that the way Clio Barnard tells it is so strange that it just doesn’t function as a film.

Barnard recorded audio interviews with Dunbar’s family, and other people connected to this awful story. That audio is what we hear in the film, but what we see are actors playing each role, lip-syncing to the recorded interviews. It is incredibly distracting. Barnard says that she wants to call attention to the fact that you’re watching a film, well… well done, I suppose. I never got away from the fact that this was a construct, never stopped being distracted by the fact that the lip-syncing was often a little off, and thus I never entirely engaged with the story.

My best friend isn’t a great cinephile, in fact he’s often described cinema as radio with pictures, usually I’ll argue with him until I’m blue in the face about that, but here he’s a hundred percent right. This is radio, it’s audio interviews, put them on the radio where they belong, where the impact of the story won’t be distracted from by the self consciously artsy manner of its telling. This is a story that should be told, just not this way.

IN YOUR HANDS
DIR: Lola Doillon

Britain and America seem to struggle finding roles worthy of the talents of Kristin Scott-Thomas. Happily that’s not the case for French filmmakers, who have helped this exceptional actress to a real career renaissance in her late forties. Unfortunately Lola Doillon’s latest, while it offers Scott-Thomas another emotionally intense role, doesn’t match up to the likes of I’VE LOVED YOU SO LONG or last year’s LEAVING as a whole.

The problem is perhaps that the film is stripped down, so simple, that it feels like something that belongs not on film but on the stage. It’s largely a two hander, with Scott-Thomas as a doctor who is kidnapped and held captive by a younger man (Pio Marmaï) who wants revenge, but won’t tell her what for. As he holds her for longer they begin to talk and form a connection.

The scenes between Scott-Thomas and Marmaï are great extended exercises in expressive, largely silent, and very subtle acting, but Doillon doesn’t make the most of them. The film is static, not very imaginatively shot, and never really comes to life visually. There are also problems with her script, notably the confusing psychology of Scott-Thomas’ character, whose relationship to her captor seems to change from scene to scene with little explanation, and no sense of a continuous arc. Kristin Scott-Thomas is a good enough actress to sell each individual moment, but when you step back and look at the whole, her character makes little sense.

This should have been intense and claustrophobic; instead it’s stagy and frustrating. It is worth a look if, like me, you’re a big fan of Kristin Scott-Thomas, otherwise this is very missable.

MEMORY LANE
DIR: Mikhaël Hers

There is a nice, freewheeling, feel to this Rhomeresque film about a groups of twenty and thirtysomething friends hanging out in Paris over a summer. There are few big events, narrative structure is minimal, instead what we get is a sense of being invited into this group.

The performances are naturalistic and understated all round, with everyone good individually but, perhaps more importantly, also gelling believably as a group of old friends. Standouts include Louis-Ronan Choisy, who builds on his debut in Francois Ozon’s LE REFUGE with a nicely played turn as a bandleader whose unstated but obvious mutual attraction to their keyboard player (Dounia Sichov, also excellent) forms the closest thing this film has to a narrative through line. Also standing out among the ensemble is Lolita Chammah, whose part here, along with her very different turn in COPACABANA, suggests that she’s inherited quite a bit of her mother Isabelle Huppert’s talent.

MEMORY LANE strikes some very identifiable notes as it passes through the day to day dramas of real life, dealing with some big issues; love, sex, depression and death among them without becoming overdramatic or depressing itself. Indeed this is a very light and easily enjoyed film, largely because it is so easy to spend time in the company of these people. If you don’t mind a film that meanders a little then MEMORY LANE is definitely worth seeking out.

An interview with Spork director J.B. Ghuman, Jr and actress Rachel G. Fox

For a lot of reasons I felt much more relaxed for this interview than I had for my last one. Rather than a rather blank office we sat in the Central London Hospital Club bar, much cosier (if noisier) surroundings than a conference room. Even before the interview actually began JB Ghuman and Rachel Fox were funny and engaging, both remarking on my little voice recorder when I put it on the table.

From the dress (JB remarked on Rachel’s tight striped number, saying that she looked “like a sexy zebra”) to the manner the whole interview was casual, the tone relaxed and chatty, as JB and Rachel expanded on my questions, often ending up talking among themselves. I hope the transcript manages to capture the tone between JB and Rachel, which was close, chummy and occasionally good naturedly kidding. The talk gets a little rambling at times, but you try and interrupt these two in mid flow (you’ll see what I mean).

I don’t know if I’ve just been lucky so far, but this was another very easy interview, with two people who seemed excited about their film and were only too happy to talk, again we overran, I was booked for 20 minutes, but the interview ended up running for the better part of half an hour.

My questions and other interjections will appear in normal type, with JB Ghuman’s answers in bold, and Rachel Fox’s in italics.

[Before the interview, I’ve just put my recorder on the table]
J.B Ghuman: Oh cool, looks like a robot. We’re easily impressed.

Rachel Fox: Yeah, amused very easily.

24FPS: Nice and easy to use, fortunately.

24FPS: Okay… I wanted to start by asking you about casting, because with a film so character driven as this it’s obviously key to its success so; that process from both of your points of view, and JB, particularly casting Spork, because it’s such an unusual role.

JBG: First of all, my casting director is Jeremy Gordon, and he came in and it was a very Type A casting situation, we put out a casting notice and we got hundreds of kids to come in for all the parts. Spork, I had seen tons and tons of kids. I got this crazy reaction; I wrote the film, just some crazy artist who doesn’t know what he’s doing. I didn’t know what to think, I didn’t know if agents were going to think “Oh my God”. The dialogue is very crisp, it’s very candid and to the bone, so I didn’t think that I’d get that big of a response, but I got this crazy response; all these casting directors and agencies “we love your script”, blah blah blah. LA’s so weird.

I got hundreds of kids to come in for the different parts, and Spork, obviously that role was the big role to cast and I saw hundreds of kids, but when Savannah Stehlin came in. I’m big on character, so I don’t know if they say you should or shouldn’t dress for the part, to me I think that’s totally good advice, and she came in totally dressed for the part. I’m very visual, so for me as a writer/director, I love that stuff. She had her crazy hair, she came in in jean overalls and she really nailed it. I didn’t give her nay notes and I said “definitely her for the callback”. She came back for the callback and she had to do the scene where she yells at her mother – the gravestone. I didn’t want to do that scene, I went through an acting phase myself and I hate, hate auditions like that.

RF: Where you have to scream and cry.

JBG: It’s like, really? And you’re outside the room and you hear the other actor screaming. I hate auditions like that.

RF: I agree.

JBG: Because, when you get the part you have time to prepare.

RF: But in the audition you just have to turn it on right there, and you get one time to really nail it.

JBG: It’s like “Oh, nice to meet you. Go crazy.” And you’re thinking “Oh my God, I have to act like a sociopath” [Both laugh]. It’s so weird.

RF: And you have to not care about what anyone thinks.

JBG: And then they say “thank you” and you think “I’m going to leave, and totally go crazy”. It’s so unhealthy to do that to anyone, let alone children. But, mind you, I did it. I put it in there, because I was scared, it’s my first film, so what if I get on set and... this moment is so pivotal in the film, and if this girl, whoever I cast as Spork, can’t do it… It’ll ruin the film, it won’t have any heart, cause she won’t ever get there. Savannah came in – nailed it – never embarrassed for a second or anything, she came in and completely fell apart. I hugged her, she was crying, and it wasn’t even that, it was just her vibe and her energy. I’m not Miss Cleo, but she had a great vibe to her, I knew that she was the one.

Rachel came in – her story is awesome [Rachel laughs] – Rachel Fox who’s sitting next to me who played Betsy Byotch, she’s been working for a while, she was in Desperate Housewives, so she didn’t come in the conventional classic way, she wasn’t waiting in a queue at a casting session, me and Rachel had a meeting. Cause when you’re an actor, in the States at least, and you’ve done a lot of work you end up taking meetings with a director rather than coming in for casting. She came in, and she took a different route, Rachel didn’t come in in character, didn’t come in looking the part with her bangs and super bitchy. She actually came in very sweet and humble, very professional, and she brought a guitar with her.

RF: [Laughs] Yeah, I remember.

JBG: And she was like: “I’m going to sing you a song”. [Rachel laughs]. The song was about loving yourself, and I said “You know you’re up for the evil rotten bitch, right?”

RF: I came in like the opposite of my role, I don’t know why I did that.

24FPS: But obviously the singing is key to the part as well.

JBG: Yes, and she performed the song, she’s a singer songwriter as well and she wrote and sang it, and she nailed it. So of course that’s great… and now let’s read some lines where you have to be a complete witch, and she did, and what it did show me is that she has incredible range. Lucky for Rachel her body of work really complemented the part, because she had done a role on Desperate Housewives where she played a really mischievous, evil, female Omen child, and I knew, when she left the room. We already had the casting session out, it had been set up before I met Rachel, so I ended up seeing hundreds of girls for the part, but throughout the process Rachel was the comparison. I was like “Not better than Rachel, nah, not better than Rachel” [Rachel giggles]. At the end they said “who do you want?” “I want Rachel, as long as she will frost her hair”.

RF: [Laughing] Cut my bangs, bleach blonde, completely.

JBG: But she did it.


RF: That pretty much explains it from my perspective too, I don’t even remember why I came in sweet, with my guitar. I was just being myself.

JBG: You are sweet.

RF: Thank you. I don’t know, maybe I wanted to show how much I could flip it, how evil I could be. It was fun, we had a kind of general meeting, we talked about stuff and life and then about the script. I got the script from my agent and I loved it, and I definitely wanted to be a part of it.

24FPS: The singing and dancing is a key part for you, so I imagine there was a lot of rehearsal for that. How involved were you in putting those scenes together, you and the other girls?

RF: Really involved. I actually had to learn three different dances. One was the dance down the hallway, I had to learn a Britney Spears dance – a Britney Spears parody – and then I had to learn a dance from the sixties… sixties disco music so ... Actually a lot of the rehearsals were quick, we had to learn the dances kinda quickly. We learnt the sixties dance disco thing the day before we shot it, so we had to be good with picking up things quickly. I actually didn’t sing in the film, just mostly dancing.

JBG: People keep calling my film a musical. It’s not a musical. They say “It’s like Glee”, and no it’s not, it’s way cooler.

RF: No one’s singing. Just dancing.

JBG: I keep calling it a dancesical. “That’s not a word”. I’m like, “it is now”.

24FPS: Another big element in the film is obviously the visual design of it, which is very striking. So how did you and the art department go about designing that very particular world?

JBG: I’m what you call a type ADD control freak, so… All of this was in my script: the lightning bolt on the finger, the boom box with the Christmas lights around it, it was all in my script. The vines reaching her feet, her collage wall, it was all written down from 2003. How did I go about it? You know, ---, he was my visual effects supervisor, I art direct my own films, and I just came into it with a big imagination and hard work. It just came about by seeing things, drawing things out, working with my special effects artitsts. I’m a huge Tim Burton fan…

24FPS: I can see that with the vines.

JBG: Yeah, so obviously I don’t have a Tim Burton budget, so I don’t have Johnny Depp running around with scissors on his hands, but I do love surrealism. To me, everyone has their own reasons for telling stories, I like to see stories from a point of view we can’t see with our two eyes, cause to me if you’re going to tell a story, why tell it in a way you can experience it? Might as well tell it in a way we can’t ever see it, so that’s why I like that stuff.

24FPS: As far as Betsy is concerned, I think we’ve all met a Betsy…

RF: In our lives, absolutely, yeah.

24FPS… you don’t have to name names, obviously, but is there a particular Betsy that you based yours on?

RF: I had a couple of Betsy’s, cause I’ve been to different schools and I know that every school I went to definitely had at least one Betsy, so I pulled from the different ones that I knew. I guess I should thank them for helping me out with the role, cause I just basically pulled from exactly what they did. I just used that as my backbone for Betsy Byotch, I remember the feeling that they gave me in my stomach when they were doing really evil things, and I tried to put that into Betsy and give the audience that feeling, and give the other actors that feeling. That same really evil, tight feeling.

JBG: Rachel Fox is strong, even if you’re unaware of it. Most these Betsy Byotch girls are insecure, anybody that’s really mean to other people and is really hurtful and vile with their mouth and just overall spiteful, they’re obviously very insecure. It reads as very strong, but it comes from a place of their own pain and all that crap. Rachel Fox has a very strong sense about her. At her age usually girls are girls and women are women and Rachel Fox is lucky, at least I think so, because her face is… the way her bone is structured, and her cheeks, she has the semblance of a woman, which gives her a strong face. For a girl who is 12, 13, 14, she’s very mature, so it can read as very bitchy. I don’t know how much in your private life that affects you, or if you go to school and everyone thinks you’re a total snob or what. But when you look at Rachel Fox, she’s so sweet [looking at her in this moment, sweetly embarrassed would be an accurate description], she came in with a guitar and sang a song about loving yourself [Rachel starts laughing, clearly a little embarrassed]. Then if you Google her she’s got this song – I hope I’m not embarrassing you – she’s got this song about shopping, she’s like this Clueless girl. [To Rachel] That’s a 90’s reference, sorry.

RF: No, I know.

JBG: She’s like this valley girl, and she’s actually very funny and she’s very sweet, very kind. She’s very sweet to me at least, but she has this sense of strength about her whereas in the film it comes across as very bitchy evilness, which is good. Most of those girls come across as very strong, and they’re leaders, but the real reason is that they’re so insecure, that’s why they make such an effort to be a leader and be so mean. Lucky for me her strength can be perceived in this film as very bitchy. Might be why you keep getting those roles.

RF: It must be.

JBG: She’s like a little Madonna, her face is very angular, she has these strong cheekbones and your eyebrows are so beautifully pronounced over your eyes.

RF: [slightly questioning] Thank you.

JBG: She looks like a woman, but she’s 13 in the film. So when you put Rachel Fox around other 12, 13, 14 year old girls you’re like: “That’s the leaderbitch”. [Rachel and I start laughing]. She looks like the mean girl in the middle, but it’s really because she looks so mature, and so strong. I hope that doesn’t backfire on you.

RF: I hope it doesn’t either. That’s a good point.

JBG: Do you get flak at school for being a brat? Do they call you snobby girl?

RF: No, cause they know me, but like you were saying I’m just a girl with a guitar; I’m nice and happy and I don’t hurt people, I’m not mean.

JBG: If I didn’t know you, and I was a nerd in school, I’d be like “here comes Rachel Fox, she thinks she’s so cool cause she’s on TV”

RF: It’s so funny, I asked my friend what her first impression of me was, when she saw me, and she described something similar to what you said.

JBG: For film and roles it’s great, cause you walk in the room and it’s “she’s very strong”, but in life the kids who aren’t as strong would think “She’s such a brat”.

RF: They’re so quick to judge you by the way you look.

24 FPS: That’s another thing I wanted to bring up in relation to the Betsy character

JBG: Oh yeah, you’re here.

[Everyone laughs]

24FPS: No, it’s fine, thank you…. was that you do seem very nice and very sweet…

RF: Thank you

24FPS:… So does that make it a particular challenge to play someone who’s so bitchy, and such a vile person?

RF: Well, acting is what I do, so I have to go and change into completely different people, so it’s not difficult, it’s just fun. I just look at other people, other Betsy Byotches and I follow after them, I look at other films, at the people in them and I follow after that. It’s what I do. Everything has its challenges, but, it’s just fun for me, it’s like an activity.

24FPS: Something else I was going to bring up with both of you actually is, are there other films that you particularly looked at? Particularly, JB, from your point of view; there are a lot of different cultural references in Spork so I wondered what the particular influences were on you?

JBG: I keep laughing when people ask “who are you influenced by?” and I’m a complete hack, I’m the Gwen Stefani of filmmaking; I don’t care, I will openly say it just like she does: I am a giant mixtape of things I love, and anybody who says otherwise is totally lying. To think you have an original voice is so egotistical. I don’t think it’s possible, I think it’s like saying “My hair’s an original colour”. Everyone has their twin and for me, of course, I’m just a collage of what I like – I’m confetti. I love Todd Solondz; Welcome to the Dollhouse. I keep being told “it’s like Glee, it’s like Napoleon Dynamite” I’m like, “seriously, dig deeper”, neither of those movies inspired me. Welcome to the Dollhouse I love, Todd Solondz I love, such a talent, and why he’s not doing giant studio films I don’t know, maybe he doesn’t want to.

24FPS: I can see that, and also I mentioned John Hughes.

JBG: I like John Hughes, I’m more of a John Waters… actually that sounds so arrogant. I’m not John Waters, but I’m more of a fan of John Waters. John Hughes, he’s a little before my time [Ghuman will be 30 in December]. I didn’t really get into it, cause it was very much a Molly Ringwald misfit, it wasn’t really biting or offensive, it was just heartfelt 80’s, whereas to me John Waters was crazy. Divine and drag queens killing each other [Rachel laughs], surburban moms becoming serial killers? I’m like, he’s amazing, he’s so crass and crazy. So I love him for his characters.

24FPS: Rachel, were there any particular things that you looked at? Heathers seemed like a reference to me.

JBG: She’s not gonna get that, but Heathers was a huge reference for me, thank you for saying that.

RF: What is Heathers?

JBG: Heathers was the predecessor to Mean Girls.

RF: That’s amazing, cause I was just about to say Mean Girls, the role of Rachel McAdams, that was what I based Betsy Byotch on in my mind. I pulled from my own mind and girls that I knew, but Mean Girls was the main film.

JBG: Which, literally, everyone called the new Heathers.

24FPS: [To Rachel] Well, Kim Walker in Heathers.

JBG: Yeah! Heathers is a little darker, cause in Heathers people die.

RF: Oh God.

24FPS: One thing we haven’t mentioned yet is that Spork has a particular identity, as an intersex kid, which is very unusual, as a leading character. Did that make it especially challenging to get the film made, and have you heard anything back from people with the same issues?

JBG: Did it make it harder? No. I wasn’t, and I openly say this, I wasn’t and am not trying to make an anthem for intersex, hermaphrodite, whatever term is considered not offensive, for that walk of life. I’m a gay man, and I didn’t make this movie for gay men. I’m not trying to speak for anybody, other than the misfit. With this movie I was reaching out to everybody in the room; the cool kid, the nerdy kid, everybody. So, was it difficult making this movie cause that was my lead? No, because it’s indie film, I wasn’t going to Fox or Disney where, yeah, that probably would have been an issue.

Did anybody come back to me? Yeah, I’ve got nothing but positive feedback though, I think because I didn’t try to hit the nail on the head, because I didn’t try to do a shower scene where she cries at her crotch. I’m not trying to go there, I’m not trying to speak for the intersex community, I’m trying to tell a story about a misfit, who happens to be intersex – or in my film we say hermaphrodite. I think the reason the community has responded so positively is probably because I did that, because otherwise I’d probably have fallen short. I don’t know the jargon, I did not research references and a ton of media for hermaphrodite little girls or boys, because I didn’t really feel the need to, because that’s not really the centre of my story. I treated it just like a common thing kids go through, or just something she had, but really she needed to love herself for who she was, not just because she’s a hermaphrodite.

24FPS: We’ve talked about this a bit, but as far as the cast goes most of them are very young. So is there a specific approach that you took to directing the kids as opposed to the adults?

JBG: Yes. I love answering this question when I’m with the kids. When we’re on stage with one of the adult actors I don’t know how to answer it without offending them. It’s my first feature; I’ve done music videos, I’ve done some documentary shorts, I’ve done experimental art shorts and I’ve done a couple of narrative shorts, but never a feature film with kids. So, as a first time feature director, I was nervous, and I didn’t want to step on anybody’s toes, do I say “Do it again, but my way”… is that rude, what do I do? [24FPS laughs]. I went through an acting phase myself so I did know a little bit from an actor’s perspective. But working with kids, I would say, is awesome, by far a better experience and I’ll say that to anybody. I think we’re born smart, and then as we get older I think the trick is staying smart, not getting smart, kids are just so much more uninhibited, they’re so free.


I’m sitting next to Rachel Fox right now and she comes across as very mature, very together, but on the set he ego is so minimal. She doesn’t have that life experience behind her, she hasn’t been told, she hasn’t been told yes or no so much. So she she’s so accessible, so open, so free and that goes for a lot of my kid cast, it was like having fun. They take their art very seriously, and they work very diligently, their age doesn’t make a difference, they’re just as focused as the adult actors. But on the flipside, directing them and handling them, particularly with Rachel cause she’s here now, it was very much more like having fun, which I appreciate. Mind you, the material is light hearted so it wasn’t like we were doing Gone With the Wind. So maybe it’s a different experience if I were doing Let The Right One In or something [laughing] might be a little more intense. But in this situation, which is my genre, and I’ll probably stick to my genre for life, it was fun.

The only part I was a little nervous about was the dialogue versus the age. Rachel, and I’m sure you’d be fine to admit it, she said “I don’t wanna say the F word so much”, and I said “It’s in the script sweetie”, she’s like “alright, well can I do some where I say fudge?”

RF: Yeah! I remember that, we did takes of one scene where sometimes I’d say freaking, and other times I said the F word.

JBG: And she’s a sweetheart, and she’s like “I don’t talk like this in real life” and she’s a very professional actress… this is actually a cute thing, but she always gave me two options. She said “Look, I’ll totally do it your way, the way in the script” but she’s an independent young woman, growing into herself, and she has the right to own what she does, and she’s like “Well, I have my own rights and wrongs and I’d like to do it both ways, just to say that I did my thing”. That was the only thing. Even with the other kids… she had to say some racist stuff, they had to curse a lot, Charlie was being called a fag, I was like “this is so awkward”.

RF: It was awkward for me. It didn’t matter cause when you watch it it’s not… it’s funny.

JBG: I think in the moment it feels a little more biting, cause you haven’t seen the final product yet, so in my brain I knew what the final result was, and it’s not supposed to be taken that seriously, it’s hyperreality.

RF: Exactly, when we watch it it’s funny.

JBG: But in the moment it’s… “This dialogue’s really intense”. I’m saying “It’s not supposed to be, just say it, trust me”.

RF: [laughs] “Just trust me”, yeah.

JBG: Cause in the moment you would have to say it over and over and over again. She’d say “I really feel bad saying ‘fucking wee wee’”. [Rachel bursts out laughing]. I’d tell her “Just trust me, it won’t be taken so seriously once you see the film.

24FPS: You’re using a lot of stereotypes obviously, but also to break them, I think.

JBG: Right, so in the final result once the music was in and the colours and it was very colour booky and hokey. The film doesn’t take itself very seriously… I mean, Spork falls off a swing at the end, right when she says “love yourself” and then once that energy is put in there… I hope at least, people realize it’s not… that offensive.

RF: No, it’s not.

24FPS: I think we’re going to be wrapping up pretty soon, so I just wanted to ask you both about your next projects. JB, obviously this one took a while, so is there something you’re going to be able to move on to quite soon?

JBG: Oh, absolutely. I have another script called Rhino, and it’s another JB collage/ripoff of fifty things. It’s about a half latino half… I keep saying Mullato, but that’s not the right word, it’s actually Blatina, which is more offensive. I’m like “don’t say that” [24FPS laughs] but it’s half black, half latin girl – she’s blatina – and it’s hopefully Rosario Dawson, she’s my muse I’m going after. She dresses in these lace unitards, she’s crazy, she’s so awesome. It’s very late seventies, she’s obsessed with Prince; Purple Rain era [to Rachel] that’s another era where you’ll go “What?” [Rachel laughs] but it’s crazy, it’s fun. She works in a tollbooth on the highway. It’s very, very dark, but funny, and it’s a film more about being yourself in that she teaches people to strip down to their underwear and kinda explode into magic and love and all that crazy hippie shit I like. So it’s gonna be a musical.

24FPS: So this one IS a musical?

RF: This is going to be singing and dancing?

JBG: Well, it’s more of a dancesical again. I don’t get singing, I can’t sing so I can’t relate. But I can dance. And I’m putting together a studio film with Hasbro.

24FPS: And Rachel, I understand you’re working with Daniel Craig.

RF: Yes, I just wrapped a film called Dream House, we shot up in Toronto for a couple of weeks, it’s with Daniel Craig and Naomi Watts. It’s really cool, and it’s coming out February of next year.

24FPS: So that’s a big release in the States, right?

RF: Yeah, it’s a worldwide release, with Universal, and it’s a psychological thriller so the complete flipside of Spork, which is a comedy and this is a dark scary… it’s not a horror film, it’s a thriller.

24FPS: And just to finish up, again for the both of you. Leaving aside Spork, what’s the best film you’ve seen lately?

JBG: [To Rachel] You go first.

RF: I just saw The Social Network, and I thought that film was amazing, cause all the actors in it were really… [to JB] Have you seen it?

JBG: No, I’ve been told by so many people that it’s amazing.

RF: It’s such a good film [to 24FPS] have you seen it?

24FPS: It’s one of the best films of the year.

JBG: Does it make you hate Facebook or like it?

24FPS: I hate Facebook already.

RF: Yeah, I hate Facebook too, but it makes you see the genius points of it, the creation and why it’s such a phenomenon.

JBG: [To 24FPS] Oh, really? I haven’t seen anything new.

24FPS: Doesn’t have to be new, just something you’ve seen lately.

JBG: Well, there’s a movie I watch all the time that I love.

RF: What is it?

JBG: The Dark Crystal. I love that movie, I love Jim Henson, so I’ve seen that movie on a loop. You know what, to give you a really cool answer, cause I’m watching movies for the Hasbro film I’m trying to put together, and I watched a film called Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains.

24FPS: I’ve been wanting to see that for ages.

JBG: I stumbled on it for research, cause it’s a rock n roll girl hero movie. It’s so good; Diane Lane and Laura Dern, so random, so obscure, but it’s so amazing. It has the drummer from The Clash and all these crazy people in it and it’s a really kickass movie.

24FPS: You can’t get it anywhere.

JBG: I have it, I got it on DVD, can you believe it?

24FPS: No.

RF: Where’d you find it?
JBG: Netflix. And it’s really good, Diane Lane’s obviously beautiful in it and she’s really talented, and the make up and the clothing. It’s so kickass to see it.

And with that I thanked JB and Rachel for a great interview. I hope you guys enjoyed it, any comments will of course be welcomed as I’m still pretty new at this whole thing.

LFF 2010 Review: Spork

DIR: J.B. Ghuman, Jr
CAST: Savannah Stehlin, Sydney Park, Rachel G. Fox,
Michael William Arnold

Last year, my LFF closed out with an offbeat American high school movie called DEAR LEMON LIMA, which, for some reason, no distributor has yet seen fit to give a UK release to. Hopefully SPORK, which is to some degree this year’s equivalent in the LFF programme, will not suffer the same fate.

SPORK is actually the name of the film’s main character (played by Stehlin); a female identifying intersex born 14 year old, who is an outsider at school. She’s bullied by a group of Britney Spears obsessed blondes who rule the school, led by the appropriately named Betsy Byotch (Fox), but when her friend Tootsie Roll is injured, Spork sees a way to get even with the people who have tormented her; win the school dance off.

This film rubbed a lot of the other critics I saw it with the wrong way, and I can understand why; the almost aggressive quirkiness of the film is definitely love it or hate it stuff, but I have to say, I found the whole thing inventive, irreverent, amusing and charming. There are a lot of influences, filmic and otherwise, at work in SPORK. At times it can feel a though director Ghuman is nodding to every kind of pop culture he can think of, but what this actually does is place the film very much in its own little world. It’s never quite clear when or where the film is set, because the references span several decades. On the one hand it’s post 1998, because of all the Britney Spears references, on the other people are still using tube TV, VCRs and there’s not a mobile phone to be seen. Blonde gang ‘The Bitches’ could easily have stepped out of MEAN GIRLS circa 1988 and yet the music (Britney aside) feels very modern, as does the dance culture to which Tootsie Roll and her friends belong.

This very individual look and world means that you accept some of the film’s surreal touches, which otherwise you might struggle with. Many of these moments also involve music, and few are as funny as the introduction of The Bitches, who appear singing and dancing their way down the hall to …Baby One More Time (and it seems that with this sequence Ghuman has hit on the one excuse good enough for the use of a Britney Spears song). There are a lot of other weird and funny things in the margins of this film, with standouts including a religious fair where there’s a sign on the wall saying “Choose Your God, Make Friends” and the occasional use of animation; a child’s drawing, in place of the sky over Spork’s trailer.

From time to time you can see what must have been a tight budget begin to bite (this is never more notable than in the nightclub that Spork and Tootsie Roll go to, which seems to be held together with sellotape and have about six people in it), but again, I didn’t mind an occasional roughness around the edges. Leaving this aside the only major complaint I had about the film is the amount of swearing, not because I'm offended, but because it will keep SPORK from getting the 12A certificate it should have in the UK to reach the audience it will mean most to.

The young cast is excellent. Savannah Stehlin is compellingly odd as Spork, it’s easy to see why, even leaving aside her intersex status, she’s an outsider at school, but she’s charming enough to ensure that you’re always on her side, rooting for her rather than laughing at her. Good as Stehlin is, the film is very nearly stolen from under her nose by Sydney Park, whose irrepressible energy as Tootsie Roll means that almost her every line scores a laugh. As the leader of The Bitches Rachel G. Fox is a perfect nightmare, like a junior version of Kim Walker’s school ruling Heather Chandler in the deathlessly brilliant HEATHERS. There are nice, if small, contributions from the cameoing adults though, including Beth Grant (in pretty much the same role she played in DEAR LEMON LIMA) and a very funny Keith David.

Dance is at the centre of the film, and it boasts an exceptional selection of songs and a quirky chiptune powered score by Casey James and The Stay Puft Kid, all of which adds to its slightly out of time 8-bit feel. The dance sequences are well choreographed, clearly executed (at least for the most part) by the actors and have a great energy to them.

This is Guman’s first feature, and for the most part it’s a confident and energetic debut. He uses a lot of stereotypes here, laughing as much at the stereotypes themselves as the kids that embody them. He also uses those stereotypes to, in the end, shatter many of them and to get the film to its heartwarming ending. In that way SPORK feels like a low budget 8-Bit tribute to John Hughes, if Molly Ringwald were intersex. Your tolerance for quirkiness may very, but I thoroughly enjoyed SPORK, and I’ll be interested to see where Ghuman goes from here.

LFF 2010 review: Black Swan [15]

DIR: Darren Aronofsky
CAST: Natalie Portman, Vincent Cassell, Mila Kunis,
Barbara Hershey, Winona Ryder

I’m used to being the odd one out. I’m the guy who didn’t think BORAT was funny; I’m the one person on the planet who didn’t like THE DARK KNIGHT and, slightly more relevant to our current topic, I’m the guy who thought THE WRESTLER was just… okay. I don’t do it on purpose. I don’t set out to take down popular or successful movies, and just so we’re clear about this, every single time I sit down to watch a film I am willing it to be great. So it was with a rather heavy heart that I exited BLACK SWAN, knowing that I was, again, about to be the odd one out.

I sometimes wonder if I’ve actually seen the same film as other people have reviewed, and certainly that’s the case here. Several reviews have already claimed BLACK SWAN as the film of the year, more have suggested that Natalie Portman’s name should just be engraved on the Best Actress Oscar right now, and for the entire 103 minutes that it ran I sat there thinking that surely this wasn’t the film that prompted those comments, that there must have been some sort of mix up.

The story focuses on Nina Sayers (Portman), a featured dancer with a New York based ballet company, who is elevated to the starring role in Swan Lake when long term principal dancer Beth (Ryder) is forced to retire. As Nina tries to embody the two sides of her role; the innocent White Swan and the seductress Black Swan, she begins to have disturbing visions, and to fear that new dancer Lily (Kunis) is plotting to steal her role.

I have only one thing - that I know of - in common with Darren Aronofsky; we both love Satoshi Kon’s anime psychological thriller PERFECT BLUE. Aronofsky has often spoken of his desire to remake that film in live action, and though it is not as marked as the trailer made it seem, that much better film is an obvious and heavy influence on BLACK SWAN. It is present in the central questions of the film; whether Nina’s demanding new role is driving her mad, whether she is in fact becoming that role and whether her rival Lily is real or a symptom of her psychosis. There are also several shots that echo PERFECT BLUE, most notably the first time we see Lily (or is it Nina’s reflection?), which is a direct visual quote of Kon’s film. That said, this isn’t the live action remake that Aronofsky has been pitching, rather it feels as though he’s taken PERFECT BLUE and Powell and Pressburger’s masterpiece THE RED SHOES, added a large dollop of melodrama, shoved them in a blender and hit frappe.

One area in which BLACK SWAN really does excel is its design and photography. The film is often mindblowingly beautiful, and Aronofsky’s shots, though I often found their symbolism groan inducingly simplistic (yes Darren, we’re getting the idea of Nina’s split personality, now that’s enough shots in mirrors, thanks), are often inventive and gorgeous in and of themselves. The treatment of the dance sequences is also striking, with the film putting us right on stage rather than positioning us (as Powell and Pressburger did) as an audience. There’s some especially good use of POV towards the end of the film, giving us a real feel for Nina’s disorientation.

The big problem with BLACK SWAN is that the film that surrounds these beautiful visuals (and the exceptional, eclectic, cast) is shrill melodrama near its worst. The script can be so generic and on the nose, especially when dealing with near caricatures like Nina’s controlling mother (Hershey) and faded star Beth MacIntyre (Ryder, in a performance so overblown it’s comical). Because the tone is so operatic at times I never managed to believe in the characters or the events in the story. Performance wise, scenery is chomped left right and centre. Few have so complete a meal as Winona Ryder, but Hershey and Cassell are almost equally guilty.

Natalie Portman gives probably the best performance in the film, but she’s by no means great, and though she’ll likely get one an Oscar nomination would be laughably misplaced. Like the rest of the cast she telegraphs a lot, to the point that it’s laughable that the people around her don’t notice sooner and with more urgency that there’s something very wrong. To give credit where it’s due though, she works hard and her dance sequences, which she appears to have done almost entirely herself, are often stunning. Mila Kunis has much less to do than the trailer might suggest. Lily is supposed to be Nina’s mirror image (Black Swan to Nina’s White), but she’s only very loosely defined and Kunis is a rather one-dimensional bad girl.

Ever since this film was first announced, fans have been drooling at the prospect of one scene… no, not the climactic performance of Swan Lake… the lesbian scene between Portman and Kunis. There is good news and bad if you’re going to BLACK SWAN for that moment. The bad news is, sorry boys, no nudity. On the other hand, the scene is rather fetching and it gets pretty hot and heavy. However, that’s no real compensation for its utter redundancy in the film. There’s no reason for it to be there aside from the fact that it’s titillating, it seems to me more like a publicity grab than an actual contribution to the film.

It’s not so much that BLACK SWAN is an awful film; it’s just that the combination of elements didn’t work for me. I can see what Aronofsky is reaching for here, and I can see that there might be a good film in it if it were more dialled back, less operatic in tone and more concerned with the psychology of Nina. At the end of the day, rather than recommending that you see this film, I’d suggest that you log on and add THE RED SHOES and PERFECT BLUE to your netflix queue, and then have yourself a double bill. You’ll have a not dissimilar experience (outside of seeing Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis make out), but by the end you’ll have seen two masterpieces rather than one disappointment.

LFF 2010 Mini Review: The Sleeping Beauty

DIR: Catherine Breillat

In my review of her last film, BLUEBEARD, I mentioned that I haven’t, until recently, got on with Catherine Breillat’s work. This is her second adaptation of a fairytale, and though it marks something of a return to her often pretentious ways of old, THE SLEEPING BEAUTY also has a great deal to recommend it.

Like BLUEBEARD before it, this film has a sumptuous visual style, which makes it seem as though the movie has been torn from the pages of a beautifully illuminated storybook. It seems too that Breillat has become more comfortable with this new aesthetic; she’s moving the camera much more, with shots being more dynamic, less like artistic tableaux.

This being Catherine Breillat, THE SLEEPING BEAUTY is little like the classic fairytale. It begins traditionally enough, with three fairies (who are delayed in attending the birth because they are bathing topless in a stream), each conferring gifts on a princess named Anastasia after she is cursed by a witch. From there it becomes very odd, with the film following the six year old princess (Carla Besnainou) as she wanders the world in her dreams (while sleeping for a century, after which she’ll wake up aged 16). She stays with a family for a while, but when her older adopted brother Peter is seduced by the snow queen she leaves to look for him, encountering strange kingdoms, creatures, and people along the way. A century later Anastasia wakes up as a beautiful 16 year old (Julia Artamanov), and begins a romance with Peter’s great grandson.

At times THE SLEEPING BEAUTY has glimpses of the Breillat of old; pretentious, boring, obsessed with sex, but for the most part it’s engagingly strange, and has a rather hypnotic quality thanks to the very particular and beautiful visual style, which betrays the rather unlikely influence of Terry Gilliam. The sheer visual beauty extends to the cast as well, especially the older versions of Anastasia and Peter, whose handsomeness as a couple actually aids the otherworldly feel of the film. The performances aren’t exactly brilliant, but the rather mannered acting does actually suit the film.

I’ll have to see this film again to be sure exactly how much I like it, there is a frustrating sense that the entire film is an 80 minute digression, gorgeous though it may be, but it is diverting in both the strange alternate reality it creates and in its visuals. I’m looking forward to giving it another look, and that’s not something I’m used to saying about Breillat’s work.

LFF 2010 Mini Reviews

SCHASTYE MOE
[MY JOY]
DIR: Sergei Loznitsa

Guess what? The title’s ironic. For me it was ironic on two levels; not only is there absolutely no joy depicted in MY JOY, but I got very little joy from it. It starts off as little more than a series of vignettes, tenuously linked by the presence of a truck driver (Viktor Nemets). He has a run in with some corrupt traffic cops, he’s told a story by an old man, he walks through a town, he has a run in with three men who want to steal what he’s transporting. And then, about an hour in, he’s gone from the film, at which juncture the film flies off on several random tangents, mostly focused on a mute bearded man. It does slowly (very, very slowly) draw together the various strands, but by that point I was a long way past caring.

The problem really is that we never learn anything about any of these characters or their lives, the whole film is just a series of ugly events, and for that to have any meaning for me I really have to be able to care about the people to whom those events are happening, and that was never the case with these near mute ciphers.

The only vignette that I really engaged with was a brief episode in which the truck driver, stalled by a long traffic jam, meets a young prostitute touting for business. I thought I recognised the actress, and the end credits confirmed that she is Olga Shuvalova, who I last saw in the exceptional EVERYBODY DIES BUT ME. Shuvalova is so forceful, and at the same time so vulnerable, as this nameless girl that in just five minutes she’s more interesting than anything else in the film.

MY JOY does look very good, especially in a menacing nighttime scene in the middle of the film, but the punishingly slow pace and the utter lack of interest I had in the characters made that scant compensation in a film from which I would like to claim back all but about five minutes of my time.


DES FILLES EN NOIR
[YOUNG GIRLS IN BLACK]
DIR: Jean Paul Civeyrac

They’re known as Emos now, apparently. They were Goths when I was growing up, and there was probably some other name for them when you were a kid, but the one thing that hasn’t changed from generation to generation is that those kids who wore black, thought everything – including life – was crap and romanticised dead rock stars were really bloody annoying. On that level, I suppose, YOUNG GIRLS IN BLACK is just about an unqualified success. On all other levels, however…

The bulk of the film unfolds over a single day; the day on which friends Noemie (Elise Lhomeau) and Priscilla (Lea Tissier) have decided to enact a suicide pact together. I can’t really fault Lhomeau and Tissier’s performances, it’s just that the characters are so irritating, and their problems so prosaic, that you just want to slap a bit of sense into them and tell them both to grow up. The other problem is that the film is just so predictable. The minute any pact is mentioned it seems obvious how it is going to end, and end it does, sadly the film refuses to follow suit.

The last twenty of the mere 85 minutes that YOUNG GIRLS IN BLACK runs are barely explicable, the film is so obviously over, and yet it continues, introducing new characters and ever more clichéd and corny moments, before ending with a shot which is simultaneously cheap and pretentious (something of a feat, to be fair).

Ultimately, YOUNG GIRLS IN BLACK is a demonstration of the fact that while strong acting is always welcome in a movie, it can’t always rescue one that isn’t working.

LFF 2010 Mini Review: Boxing Gym

DIR: Fred Wiseman

Strange as it may sound, BOXING GYM is an ideal companion piece to veteran documentarian Fred Wiseman’s last film; LA DANSE: THE PARIS OPERA BALLET. The worlds could scarcely be more different – the rarefied world of professional ballet as opposed to a Texas boxing gym frequented by amateurs and professionals alike, aged from about 6 to 68 – but the films both end up being largely about two things. The first of these is the physical feats the human body is capable of; the second the social structure that grows out of participation in each sport.

Wiseman is, arguably, the last true documentarian working. He deals not in imposed structure (BOXING GYM lack even the loose structure of LA DANSE) but the recording of moments of lives that interest him. This can be a little frustrating, and there are moments where you wish that BOXING GYM would at least build towards a defined event, but what Wiseman captures is so compelling in its raw honesty, and its visual beauty, that those concerns don’t detract from the experience of the film.

The only character we get to spend any great amount of time with is gym owner Richard Lord, who is shown in a great light as a teacher who is able to fit his approach to any sort of student. Aside from Lord though, most of the people in the film pass through the gym and the film. We see many in the background of multiple scenes, but most only get the focus turned on them briefly, be it the semi-pro female fighter whose baby sits in a car safety seat at the side of the ring as she spars, the three young men discussing the Virginia Tech shooting as they lace their gloves or the 19 year old with a black eye who assures Lord he’s not joining the gym so he can get in trouble.

Wiseman intercuts these snatches of conversation, these little pieces of people’s lives, with the almost ritualistic repetition of their training. It could be boring, but as in LA DANSE it becomes hypnotic, at times almost poetic. Wiseman is a brilliant director and cinematographer, and while never sacrificing the lived in reality of this film, he finds countless beautiful, artistic images with which to show us this world. BOXING GYM couldn’t be further from the likes of SUPER SIZE ME and SPELLBOUND if it tried, and while that will mean that it’s not for everyone I found it enthralling.

LFF 2010 review: Dark Love

DIR: Antonio Capuano
CAST: Irene de Angelis, Gabriele Agrio

It’s not that DARK LOVE is a bad film (actually it's a very good one), it’s just that it’s absolutely not the film that its director thinks it is. Antonio Capuano maintains that this tale of victim and perpetrator attempting to deal with the consequences of rape is a love story. It’s not (and thank God for that), but it is a genuinely interesting exploration of the reverberations and consequences of a single, hideous, act.

The film is largely divided into two continually intercut parts. One follows Ciro (Agrio), whose immediate remorse leads to his turning himself and the other rapists in, as he serves his time in prison and writes to his victim Irene (de Angelis). The other half of the film follows Irene as she tries to go on with her life in the wake of the attack in as normal a way as possible.

There are several striking things about DARK LOVE, one that immediately springs to mind is the way it deals with crime. Most films dwell on either the commission or the solution of a crime. Capuano shows no interest in either of those things, and he’s right, the detail of what happened to Irene really doesn’t matter, the violation is enough. Capuano is not a young man, but this vital, energetic, stylistically impressive film is unmistakably the work of someone who is still finding new ways of working with the medium. Most interesting is the the colour treatment, Capuano has spoken of using colour correction to literally paint the film frame by frame, especially in the fast moving opening scenes and a somewhat nightmarish scene in which Irene attempts to have sex with her boyfriend. He’s also notably well served by the beauty of the film’s Naples locations, with he shoots with affection, and bathes in beautiful light, especially as Irene walks in a rainstorm and discovers parts of the city she’s never previously explored.

However, what really makes DARK LOVE the success it is is the pair of excellent performances at its centre. As Ciro, Gabriele Agrio manages the difficult task of making a character who begins the film by participating in a truly terrible crime somewhat sympathetic. He allows us to see the slow, difficult, progress that Ciro makes in prison, and how his remorse ends up bringing out the best in him. Irene de Angelis is, if anything, even better as Irene. She has much less dialogue to work with, but her expressive face and fragile frame communicate huge amounts soundlessly. There is a clever parallel between the stories, as both seek solace in art; Ciro in writing and Irene in acting, and her final performance is some of the rawest and most emotional acting that de Angelis does in the film.

It’s a real shame that, after about 80 minutes of beautifully balanced drama, the third act of the film turns its focus completely onto Ciro. It undermines the central idea of the film; the parallel experiences of Ciro and Irene. It’s also the one time that the film settles into a really familiar rhythm and becomes rather predictable. After each scene, for the last twenty minutes, I was expecting the credits to roll, because it felt like the story had been over since Irene left it.

I may not agree with Antonio Capuano about what his film is, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that it is a very strong piece of work, with two very fine performances at its centre. If this one picks up a distributor I’d recommend that you seek it out.

LFF 2010: More mini reviews

WOMB
DIR: Benedek Filegauf

For me, this is one of the most disappointing films of the festival so far. It’s disappointing because the synopsis promised so much, but most of all it’s disappointing because even as you watch it you can see the great film that it should have been and isn’t.

WOMB is about Rebecca (played as an adult by Eva Green), as a child on holiday she meets Tommy (played as an adult by current Dr. Who, Matt Smith) but soon after they meet she moves with her Mother to Tokyo. 12 years later Rebecca returns, finds Tommy, and falls for him. When Tommy is killed in an accident Rebecca decides to have him cloned, and to give birth to him herself. As her ‘son’ grows up, Rebecca’s feelings for him become ever more complex.

The problem isn’t the premise. It’s the execution. You can tell that this is Hungarian writer/director Filegauf’s first English language film, because the problems with WOMB are all in the performances. The visuals are astounding. There is barely a frame of this film that isn’t beautiful enough to hang on the wall of an art gallery, everything in each shot; the colour, the geometry, the movement of the camera and the actors, is beautifully designed. Sadly these exquisite visuals are wrapped around performances that simply don’t work.

You have to blame Filegauf for the performances, because the flat, emotionless, line readings are given by every actor young and old, which means that they must have been directed into them. WOMB deals with controversial issues, powerful feelings challenging emotions, and none of it comes through in the dialogue because everyone delivers it as if they were reading their shopping lists to one another.

The only performer to rise above this is Eva Green, who suffers from the same issues as far as line reading goes, but is a good enough actor to bring a great deal of depth to Rebecca through her physical acting. There is more going on behind her eyes than in the whole of all the other performances (Matt Smith’s terrible display in particular) combined.

I’d like to recommend WOMB, it’s beautiful and it’s got such an interesting, provocative, premise, but it just doesn’t work. If Benedek Filegauf takes some English lessons though, his next film might be very interesting indeed.


AU FOND DES BOIS[
DEEP IN THE WOODS]
DIR: Benoit Jaquot

I like Isild LeBesco, since having seen her first in Cedric Kahn’s great serial killer movie ROBERTO SUCCO I’ve always enjoyed her work, but by God she comes unstuck in this giant exploitative mess from Benoit Jaquot, with whom she has worked several times before.

The central problem is perhaps that the film seems to exist, for at least an hour, purely as an excuse to get LeBesco to take her clothes off. Let me be clear; Isild LeBesco is a gorgeous woman, and I’m perfectly happy to look at her naked, but the problem is that that’s pretty much the only interesting thing in the first hour of DEEP IN THE WOODS, and her performance is so awful that she’s upstaged by her own nipples.

The film is set in rural France in the mid 19th century, and casts LeBesco as Josephine; the young daughter of what seems to be a relatively rich family. One day her Father invites a deaf mute boy (Nahuel Perez Biscayart) to dinner. The next day the boy returns, hypnotises and rapes Josephine and then hypnotises her into leaving with him. For what may be some weeks he holds her under his power, or does he?

After an hour consisting largely of laughably acted scenes of hypnotism (or ‘magnetism’) and rape – lots of rape – Jaquot suddenly decides that there should be some psychological depth here. He tries to inject this depth with a third act in which the film turns into a courtroom drama and examines the question of why Josephine never ran away from her captor. It’s completely unconvincing, reaching for a depth that just isn’t there in the first two acts, because the characters are so badly played, and defined only within very narrow parameters.

If you want to see Isild LeBesco naked (and trust me, you do) then might I recommend Google? It will take much less time than watching DEEP IN THE WOODS.


CARANCHO
DIR: Pablo Trapero

Film noir had its heyday in the 1940’s and 50’s, but while it’s not so dominant it remains a vibrant genre of filmmaking worldwide, and this is the first example I’ve seen from Argentina. It’s the new film by Pablo Trapero, which made me just a little wary, because I wasn’t as convinced by his earlier LION’S DEN as most critics. However, CARANCHO is a much more complete and confident film for Trapero.

CARANCHO explores the dark underbelly of what is apparently a lucrative industry in Buenos Aries; compensation for injury in traffic accidents. It follows disenchanted injury lawyer Sosa (the Argentinean film industry’s MVP, Ricardo Darin) and paramedic Lujan (LION’S DEN star Martina Gusman). But when the two begin a romance, and Sosa’s conscience begins to bite, his employers let him get away without a fight.

The overall thrust of the story is familiar from years of noir, but the specifics are well drawn and quite different. This is especially true of the first half of the film, which eschews the later thriller elements for a dark romantic drama, with Trapero taking his time in setting up the characters of Sosa and Lujan. It’s a tactic that pays off on several levels. First it gives the turns that the story takes in the second half all the more punch, second – and arguably more important – it spotlights the excellent performances of Darin and Gusman, and, despite the fact that both characters are coloured in notably dark shades of grey, allows you to sympathise with and root for them. Happily there is a great deal of chemistry between Darin and Gusman, both as romantic partners onscreen (which overcomes the age gap between them) and as actors, playing off one another to great effect.

CARANCHO is an energetic, dynamic, film. Even when it’s more concerned with building character it is still full of incident, and moves at a fast, stylish, clip with Trapero’s fluent camerawork powering it along. While the camera is almost always on the move; keeping action dynamic, it doesn’t often fall victim to that horribly semi-epileptic style that has afflicted much cinema lately.

The only disappointing thing about CARANCHO for me was the final shot. For over 100 minutes the film had avoided the expected, had been content to be messy rather than taking things down expected tracks. And then, right at the last hurdle, I felt that it fell, because the final incident is just too neat, too obvious, too poetic, for a film like this. That, though, doesn’t detract hugely from what is an excellent film, one that really puts Pablo Trapero on the map.

An interview with Katell Quillévéré

The day after seeing her debut film, UN POISON VIOLENT [LOVE LIKE POISON], I went to meet director Katell Quillévéré at the offices of Artificial Eye in London. I had prepared, but this was my first interview and I was (hopefully not too visibly) nervous. As I sat and waited I saw other journalists doing their interviews, which seemed to be taking a long time. Shit, had I prepared enough questions? Quick, think of more.

I was told I’d have 10 or 15 minutes with Katell, which put me a little more at ease, and I was ushered into the conference room where two women had been sitting with the other journalists. As I was introduced to Katell I was shocked to discover that she was the younger of the two, the woman I had assumed was the translator because she looked so youthful.

Katell was petite, and though she’s just 30 she looked a good deal younger. Shoulder length dirty blonde hair framed a classically pretty face with a friendly smile. If she noticed that when I was introduced I initially went to shake the translator’s hand she either found it funny, or was simply polite enough not to mention it.

I made a hash of the beginning of the interview, as my nerves prompted me to try and stretch by asking an opening question that I hadn’t written, and a follow up that was an attempt to be chatty but which, I realized the second I asked it, could easily have been taken as my asking for Katell’s qualifications. I learnt my lesson fast, and stuck to my notes thereafter, at which point Katell seemed to be much more at ease, and the interview began to fly by.

Our 10 to 15 minutes actually ran to 20, and so full were Katell’s answers that I didn’t get through all my questions. For the most part I think she understood my questions, but she answered, most of the time, in French.

My questions are in bold type.

24FPS: LOVE LIKE POISON is your first feature film as a director, so I wanted to ask you about how you got into film in the first place and what you’ve done before, because this will be the first time that a lot of my readers will have come across one of your films.

KATELL QUILLEVERE: At university in Paris I studied philosophy and Film, and I made three short films before this one.

24FPS: Did they also play at LFF, or other festivals?

KQ: There are shorts at the London Film Festival, I think. The first of my shorts did actually do quite a lot of festivals.

24FPS: Okay, so moving on to LOVE LIKE POISON specifically, it is a very intimate film in a lot of ways, and it feels like a very personal piece of work to me, so does it draw on any personal experience?

KQ: Yes, it’s a very personal film indeed. I wouldn’t say that it’s literally autobiographical, but there are some bits that are inspired by my own personal journey, especially, for example, her journey with regards to her faith, the young girl’s faith and her doubts and losing her faith. I grew up religiously, in a catholic family, and I lost that faith when I was around 14 years old… 13 or 14, and that was a very fundamental moment really. I find it very inspiring, this moment that we all go through as teenagers, this moment when you sort of topple into the adult world when this change happens, when certain illusions are lost and we enter a rather violent conscious world of awareness of the world around us. At the same time there is this loss of this perception we have of being an adult, as if the adult age is empty, as if there’s no such thing, that’s the realization that comes to us.

24FPS: So obviously the role of Anna is very personal to you, and that was one thing that really struck me in the film was that Clara Augarde – I hope I pronounced that right…

KQ: [In English] That was good

24FPS:… is a real discovery, so can you tell us a bit about the process of casting Clara as Anna, and about how you worked with her on set to get that rather remarkable performance out of her.

KQ: I did what is known as ‘wild casting’, where I don’t go to specific agents. [Katell and the translator burst out laughing]

Translator: It’s just, it’s an answer I know.

KQ: [In English] She knows my answers, so…

KQ: It took about four months to find her, because I put an ad in newspapers and I saw about 400 young girls. It also took time for me to know what I was looking for, that’s maybe also the reason I saw so many girls; to help me find out what I was looking for. When I saw Clara Augarde, there was a sort of obviousness there, no doubt also because now I was ready to see her, and now I knew what I was looking for, because casting is very much about a meeting of two people, two minds. In her physique she had that duality in that she was just between childhood and adulthood, and there was a contrast in that her face was still very childlike, and her body was already that of a woman. She had within her a natural ability to act; very correct, very right. Most of the work with her was then to push her, to get her to go towards more subtle things, or more intense things depending on what was required. What’s really quite particular about working with a teenager is that she is at that moment actually going through that change herself, so it’s sometimes quite complicated as an adult to get what’s going on in her head, because so much is changing and everything that’s happening around her has a bearing on her acting, on what she’s doing. Sometimes there would be a scene where she was just stuck, she’d just clam up and it wouldn’t work, and two hours later I got it, and it was because just before shooting somebody had said something to her and, you know, it was all going round in her head. So there’s something there as a teenage girl where she’s unable to separate when we’re shooting and when we’re not and it’s real, so she’d sometimes barricade herself into some sort of protection. You can’t do very much against that, that’s in her nature as a teenager, so the work is more about being patient and maybe accepting that we have to do something again a bit later. There’s a lot of mystery, and a lot of things that you can’t be in control of, even less so with an adolescent than with another actor.

24FPS: Were there a lot of scenes that you had to come back to with Clara, or did that just come up once in a while?

KQ: It happened only really once, but also, from a concrete point of view, because we didn’t have much money, I didn’t really have the means to do a lot of scenes again, so I had to find tricks to go around the problem.

24FPS: Another interesting thing, I found, in the film is the use of music, particularly given that the main character is a teenager and most of the music is choral, which isn’t what you might expect. So, were there certain pieces you always heard in the film, and how did you go about choosing the music for the film?

KQ: I worked with somebody called Frank Bouver, who is a musical researcher, so he was really there from the start, when I was writing I’d given him the script to read so he’d given me certain things to listen to and led me, guided me towards certain things. It’s through him that I discovered American religious folk music; Barbara Dane, Collie Ryan. So a lot of the things that he made me listen to I had chosen before even shooting, but at the same time I had to remain open, I didn’t know that they were definitely going to feature in the film, but I had chosen specific pieces. I also worked with a composer at the editing stage for the church scene; the lyrical songs and the organ music.

24FPS: I assume you also worked with the composer writing Pierre’s song, which struck me as one of the funniest moments of the film, and one of the most true about him as a teenager, because it’s so awkward.

KQ: Yes, that wasn’t the scene that was in the original script. It was supposed to be another scene, which I wasn’t able to film for financial reasons, because it was too expensive. [Laughing] So I had to invent this scene that happened just in the one room. So I had this idea of this song, and my DP, in his own free time, is also a little bit of a singer-songwriter [Laughing] and he’s also somebody who hasn’t completely quit adolescence, he’s still a bit of a teenager. So I asked him to write a song for Clara so he said “yeah, alright I’ll try” and two hours later, it was a Sunday, he came back and I listened to it and I thought it was perfect, because there was something that was really at the border of something ridiculous and really very serious, and that really is what adolescence is about.

24FPS: So, can I ask what was the scene that that replaced?

KQ: [I didn’t need this sentence translated] Non, c’est pas tres interessant.

24FPS: Fair enough. The film also deals with Catholicism in quite a lot of detail, particularly at the end with the reading of the letter to Galatians, which given Anna’s experiences in the film seems like quite a pointed criticism of Catholicism [KQ nods]. Is that something you’ve had a lot of controversy about, the way the film mixes a religious and a sexual awakening?

KQ: Originally, Paul’s letter to the Galatians wasn’t in the first script. Roughly a week before shooting I was actually present at a confirmation that was happening in that church, because I wanted to see what was happening for real, the real bishop that was there etc, and they read this text. I found it so violent and anachronistic for 2009, and it gave me this desire to integrate it in the movie. I wanted to put it in the film partly for me, in terms of my position towards Catholicism, but also because I felt the film needed it, because I felt that at this point something had to be said – something we feel from the beginning – but this difficulty to… apprehend the body, the flesh, and it was necessary for the spectator to be slightly surprised or shocked into something. So the film positions itself in a specific way; on the one hand there is a certain amount of love and respect for certain figures of faith, through, for example, Father Francois, who is a modern priest, generous. But also [the film] quite clearly is against Catholicism as an institution, which I find really aging, and out of touch with society today, and is still selling the guilt which you should have towards your body and flesh, that’s what it’s still promoting. I find that that’s really quite dangerous for teenagers.

24FPS: We have to finish up, but just before we do, one quick question: Aside from your own, what’s the best film you’ve seen lately?

KQ: [Laughs, then in English] OF GODS AND MEN, I really enjoyed it. I’m sorry to choose a French movie.

24FPS: No, that doesn’t surprise me, having seen your film actually, because it shares quite a lot of…

KQ: [Still in English] I have to find something else. I liked THE SOCIAL NETWORK too.

24FPS: So did I.

KQ: [Still in English] I saw it two days ago and I really enjoyed it.

24FPS: Well, thank you very much for your time. I wasn’t going to tell you this, but that was my first interview, so thanks for making it so easy for me.

Speaking to Katell was a pleasure. I was nervous that I wasn’t prepared for what seemed like it might be a longer slot, but honestly I could have gone on and on talking to her. LOVE LIKE POISON is being released by Artificial Eye after playing the London Film Festival. It’s an intriguing film and marks both actress Clara Augarde and Katell Quillévéré as names to watch in the future, check it out when it comes round your way.