Review: Hunger (5/5)

Hunger
(Steve McQueen):
Michael Fassbender, Brian Milligan, Liam McMahon, Liam Cunningham, Stuart Graham.
Running time: 92 mins (15A)


I can only imagine the frustrated banging of fists of all those lining up to proclaim on Hunger. Here is one of the most supercharged political issues of our time ? the 1981 Maze prison hunger strikes ? and it hits the screen certainly supercharged, but without a hint of politicking. It marks the debut of artist-turned-director Steve McQueen, a Londoner who was a young teenager during Bobby Sands' hunger strike. He takes to the story with fearless abandon, shooting it entirely on his terms. It's a remarkable film ? a work of stunning originality and dazzling cinematic expression. Its sheer visceral thump left me hobbling into the light broken, beaten and scarred. With just one film, McQueen has shown he is a major cinematic artist.
Hunger stars Irish actor Michael Fassbender as Bobby Sands, but you'll have to wait a while to see him. First we meet Raymond Lohan (Stuart Graham), prison guard and Maze brutaliser. We watch him bathe a hand with bloody knuckles. Before work, he lowers himself under his car to check for a booby trap. Then he puts the key into the ignition. Your muscles explode with tension. Nothing happens. It just isn't that kind of film. Instead, it erupts with mesmerising detail: crumbs fall like boulders into a napkin; or the hazy, beautiful sequence outside in falling snow where Raymond smokes a cigarette and a single snowdrop melts on a bloody knuckle. McQueen paints a picture of a man about to stress-fracture. He hoovers microscopic details with an insatiable hunger for feeling.
The H-Blocks are a circle of hell. The prisoners, in dirty protest, have taken to interior design using their own excrement. Maggots squirm in piles of dumped food. The prisoners tip buckets of urine under their cell doors, stinking tributaries that trickle into a bay of piss in the corridor. There is a long shot of the man who has to clean it up. And that's one of the things about Hunger: it wants to capture everything ? from the prisoners' conditions to the man whose job it is to mop their mess; or the work involved in hosing their excrement from the walls.
The film surges from tenderness to brutality: new prisoner Davey (Brian Milligan) nurses a fly atop his finger; there's an eyeball, wrought with horror, of a young riot squad officer whose job, in battle gear, is to pummel the prisoners. The men are forced naked under a gauntlet of truncheons, their backs mushrooming into welts. The policeman escapes to sob behind a wall.
The prisoners only get to meet at mass. It is one of the few amusing scenes: a priest declaiming to a room of non-listeners, busy whispering into each other's ears. You can imagine Mel Gibson getting giddy at the sight: all those bruised, battered, long-haired bearded men. It looks like a Jesus Christ convention. But Hunger doesn't saddle the viewer with the kind of Christ-like noble suffering that Gibson dumped on us in The Passion of the Christ. Sands is beaten and shorn like a wild animal. He flails pathetically before going limp in the bath. He is no Christ figure.
But his inner spirit is wild cat. In an exhilarating verbal set-piece, he faces a priest (Liam Cunningham) who has come to talk him out of going on hunger strike. He accuses Sands of being a fool, of wanting to be a martyr. It's like watching tennis, your eyes work back and forth across the heads, a net of blue cigarette smoke curling between them. The spitfire dialogue volleys like trench gunfire. Even the camera sits down in awe. (It's the only time where you feel the presence of co-screenwriter Enda Walsh.) Cunningham's priest is brutal and honest; Sands has a cool but fierce passion. The exchange ends when the camera roams into Cunningham's eye to reveal dismay and defeat.
Fassbender comes into his own in the riveting final act. His body crumples; his skin blisters into sores; ribs poke the air around him. Food is laid beside the bed: scrambled eggs, jam on toast, an apple. Hungry-boy food that Sands, slipping into hallucination, ignores. Dying in the movies never looked so ghastly, so awkward, so disgusting. And McQueen attacks it with corporeal fascination. Fassbender conjures a hollowed body clinging desperately to life, yet he stares out with a thick-headed contradictory defiance. I think it's quite remarkable how he does that.
Hunger won the Camera D'Or at Cannes, and is on the level of another cinematic high-water mark of this year ? The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. It is no coincidence that both that film's director, Julian Schnabel, and McQueen day-jobbed before as artists. It has liberated attitudes to making movies. McQueen approaches cinematic form like he never read the rule book, taking narrative grammar and beating it with a truncheon.
The film is ravenous for experience. McQueen wants to know what it feels like when the mind and the body are pushed to the limit. Sands emerges here as neither a martyr nor a terrorist but a human being. The men who mistreat him are brutalised in a different way. You feel for all of them. It defuses bias, sweeps aside politics, until you see the mess for what it is. And that is quite an achievement.

Review: The Class (5/5)

The Class
(Laurent Cantet)
François Bégaudeau, Franck Keita, Nassim Amrabt, Esmerelda Ouertani, Laura Baquela
Running time: 128 minutes (12A)

Escapism at the movies has never felt so real. In the triumphant, swooning fantasy, Slumdog Millionaire, you can almost smell the stench among the mountains of Bombay trash which serve as home for Jamal and Salim. Danny Boyle’s camera, always restless and nosing, steels his Dickensian fantasy with the hard edge of poverty. It stirs our sympathy for these kids even more.
American movie-making prides itself on escapism but has for years been gravitating ever closer to real life. Think of last year’s docu-horror Cloverfield, which whooshed us towards the ground in a helicopter crash. Your stomach turned inside out; your body shuddered on impact. In Jonathan Demme’s recent American drama, the Altmanesque Rachel Getting Married, he took us to a wedding and left us to roam around. You knew what it felt like to be there. Realism, it turns out, is the new escapism.
Since the Italian neorealists shook the movies up in the 1940s by using real locations and non-actors, many filmmakers have relied on realism to create intimacy and, with it, to shine light on a greater kind of truth about life. But the mainstream is filching their thunder. Perhaps in response, French directors are pushing those boundaries of neorealism while keeping their eye on narrative force.
In last year’s Couscous, director Abdel Kerchice crafted the kind of film that pokes its nose in during dinner, only to stay and forget the plot was working invisibly around you. And now there’s Laurent Cantet’s nourishing, Palme D’Or-winning film, The Class.
It’s beautifully complex yet beguilingly simple. We spend a year in a tough Parisian classroom and it is so naturalistic, you wonder if you are watching a documentary. You don’t notice there is even a plot until you find your feelings all caught up in it. You could call it extreme-realism.
The Class opens in a café with Mr Marin (Francois Bégaudeau, playing himself from his own semi-autobiographical novel). He slugs an espresso though you suspect whiskey would be more appropriate. He teaches French in a tough Parisian school with a multicultural medley of students. The faces are African, Asian and European. Each day fills up with the din of clashing identities. But Marin – young, balding with a distinctive Gallic nose – takes a progressive approach.
The kids are rowdy and surly. You think, perhaps, he lacks control. Yet he works them in subtle ways. While other teachers prefer discipline, he gives the children room to earn respect. They question everything. He questions their assumptions with Socratic patience, gently leading them to self-awareness and understanding. Unlike the other teachers, he doesn’t want to tame them, even though they kick at student-teacher boundaries.
One slippery and troubled youngster called Souleymane (Franck Keita) makes an inquiry: “People say you like men”. It’s the kind of moment that could destroy a career. Marin smiles. “Why do you ask?” he says. The kid fires back: “Homosexuality isn’t an insult, sir.”
One teacher has a breakdown. To survive, Marin displays the quick thinking of a fire fighter, yet the nurturing instincts of a gardener. But the openness of his approach has its limits too. An incident involving a quarrelsome girl snowballs into a serious problem. At one point, the camera pulls back and we watch Marin swamped by kids in the schoolyard. He has lost control.
The Class is not the kind of film that throws cheap shots. Marin doesn’t inspire his students to stand on their desks reciting Walt Whitman’s ‘O Captain! My Captain!’ It wants instead to understand rather than inspire.
Cantet imbues the film with the gentle inquisitiveness of a parent. His approach allows you to feel like a class inspector; instead of sitting at the back, though, the handheld cameras roam the room, exploring the confused, anxious faces.
Through delicate exchanges, Cantet crafts a warm, stirring snapshot of the future. For underneath the drama is an engorging debate. He is asking explicit questions about secular France and who we are as Europeans within a tidal wave of conflicting identities. In a sense, Marin and his class become a prism of society and its governance. Where do you draw the line between compassion and destructive behaviour if you are a liberal? How can you understand people who are too caught up in their own problems to understand you?
The title of the film in France is Entre les Murs (between the walls) and seems more apt. It has so much in common with Nicholas Philibert’s beloved 2002 documentary Être et Avoir about a year in a provincial school. The Class has a similar texture, with engaging characters and subtle yet profound revelations. It reverberates with real life but it’s entirely a construct. A great achievement.

Review: Doubt (3.5/5); Five Minutes of Heaven (2/5)

Doubt
(John Patrick Shanley):
Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams.
Running time: 104 minutes. (15A)

After the plastered-on smile of Mamma Mia! The Movie, Meryl Streep is back to prove she is America’s best screen actress. Of that, no doubt. She cooks up enough electricity here to power Lichtenstein.
As stagey cinema goes, Doubt is engaging. As a parable of how church child abuse was brushed under the rug, it’s riveting. Director John Patrick Shanley (who wrote the play) creates a world of vice-like church control at a school in an Irish-Italian Bronx parish in 1964.
Streep is a grim horror as Sr Aloysius, a pinch-lipped martinet. She keeps a tight rein on the students and a close eye on Fr Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a smiling priest with a touchy-feely attitude. Amy Adams’s Sr James is a gentle naïf. She admires the compassion Fr Flynn shows, especially when he takes the school’s first black student under his wing. When the kid begins acting strangely, however, Sr James wants to give Fr Flynn the benefit of the doubt. Sr Aloysius, intuitively, does not.
The title refers not to religious doubt but to faith in religious institutions. The film plays on your own doubt too: it creates enough room for Fr Flynn to wiggle. It wants you to second-guess yourself. Sr Aloysius draws him into a verbal mousetrap. That scene between Streep and Hoffman is fizzing. She turns her monster into a human being. Shanley’s writing is as solid as a granite church, but he relies too much on the weather to make his film cinematic.

Five Minutes of Heaven
(Oliver Hirschbiegel):
Liam Neeson, James Nesbitt.
Running time: 90 minutes. (15A)

Acclaimed German director Oliver Hirschbiegel’s drama about Northern Ireland arrives here freighted with awards from Sundance. This two-hander, starring Liam Neeson and James Nesbitt, and written by Guy Hippert, sets out a worthy, even self-important stall: how can we learn to forgive after the Troubles in Northern Ireland?
But the film’s demonstration of its subject is clunky and stagey. Nesbitt plays Joe. As a Catholic child he watched local protestant Alistair gun down his brother. Now the grown-up Alistair (Neeson) wants reconciliation. The effects on Joe’s family were devastating and Joe naturally fights feelings of revenge – or ‘five minutes of heaven’. The film’s first reel, set in 1970s Lurgan, plays like a heist movie. It’s expertly done: Hirschbiegel uses it to show the tragedy that occurs when explosive ideology is mixed with youthful stupidity. If only he had stopped there. What follows is un-dynamic and visually inert – a series of close-ups with jabbering voice-overs. Close your eyes and it would make a good radio play. Nesbitt is like an itch you can’t scratch. When he’s not hamming it up, he speaks in a manic voice-over that sounds like another TV commercial. Neeson’s natural reticence and melancholy brings the right kind of heft to the film. His story, of how killers too carry their own kind of ghosts, is touching.

Review: The International (3/5); Franklyn (2/5)

The International
(Tom Twyker):
Clive Owen, Naomi Watts, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Brian F O’Byrne.
Running time: 118 minutes. (15A)

Tom Twyker’s debt-ridden thriller offers the noble suggestion that bankers should be shot. I’m sure many will go along with this. The film’s hero, Louis Salinger (Clive Owen), is an Interpol officer who, along with New York district attorney Eleanor Whitman (Naomi Watts), is on the trail of a faceless rogue bank. It trades in arms deals and assassinations.
Every route the pair takes leads to corrupt indifference from on high. Owen is a very watchable gumshoe. He looks like he hasn’t slept in weeks and is powered by silent fury.
Naomi Watts keeps her talent at low voltage. Twyker keeps the nuts and bolts screwed tight and sets the picture in the cold world of chrome and glass. At times, it’s a nervy watch: it flips from a procedural into paranoid retreat with Euro-nasties played by Armin Mueller-Stahl and Ulrich Thomsen. There is a shoot-out in the Guggenheim that would fit nicely in Heat, while the film is inspired but doesn’t improve on the paranoid thrillers of the early 1970s. It’s an old format for a new fit: while films such as The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor were imbued with Nixonian cynicism, The International plugs straight into the crippling banking crisis.

Franklyn
(Gerald McMorrow):
Eva Green, Ryan Phillippe, Sam Riley, Bernard Hill.
Running time: 95 minutes. (16)

The debut film from British director Gerald McMorrow is overweeningly ambitious. It has four separate storylines, three of which are set in a burnished looking modern-day London, the other a noir-ish, ultra-religious sci-fi city straight out of Blade Runner.
The hero of that story is a violent vigilante and athiest Jonathan Preest (Ryan Phillippe). Back in real life, there’s sensitive mope Milo (Sam Riley) who has a broken heart; suicidal artist Emilia (Eva Green) who wants to reconnect with her mother; and Peter (Bernard Hill), a religious man in search of his missing son.
McMorrow’s heart is in the right place: his material speaks about familial alienation and melancholia. And he has ideas, too, about mental illness and vigilantism (borrowed from the Watchmen comic). But he strives too hard at being enigmatic.
The strands of the story don’t have enough ballast, yet are kept separate for as long as possible in the hope of achieving a dramatic pay-off. And the finale, if you can get that far, is pretentious poppycock.

Review: Gran Torino (4/5)

Gran Torino
(Clint Eastwood):
Clint Eastwood, Christopher Carley, ...
Running time: 116 minutes.

In human years, Clint Eastwood is a towering 78. But in Hollywood legend, he is as old as mythology. In a staring contest between Clint and a Cyclops, you know who would be picking up the bar tab. Gran Torino is the new film directed by and starring Eastwood and it’s a chrome-looking, all-purpose vehicle. Like the sleek 1972 sports car of the title, it revs up into the fast-moving, nervous territory of the action hero movie. But it’s also happy to drive along at cruise speed, the typical pace of an Eastwood drama.
Ostensibly, it’s the story of Walk Kowalski (Eastwood), a bigoted war veteran who comes to find an unlikely redemption late in life. But it’s also as much about Clint Eastwood, his iconic status, and his advancing years. Gran Torino is also the most unlikely comedy this year. “I’ve been called a lot of things,” Walt growls at one point. “But never funny.” He’s hilarious. He deserves a silver star for single-handedly storming the political correctness brigade. He lobs racial stereotypes like he was back in Korea throwing grenades. And they’re funny because the film shows they are patently empty. The humour and the drama in Gran Torino lies in watching Walt come to care for his nextdoor neighbours, an Asian family he initially despises, to the point that he wants to go out and fight for them.
Eastwood’s Walt is a crinkled curmudgeon. His mouth is sour at the corners. His face has curdled. The skin on his neck is folded like a concertina: when you squeeze him, he growls. At his wife’s burial, he glowers at his grandchildren, and ignores his sons. He’s followed about a baby-faced priest (Christopher Carley), who is determined to wring a confession from him. But Walt gives it to him straight: “I think you're an overeducated 27-year-old virgin who likes to hold the hands of superstitious old ladies and promise them everlasting life.” It’s as if Dirty Harry’s Harry Callahan retired to mid-western Michigan and got old.
Walt flies the American flag on his porch. He fought for his country and worked for Ford all his life. Now, he finds himself patronised by his grow-up children and marooned in his neighbourhood surrounded by immigrants. He catches nextdoor kid Thao (Bee Vang) trying to steal his prized Gran Torino. But he knows it’s not the kid’s fault. He’s being pressurized by a violent gang and Walt emerges as the only guy who will stand up to them.
The middle of picture is a charm. Walt chases a gang with just an old rifle off the lawn of his neighbours. They think he’s a hero. The sarcastic Sue (Ahney Her) and bookish Thao lure the grump from his lair. Soon he’s eating their food at a barbecue (“bring me another beer, dragonlady”) and starts lending Thao his tools. But tensions are simmering in the background. The gang, like an angry wasp, has not gone away.
Eastwood is happy to mine his own iconography. “Ever notice how you come across somebody once in a while you shouldn't have f**ked with? That's me,” he says. He speaks with the deadly intent of a young man. He pulls a gun but it’s only his finger. Brazenly, he pretends to shoot gangsters with his bare hand. On his front lawn with his rifle pointed in the face of a gangbanger, he tells him: “I'll blow a hole in your face then go inside and sleep like a baby.” The problem with Walt, however, is that while he happy to play the hero, he does not sleep like a baby. His conscience is riddled with anxiety.
In some respects, the film is a perfect marriage of Eastwood’s career: we get the flinty figure of Eastwood the actor, and the keen, generous eye of Eastwood the director. He plays a game with the audience: he teases us with vigilantism, but really he wants to probe the troubled hero, men such as Walt, Harry Callahan or A Fistful of Dollars' The Man with no Name. Why is Walt such an angry bigot?
But there is a poignancy eating at the heart of Gran Torino too. For Walt, just like Eastwood, is an elderly man. He fills up with rage because he wants to do more than he physically can. He puts his fist through the kitchen presses in anger. Eastwood makes palpable the fury and impotence of growing old.
Gran Torino is by no means a perfect film. It’s crafted with Eastwood’s classical restraint and easy tracking shots, but it’s clunky at times with its actors. Still, it’s captivating. Walt hangs on to old ideas of his masculinity, much as we too cling to old ideas about Eastwood. Gran Torino is about letting go. It’s a requiem for retired gunslingers everywhere, a perfect swan song, should he so wish, for Eastwood’s own career.

Review: Confessions of a Shopaholic (2.5/5)

Confessions of a Shopaholic
(PJ Hogan):
Isla Fisher, Hugh Dancy, John Goddman, Joan Cusack.
Running time: 112 minutes.

Confessions of a Shopaholic begins life as fashion porn, a great denial of consumer emptiness. It teeters dangerously on high heels. And then, unexpectedly, it trades the stilettos for flat shoes and all round sensibility. It’s the first film I’ve seen that addresses the recession head on. Expect many, many more. Isla Fisher plays Rebecca, a young journalist buried under credit card debt. She hadn’t a clue how to manage money. Amazingly, she lands a job at a financial magazine where she’s a hit: her column, which preaches financial prudence, becomes a hit and the editor (Hugh Dancy) takes a tumble for her. But she’s a spoofer. How long can she keep the game up? Fisher is a winning personality. She has a cheering face and pixie energy. Her character must endure ritual humiliation and she’s up for it. For she’s a good comedian — her face is alive with little signals that tell us her character knows she shouldn’t be getting away with things, which is all the more fun when she does. Dancy is the quintessential Brit-in-America. He could be the child of a gay marriage between Hugh Grant and Colin Firth. The surface of the film is garish and director PJ Hogan is happy to steer through dire romcom cliches.

Review: Chew: Part II (3/5); Push (2/5)

Che: Part II
(Steven Soderberg):
Benicio del Toro, Benjamin Benitez, Julia Ormond, Armando Riesco, Catalina Sandino,

‘Guerrilla’, or Part two of Steven Soderberg’s biopic of the Cuban revolutionary, takes up with his arrival into Bolivia. The revolutionary fighter explains in a letter to Castro that his work is done and the struggle must continue elsewhere. Che (Benicio del Toro) smuggles himself into Bolivia as a bald, middle-aged man before he retreats to the hills to begin his ill-fated guerrilla campaign. He is betrayed, captured and executed. Part two has a more settled feel than the first. Soderberg’s approach is quiet and unhurried and the film has a stillness that is very absorbing. The director is clearly striving for greatness and yet, I can’t say I’m taken with this project. The two films, taken together, are visually impressive: Soderberg and his cinematographer Peter Andrews have captured in broad and very intimate strokes the sweep of a very turbulent period in history. Yet, they’re austere and cold. Benicio del Toro’s Che is distant and unknowable. The film does not bother to present or probe the dark side of his nature. You come away knowing little about the revolutionary which is a lot to ask for four hours of film watching.

Push
(Paul McGuigan):
Dakota Fanning, Djimon Hounsou, Chris Evans, Camilla Belle, Cliff Curtis.
Running time: 111 minutes. Two stars.

Push is a muddled Matrix-inspired superhero action thriller about a plot to take down The Division, a secret US government agency turning telekinetics into dangerous weapons. It’s set in Hong Kong where telekinetic Nick (Chris Evans) is in hiding and is tracked down by clairvoyant Cassie (Dakota Fanning). The format is very standard: Nick must awaken to his powers within, save his super-powered girlfriend (the sullen, lacklustre Camilla Belle) and take down the agency and a gang of super-powered Hong Kong telekinetics.. Unfortunately, Chris Evans who plays him, hasn’t yet awoken to the fact that he’s supposed to be a movie star. He’s got five o'clock shadow and that all American rugged look. But he has the onscreen presence of a cardboard cutout. Thank goodness for the mercurial presence of young Dakota Fanning, who brings an uncanny intelligence to everything she does. Director Paul McGuigan (Lucky Number Slevin) is keen to amp up the exoticism and mines Hong Kong for all its worth. But he brings no clarity to the plot which fogs up with silliness and over-complication.

Review: Three Monkeys (3/5)

Three Monkeys
(Nuri Bilge Ceylan):
Yavuz Bingol, Hatice Aslan, Ahmet Rifat Sungar, Ercan Kesal, Cafer Köse
Running time: 109 minutes

Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan makes films like icebergs. They’re pristine, chilly and somewhat formidable. They travel slowly on deep-water currents all of their own. In style and feel, they could have been chipped into shape in the Antarctic. Yet his films speak so clearly about his own country and his own people they’re unmistakably Turkish. You come away from his pictures feeling you have perhaps spent time there, but only in the parts you would never go on holidays.
Three Monkeys follows in the wake of his remarkable 2002 film Distant and the brooding 2006 film Climates. Both of those pictures were superb studies of isolation and crafted with Ceylan’s very distinctive, immaculately composed photography. (He was a photographer before he became a filmmaker.) In those films, the male heroes were so taciturn, to get them to express their feelings would be like asking Sisyphus to roll a boulder all the way to the top of a hill. In Three Monkeys, Ceylan wants to open things out, spread the isolation around. The title and theme come from the three wise monkeys proverb, see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. Here, there are four characters, a family whose lives are ruined by a scheming, fat-faced politician. But it is only when the film delves deeper, when we really get to spend time with the family, do you wonder how screwed up they were in the first place.
Here, Ceylan has a beef with Turkey and the film plays as a secular call of despair. It’s there in the opening scene, set on a dark, tunneling country road. A car approaches and stops by a body lying in the middle of the road. We can’t see their faces, but they can tell the person is still alive. A woman warns the driver not to get out. Call the police she says. They take the number of a car in the ditch and drive off. After this, everybody is out for themselves in this film. Social responsibility is cast away for a deep-rooted selfishness.
This is never more evident in Servet (Ercan Kesal), a businessman turning politician. He comes skulking out of the shadows when the car passes. He’s responsible for the accident and knows it will destroy his career. So he asks his driver Eyup (Yazuz Bingol) to own up. A year in prison in return for a cash sum. Eyup has one of those faces beloved of Ceylan: bristled and hung heavy with unspoken sadness. He does time and leaves behind his wife Hacer (Hatice Aslan) and his depressed son Ismail (Ahmet Rifat Sungar) who keeps failing a university exam. Hacer has eyes like dark pools and a face proud with strong bones. But she’s crumbling inside. While Eyup serves time, she is seduced by Servet only for Ismail to walk in on them. He seethes silently but won’t tell his father.
There is a great scene where Hacer goes to Servet to ask for the money. He’s self-absorbed as usual, sweat, like a guilty conscience, trickling down his forehead. Her mobile rings but she can’t find it in her bag. It’s the most annoying ring – a pop song with lyrics that come later to haunt the film. And it fills up the screen with awkwardness. Ceylan did a similar thing in Climates, where, at a pivotal moment when a man wanted to tell his ex-partner how much he had changed, the film interrupted him with a bunch of noisy workmen. It’s a typical Ceylan moment: his still, wide-screen compositions seem so studied, but life keeps interrupting.
The texture of Three Monkeys is lovely. A green hue like dark moss. Blood when it flows is a life-draining brown. Sometimes the picture plays so slowly, moss could be growing on it. But Ceylan is somebody you trust at this speed. Three Monkeys is a film you digest. It repeats in your thoughts after you’ve seen it. Much of it works in silence. Characters think their way through it. But you always know what they are feeling. Ceylan is so in tune with his characters, he can write inner thoughts large on screen. This director takes his cues from the Italian giant Antonioni who painted a world where human connection was impossible. Ceylan’s characters, however, want desperately to speak but don’t know how. So they numb themselves to life. Three Monkeys is not as convincing as Ceylan’s earlier work. It has an austerity that borders on being anti-social, moments when you wonder if he is trying to isolate the viewer too. But it is hard not to be impressed by the potent charge of his imagery or his ability to drill down to unspoken human essentials. He works with clarity of focus that is spiritual, cool and clear.

Review: The Pink Panther 2 (1/5)

The Pink Panther 2
(Harald Zwart):
Steve Martin, Jean Reno, Emily Mortimer, Andy Garcia, Alfred Molina, John Cleese, Jeremy Irons, Lily Tomlin
Running time: 92 minutes (PG)


Peter Sellers must be spitting worms. Just as civilization was recovering from Steve Martin’s 2006 Pink Panther remake, along comes The Pink Panther 2, a movie so woeful you wonder if mankind would just be the better for annihilation.
Most of this jewel-heist story is set in Paris. We know this because the film gives us an establishing shot of the Eiffel Tower every three minutes. What we really need is an establishing shot that reminds us we’re supposed to be watching an Inspector Clouseau comedy. Steve Martin is ill-equipped: imagine a quadriplegic monkey on a unicycle. He slimes through the feeble jokes. He can’t do slapstick. (He has to rely on the editor who cuts the jokes physically into shape.) And he has to rely on a body double for larger stunts. Remember Peter Sellers in The Pink Panther or A Shot in the Dark? He used just the personal space around him to create all-consuming anarchy. The director Blake Morrison didn’t have to do a thing but put the camera in front of him. The plot here is not worth speaking of because the movie can’t be bothered with it. After 45 minutes nothing has happened. This is because there are so many star appearances, the film detours to give each one of them a scene. I’ve lost all respect for Lily Tomlin. I never want to see Jeremy Irons or Alfred Molina again. As for Steve Martin, he hasn’t a Clouseau.

Interview: Wood Allen

Just who is Woody Allen? Everybody thinks they know him. I’ve never spoken to the man yet I expect to know him like an old friend. When we speak over the phone, it’s 12pm in New York. I’m full of expectation. The line is distant and fuzzy. I wait for him to come at me a mile a minute down the line. But he doesn’t. Allen speaks slowly – gentle, thoughtful. There’s music in his voice. But he sounds tired. Who wouldn’t be? He’s written and directed a film a year for the past 40 years. And, when asked, he’s more than happy to burst the myth that we all think we know Woody Allen.
“There is no Woody Allen figure really in any of my movies, actually,” he says. “They are totally fictional characters that I wrote... But, ahh, I’m nothing like the character in the movies. People always think that I am of course, but they don’t have the faintest idea...”
And I’m willing to go along with that. Even as I listen to him pepper his phrases with those trademark pauses (“ummm” and “you know”) and the non sequiturs that litter his speech. And then, a little while later, he drops in the phrase “existential philosophy” and a smile breaks on my face. And he gets excited when we get to talking about death. If this isn’t the Woody Allen we all know and love, then who could it be?
There lies the problem with Woody Allen. His films are so interwoven with his personal preoccupations, they can be hard to untangle. Whatever approach he has taken for his movies (cut and paste together in any order: slapstick, farce, parody, screwball romance, chamber drama or tragedy) his distinctive voice shines through. The Brooklyn-born auteur has made a career kvetching about his insecurities: love, death and everything in between. He makes us laugh at our own anxiety. (The tagline for Annie Hall was “A nervous romance”.)
Critics would happily split Allen’s career into three stages. There are those early films (his first proper film was Take the Money and Run in 1969) which bustle with beguiling slapstick, cheeky literary references and Allen’s trademark New York Jewish neuroticism. Then Allen hit his stride in 1977 with Annie Hall which won four Oscars. In that middle period, he made one extraordinary film after another. Ask a Woody Allen fan to choose some DVDs to take to a desert island and it would be a difficult choice between films such as Manhattan, Zelig, Broadway Danny Rose, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Hannah and her Sisters, Radio Days or his final masterpiece Crimes and Misdemeanors. Those films are glorious: rich and warm, deeply textured with an elasticity his later films lack. They are not just deeply funny still, but improve with age. But things have slowly dived since Crimes and Misdemeanors in 1989. Though there have been moments. With each new release there has been talk of a revival though critics have ho-hummed and fans have grumbled.
And now, there’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona, a hit with US audiences. Though critics have fallen on both sides, surely its success makes Allen sleep better at night?
“Nah, I never think of those things,” he says chuckling. “I’ve been ahh… I’ve had so many box-office failures in my life ahh... so many more than successes, that, ahh, that I’m used to it and I’m always surprised when a film of mine does anything at the box office. I haven’t read a criticism good or bad of a film of mine in 30 years.” Not even a sneak peek? “No, I have no temptation whatsoever,” he says.
And what about the critics who say Woody Allen hasn’t made a great film in 20 years? Surely that has to get under the skin? “It’s a matter of non interest to me,” he says. “Like those sports that I’m not interested in. You know, like, I’m a great basketball and baseball fan. I’m devoted to them. And boxing. Hockey is a sport that I never got interested in and so hockey has no interest for me whatsoever. It’s just completely uninteresting. And I feel the same way about... uhh... things written about my movies. Not just criticism but any, you know, insights, or observations about them. They are all something that I have never been interested in.”
Vicky Cristina Barcelona, he says, came about because Spain put the money up. (The film, shot mainly in Barcelona, makes a small detour to Oviedo, where there is a statue of Allen.)
Vicky Cristina Barcelona tells the story of two chalk-and-cheese American friends (Rebecca Hall and Scarlett Johannson) who go to Barcelona for a summer. Both are seduced by the appropriately named Juan (Javier Bardem), a strutting artist with a crazy ex-wife (Penélope Cruz) whose tempestuous lunacy spills all over the place. Both Cruz and Bardem dial the Latin heat to sweltering. Life lessons are learned and then discarded. Nobody knows what they want.
The film is shot both in English and Spanish and I wondered if that posed any problems.
“It was not difficult at all,” Allen says. “There was a script and they obeyed the script, although there were times I asked Javier and Penélope to improvise and they did improvise in Spanish and I didn’t know what they were saying. But I could tell from their body language, their physical actions, that they were doing the right emotions. It worked out pretty well.”
And how much input did Cruz, now Oscar nominated, give for her character? “I felt she created it all,” he says. “You know, she comes from there, she brings that presence. She gets out and does it and she brings it to life. I write down the character but, you know, when you see a character in script form it’s just lifeless words and you give it to 20 different actresses and you’ll get 20 different versions. She was the one that brought all the fire and the passion and the vitality to it.”
The film riffs on a classic Allen theme: the conflict that occurs in relationships when people just don’t know what they want. At 73, has Allen come any closer to knowing anything for sure? His voice brightens. “I’ve achieved no wisdom whatsoever,” he says. “I’ve, you know, after all the years, all the problems remain the same. I haven’t really... I feel these things are all unknowable and unsolvable and they will be the same problems a thousand years from now.”
One of the joys of Allen’s great comedies is the way they take these problems into account. They are buoyed up with a witty, knowing humour, but never lose sight of what is essentially tragic. And yet, Allen has said many times over the years that if he could give up comedy to be a great dramatist, he would. Does he now feel any different?
“Well, I’d love to be able to do, you know, great heavy stuff, you know, just from a pure pleasurable point of view. It’s fun to write a tragedy or a melodrama. I enjoy that. But, ahh, I’ve been able to do comedies over the years, that have been... the strength of them has been that they’ve been basically serious and like Vicky Cristina, kind of sad, the futility of life underneath them. On the other hand, that quality that makes them interesting to a portion of the people keeps another portion of people out of the theatres.”
And who might that be? “Well, there are people who go to the theatre and see a comedy and they want to laugh and be entertained completely. They’re not interested in the sadder side of life or the other dimensions of life. They get that if they go to a drama.
“But if they go to a comedy, they want to see, you know, girls and guys, doors slamming and guys in the wrong beds, and things like that. And they want to laugh. They want to put their troubles away while they laugh.
“My comedies, you know, don’t let them usually do that. They laugh when they’re funny but, you know, they’re always mindful of the sad undercurrent of life and that would be off-putting.
“I do want to make people think and feel a little bit about the poignancy of life and you know I hope that they’re entertained when they do it. I don’t want it to be homework. I don’t want them to feel it’s a course in existential philosophy or a course in interpersonal relations or something. You know, I want them to come in and enjoy themselves. But I don’t want them to just have a mindless experience. I want them to, you know, to get some sense of the underlying tragedy of life.”
Allen has his eye still firmly on the future. His next film, Whatever Works, stars Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Larry David. It sounds like a perfect fit. (“I feel comfortable with him doing my material. He gets it.”) While he plans to return to London to shoot his next film in the summer. (“I like being in London. The weather is cool. The skies are grey.”) Does he ever revisit those earlier movies? “No, no, I never do that. That would depress me. I mean, I’d be sitting there thinking, ‘Oh God, what did I do? I can do that so much better and I shouldn’t have done this and that – it’s so obviously wrong.’ I’d be nothing but critical and there’s nothing I could do about it.”
Woody can’t face his own movies. He famously can’t deal with death. Though after 40 years of talking about it, it’s not for want of trying. Does it get any easier at 73?
“I’ve thought about death every day,” he laughs. “Since I was eight years old. And I haven’t come any closer [to accepting it]. Because there’s never been any room to come closer. And I mean, it’s something that I always think about. It’s the number one factor – one’s mortality is the number one issue of one’s life. So you know it hasn’t increased for me but that doesn’t mean it’s still not enormously prominent.”
So what does he think the public will make of him when Woody Allen finally gets around to dying? “They’ll say, ‘Who are you thinking of? Who....?’”