London Film Fest Day 16 - PERSECUTION

Daniel is an layabout construction worker, without a house or a steady job, or, apparently, a comb. He spends his time trying to get away from people, sulking and feeling sorry for himself. He is insecure about the fact that his career-woman girlfriend, Sonia, won't commit to him, but it's not like he's ever introduced her to his best friend, Thomas, or to his brother. And now he's being stalked by a man who claims he loves him, and alternates between kicking him into the street and having a familial chat over a cigarette. Yes, Daniel is a shiftless, emotional mess. Often intensely dislikeable, and yet, in Patrice Chereau's new film, ultimately sympathetic.

The movie is an intimate portrait of a man who has great difficulty with intimate relationships. The most painful moments are conversations with his girlfriends - they feel like negotiations over the terms of engagement. The most awkward, but also the most weirdly touching, are with the stalker. The resulting film is well-acted, well-written, and compelling. Romain Duris and Charlotte Gainsbourg are impressive as the couple, and Jean-Hughes Anglade does well in a difficult smaller role as the stalker.

But I found myself a little disappointed in PERSECUTION. Maybe I am being unfair in holding it up against his other films, which almost uniformly set a very high benchmark. Where, given the subject matter of sexual obsession, is the sexual tension of the marvelous LA REINE MARGOT? Where, given, the deep crisis in the central relationship, is the brutality of Chereau's best and most recent film, GABRIELLE? Certainly, PERSECUTION is a good film, but it is not a film I need to see again.

PERSECUTION played Venice 2009 and will be released in France on December 9th.

London Film Fest Day 15 - STARSUCKERS

STARSUCKERS is the latest film from British documentarian Chris Atkins, whose last film, TAKING LIBERTIES was a powerful indictment of the Blair government's systematic dismantling of our civil rights. His new film focuses on the way in which Big Media creates celebrity avatars and systematically markets them to us from a very young age, so that the desire to be near the famous amps up their sales.

The production values on the film are, in all honesty, terrible. The animation, the slickness of the title credits, the way in which it's filmed - none of it looks as good as, say, a Michael Moore documentary, with the weight of the Weinsteins behind it. But all of that matters not one jot. Because Chris Atkins, in sharp contrast to Michael Moore, knows how to organise his material, how to back it up with credible commentators, and how to take an audience through a complicated thesis from the stuff we all think we know, to the stuff that we don't know and that scares us.

The Atkins' thesis is that humans have evolutionary programming that attracts us to celebrities, and makes us want to get as close to them as possible. It's all about wanting to learn from or mate with the alpha male. Politicians and corporate brands know they can feed off that by associating themselves with celebrities, and pretty soon the line begins to blur. Big Media creates a message splicing the two, and targets it at us from a young age. Moreover, they hold out the carrot that we too can become celebrities through reality TV. Where it gets dangerous is when Hannah Montana is marketing Walmart to kids through alarm clocks, or the Live 8 concerts are being arranged to spoil the coverage of the Make Poverty History campaign.

As I said, STARSUCKERS is a compelling, well-organised and well-argued documentary, even if I don't agree with everything it says. For instance, I fear that blaming our addiction to celebrity culture on pre-historic impulses lets us off the hook for our complicity in the whole thing. After all, THE SUN would provide 20,000 word thoughtful reviews in the manner of the LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS if that's what sold. The key point is that even if you don't agree with everything Atkins is arguing, his arguments are still credible and well-researched.

More than that, you almost have a duty to yourself as a consumer of popular culture to watch this film. By definition, if you're reading this review, you've probably come via IMDB and spend a disproportionate amount of your time consuming Hollywood and the celebrity press' output. It becomes, then, mandatory to see footage of Max Clifford boasting of squashing stories - a story that he tried to injunct.

My only real criticism of STARSUCKERS is that it doesn't go far enough. I didn't get the same sense of anger as I did watching TAKING LIBERTIES. Chris Atkins takes down some low level sleazy tabloid journos, but nowhere does he explicitly examine the power, say, of Rupert Murdoch, and the way he has successfully lobbied government's to dismantle concentrated ownership laws. And in his section of politicians as celebrities, would Berlusconi not have been a more powerful example than some Lithuanians. All through the documentary, Atkins' narrator talks on behalf of "Big Media" as "we". Well, if that's the case, you need to show more complicity between the big media agents.

STARSUCKERS played London 2009 and is on limited released from this weekend, including at the Curzon cinemas.

London Film Fest Day 15 - THE WINDOW / JANALA

THE WINDOW / JANALA is the latest film from Indian art-house director Buddhadev Dasgupta - a modern day Satyajit Ray, if you will. The film moves at a slow lyrical pace, and is a warm-hearted chronicle of the absurdity of life for the ordinary working class folk in modern day day India. The film opens with an intimate portrait of a couple, happy in each other's love and happy to be having a baby, even though they have yet to get married. It's a shocking scene for people used to conventional Bollywood movies in which you never see such real intimacy but song and dance numbers. The woman works in the modern India. She's a call centre worker for American Airlines, listening to the abuse and ignorance of western callers, saving hard for their marriage and child. The man is in the India that has been left behind. He has no family, no home, and a life working in an old folks home miles away. He's a lovely, innocent guy, and decides to donate a picture window to his old village school - a window he can't really afford. The film shows follows the man as he has the window made and tries to deliver it, and works as a kind of picaresque tale, as he comes across all manner of people. The India that Dasgupta is portraying is one of endemic corruption, theft and poverty, where acts of kindness occur, but the good will always be swindled.

What I love about this film is that is never shows contempt for its characters - even the thieves - and while it shows a fundamentally hopeless situation, it still manages to be warm-hearted. The main character, who could so easily have been an unbelievable child-man, actually seems real. With a light touch, Dasgupta tells us more about social injustice than all the angry docs and issue-movies in the world. And he entertains us to boot.

This is one of the best films I have seen in the festival.

JANALA played Telluride, Toronto and London 2009.

London Film Fest Day 14 - A SERIOUS MAN

A SERIOUS MAN is being marketed as the new black comedy from the Coen Brothers. But I found this movie absolutely excruciating to watch. Not because it's badly made. It would be hard to find a movie that has better production values, better lead performances, a more tightly written script or a more brilliant visual style. No, I found this film tough going because it essentially take a nice man, Larry Gopnik, and hurls abuse at him for two hours. I could see, in the abstract, that a lot of the dialogue and situations made for good black comedy. And I could hear the rest of the audience laughing. But I was just so over-powered with such a bleak vision of humanity that I couldn't laugh. In fact, I could barely sit through it. This is, without doubt, one of the most depressing, most depressed, and most sadistic film I have seen.

The story is simple. You take a nice middle-aged, middle-class guy living in a suburb in the 1960s. He has a wife and two kids and he's going for tenure at his university. And then, for two hours, you make his life crumble. His wife leaves him for a guy who is smug and patronising. His kids treat him as a cash-register/TV fixer. His students try to bribe him for better grades. Someone is writing slanderous letters to his tenure committee. His neighbours are taking over his garden. But Larry is a good Jewish man, and he wants to be a serious man, who takes these issues in a thoughtful calm manner. So he turns to Rabbis, and they just give him crappy advice - meaningless stories that give no hope or insight. It's even worse: he takes comfort in his son completing his Bar Mitzvah successfully but in reality it's a sham - his son was stoned. And in the final scenes, my interpretation is that the ending is incredibly bleak - we are all basically insignificant and buffeted by the elements/God.

So, I can see how some will laugh at these situations. The writing is funny, in theory. Fred Melamed, in particular, is genius as the oleaginous lover, Sy Abelman. David Kang is also funny as the Korean student Clive. But I found this movie really depressing. I took the message that life is basically cruel; humanity is dumb and selfish; and that the stories in the film and by extension, radically, the story that is the film, are ultimately pointless.

A SERIOUS MAN played Toronto 2009 and is currently on release in the USA, Denmark and Norway. It opens on November 6th in Italy and on November 20th in Australia, Iceland, Sweden and the UK. It opens in Russia on November 26th. It opens in Argentina and Finland on December 3rd. It opens on January 20th in Belgium, France, Germany and the Netherlands.

London Film Fest Day 14 - GLORIOUS 39

Stephen Poliakoff is a well-respected British play-wright and some-time film director, and the cast of Glorious 39 is filled with great British actors - from the young and talented Romola Garai and Eddie Redmayne, to stars Jeremy Northam, Julie Christie and Bill Nighy. How disappointing, then, to find his new World War Two political thriller to be poorly made, poorly acted, poorly written and patronising to boot.

The story is set in the weeks before England went to war with Germany - the glorious summer of 1939. The adopted daughter (Romola Garai) of a wealthy aristocratic family (Nighy, Agutter, Redmayne, Temple, Christie) discovers that the British government is hiding recordings of meetings in her family's rambling country estate. They give evidence that certain elements within the British establishment are so afraid of another war, and so convinced that they can't win it, that they are preparing to negotiate a secret surrender to Hitler before the war has even begun. (All true, as it happens). The movie is a thriller, wherein the daughter uncovers the who the voices are on the record, and tries to smuggle it out to people who can use it to bring down Chamberlain's government and bring Winston Churchill to power.

All this could've been the stuff of a superb thriller, in the manner of ENIGMA. But this film lacks context. We never see the politicos, the military and the aristos arguing over the future of Britain. The stakes are all rather academic, and explained in a very patronising manner by characters played by David Tennant and Hugh Bonneville. Stephen Poliakoff seems to be assuming that his audience won't know anything about World War Two. What we are left with is a melodrama centred on this rich family who motor around the countryside and attend nice parties. The siblings are vaguely sinister, and there is a spooky looking government man, but no real sense of tension. I spent much of the movie being annoyed at the heroine for taking her time. If you found the 1939 equivalent of the Watergate tapes, wouldn't you just jump in a car and take it straight to the opposition party? Why all the listening, carrying in handbags and re-listening? Why the comedy, Agatha Christie style bumping off of minor characters?

Still, for all that, the movie is vaguely interesting for the first hour. Where it really comes off the rails is in the final hour. The heroine finds out who is plotting against her and is captured. At that point, the performances and writing veer into B-movie melodrama. It's truly risible and basically unwatchable. We then squelch into a final act, where the enemies, so ardent in hunting her down, just let her slip off, and a final scene in which we're meant to acknowledge her as a true hero of the war. But she never actually does anything!

What a waste of talent.

GLORIOUS 39 played Toronto 2009 and opens in the UK on November 20th.

London Film Fest Day 13 - TAKING WOODSTOCK

TAKING WOODSTOCK sees Ang Lee, director of tense, beautiful tragic romances - LUST, CAUTION and BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN - take a step back into gentle comedy. The resulting film is warm-hearted, earnest, occasionally funny, but also somewhat ramshackle, meandering and ultimately, unsatisfying. Interesting characters are given too little screen time in an ensemble film, uninteresting characters are left to over-act wildly, and the third act acid trip is a complete waste of half an hour. Maybe the problem is that Ang Lee doesn't quite have the conviction he needs to make a film about a famous concert that IS NOT a concert film. He wants to tell the story of the family who's run-down motel became the HQ of the organisers and the impact the festival had on them. He wants to make a point about Woodstock being, for most people, about the journey there and the people you met, rather than the concert itself. But Ang Lee does cave in and gives us his protagonist journeying toward the mainstage and getting dragged into acid trips and mud-slides. It's just too much of a tease! Either focus on the motel, or give us the concert, but don't flail around in the mud!

The movie starts of well. We have a likable protagonist called Elliot - a sweet kid, who's compromising on his dream of going to San Francisco because he's helping out on his parent's run-down motel in the Catskills and because he can't quite admit that he's gay. Faced with foreclosure, he decides to invite the Woodstock festival to relocate to his parents' motel and his neighbour's land, when the folks in that town rescind the permit, scared of thousands of freaks showing up. Before you know it, the cash is rolling in and Elliot's conservative parents are surrounded with hippies and beats. Both they, and Elliot, experience many-splendored life, and then the festival rolls of out town.

The period setting and casting are absolutely spot on, with the exception of rather broad performances from Emile Hirsch as Billy and Dan Fogler as Devon, the Earthlight Player. Imelda Staunton and Henry Goodman are particularly good as Elliot's rather flummoxed parents, and Demetri Martin is affable and congenial as Elliot. But the two most interesting characters get way too little screen time. The first is Eugene Levy in a fairly straight performance as farmer Max Yasgur, the guy who actually rented out his fields to the festival. Why was such a provincial farmer so very liberal minded? Fascinating, but unexplored. The second fascinating, but too little explored character, was Vilma, a former US marine turned transvestite, played by Liev Schreiber. What a wonderful character! And what a fascinating nascent relationship with Elliot's father! I would have loved to spend more time with them. But instead we get Ang Lee trying, very clumsily, to speak to Vietnam in the form of the cliche of a battle-traumatised Vietnam vet, and to speak to the counter-culture in the form of a completely pointless acid trip. And when Ang Lee tries to create some real dramatic tension with a final act revelation involving Elliot's mother, it all seems out of tone with the rest of the film. Shame.

TAKING WOODSTOCK played Cannes 2009. It opened earlier this year in the US, Australia, Canada, Sweden, the USA, Germany, Denmark, Finland, Norway, the Netherlands, Portugal, Estonia, France and Spain. It is currently on release in Hong Kong, Israel, Singapore, India, Italy, Taiwan, Belgium and Greece. It opens in the UK on November 6th, in Argentina and Mexico on December 10th and in Brazil on January 15th 2010.