THE PARTY - Day 9 - BFI London Film Festival 2017

THE PARTY is a brilliantly observed, nastily witty laugh-out loud dark comedy from writer director Sally Potter.  Filmed almost as a chamber comedy in one apartment, the entire 70 minute movie takes places over an aborted dinner party. It has been convened to celebrate the fact that Janet (Kristin Scott Thomas) has just become Shadow Health Minister, much to the delight of her scabrously rational realist best friend April (Patricia Clarkson).  But, rather bizarrely, her husband (Timothy Spall) is apparently depressed if not borderline potty.  This is somewhat overshadowed in the early scenes by the totally bizarre behaviour of the strung out city banker Tom (Cillian Murphy).  The remainder of the guests are April's new age hippie boyfriend Gottfired (Bruno Ganz), brilliantly mocked by April - as well as a lesbian couple expecting triplets, Martha (Cherry Jones) and Jinny (Emily Mortimer).

It would be unfair to reveal the plot twists and dramatic turns that propel this short film toward its dramatic conclusion. I was utterly surprised by all of them - particularly the last.  But it felt to me that this film had it all - properly funny, but also with moments of real relationship trauma and deeply felt distress. In particular, the reaction of Martha to learning she's co-parenting triplets felt very raw and credible.  The acting is also universally good, with Patricia Clarkson stealing the show with her nasty put-downs.  I also loved Aleksei Rodionov's cinematography - effectively using lighting to create stark black and white contrast, and with a mobility and fluidity that kept this one-room drama feeling exciting and pacy. The music choices are also used to great effect - in one scene of near-death, the use of Dido's Lament had me corpsing too.

In the words of Meester Phil, this is a frankly delightful film. It's an unhinged expose of the middle class English suburban family and purported intellectuals. 

THE PARTY has a running time of 71 minutes. The movie played Berlin, Seoul, Sydney, New Zealand, Melbourne and London 2017.  It was released earlier this year in Germany and France. 

THE COUNSELOR

THE COUNSELOR has been comprehensively drubbed by the film reviewing community, recalling Roger Ebert's seminal review of Vincent Gallo's THE BROWN BUNNY, along the lines of "I've had colonoscopies that were more funny."  And just as I really liked THAT film, I actually rather like THE COUNSELOR. Or rather, I should say that I'm fascinated by why people are so horrified by it.  It's not that I enjoyed watching it so much as I enjoyed all the provocations it presented as I watched it.  

The movie opens with and maintains a rather opaque narrative style - a mash-up of abstruse conversations in beautifully designed international locales inter-cut with grungy Mexican drug runners pushing a truck full of cocaine disguised as human shit over the US border.  The Counselor of the title is a naive but greedy lawyer (Michael Fassbender) who is defined his love of the equally naive Laura (Penelope Cruz).  The Counselor works for Reiner - a flamboyant drug dealer and club owner played by Javier Bardem as a cross between Brian Grazer and Brad Pitt in Twelve Monkeys. Which is weird because Brad Pitt also stars in the film as a kind of a redneck magus, who tries to wise the Counselor up, but to little avail. The plot, such as it is, sees someone hijack the drug shipment and pin it on our crew, which violent and grim consequences.

Bardem does Grazer's fright wig

The moral of the story, is that there are no morals. There's just the hunt. This is a fascist world in which weakness, and flamboyance, and hubris are brought low in a manner that is so foul and evil as to be shocking.  The moral is that you should not be shocked.  There is a brutal simplicity and fascination in seeing faceless men pull off brutal procedural heists. But also something bewildering about seeing actors such as Toby Kebbell and Natalie Dormer pop up in small roles that hint at something more fascinating that isn't given a chance to develop. 

Anyone looking for the redemptive final act of Cormac McCarthy's sublime novel, The Road, is looking in vain.  And critics who have panned the film have typically blamed McCarthy for forcing this word-heavy, abstract, opaque script on a high quality cast and director.  I disagree.  This is like a sleazy B-movie filtered through an art-house lens -  as grungy and elliptical as Raymond Chandler - as absurd and meaningless and provocative.  As an example, I'd give you the notorious scene in which Reiner's wonderfully unapologetic and spiky girlfriend Malkina fucks a car.  This is as shocking as Chandler's depiction of the nympho Carmen Sternwood would've been in THE BIG SLEEP.  But what is the movie really focussed on? Not her sexual act - she is confident, unapologetic and uncaring about what you or I or Reiner might make of it.  The movie focusses on the reaction of the men in the picture - their horror, fear, inability to process.  In fact, I would argue that THE COUNSELOR is a shocking and reviled movie because it's so radical.  No-one's a good guy.  The bad guys are pussies.  And the bad girl doesn't care what you think.

THE COUNSELOR has a running time of 117 minutes and is rated R in the USA.

THE COUNSELOR is on release almost everywhere except Taiwan where it will be released on December 6th and in Italy where it will be released on January 30th 2014.

London Film Festival Day 14 - THE BAADER MEINHOF COMPLEX

THE BAADER-MEINHOF COMPLEX is a straight-forward, unexciting re-telling of the history of the Red Army Faction - a group of German left-wing militants active in the 1970s, also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang. Directed by Uli Edel (LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN), the film is more easily recognisable as another of producer Bernd Eichinger's historic German epics. Following on from DER UNTERGANG, it seeks to put Germany's recent past under the microscope. In terms of subject matter, the social unrest of the late 60s and early 70s is a logical follow-up to Hitler's suicide. So much of what the students were protesting against was a direct result of World War Two - the feeling that their parent's generation had no moral (and therefore legal) authority - the feeling that denazification had not gone far enough - the resentment of US policies that seemed to ape the imperial aims of Nazism in Vietnam and the Middle East - the tangible presence of US army bases on German soil.

Of course, most students only went as far as demonstrating. Political extremism was just another cause - along with feminism and environmentalism. And the middle-class liberals were similarly pursuing legitimate lines of protest. The Red Army Faction decided that talk meant nothing without action, influenced by figures such as Che Guevera. A key flaw of this film is that it never really shows us why these people went beyond talk to violent direct action. Andreas Baader (Moritz Bleibtrau) seems to fire guns because he thinks it's cool. Is that really all it was? Gudrun Ensslin (Johanna Wokalek) supports direct action because....I'm no clearer after this movie. The more interesting character is Ulrike Meinhof (Martina Gedeck). Meinhof was older and an influential journalist with a real reputation. She could've affected change through legitimate protest. According to Uli Edel's interpretation she opts for violence because she's goaded into it, which seems rather pathetic, and hard to believe of such an intelligent woman. Still, maybe that's the point? Maybe the RAF was violent for no other reason than that it was bored and it seemed exhillerating?

Over the first hour of the film, the Baader-Meinhof gang succeed in their aims of causing general mayhem. They also succeed in aligning themselves with some particularly nasty people, and the film is very clear in showing them to be feckless and petulant to a degree that is shocking and basically evil. It's ironic that these guys are protesting against "fascist tendencies" and yet they employ the same language as the Nazis. They regard the police as "not human" and that to kill a policeman is "not murder" just as the Nazis dehumanised the Jews before killing them. One of the most disturbing moments - and one too little explored in this movie - is when the Black September terrorists holding Israeli athletes hostage during the 1972 Munich Olympics ask for fellow terrorists to be released. Among the names are those of the imprisoned RAF members.

In the final hour, the film changes focus. The founder members of the RAF are in prison and the second generation of terrorists continue their work, escalating methods and targets. They collude with the PLO to hijack an airplane and assassinate a prominent businessman. There is less talk of ideology - it's just simple revenge. Meanwhile, in Stammheim prison, the first generation prisoners look banal and pathetic. Martina Gedeck gives a convincing portrayal of Meinhof as an ideological purist driven mad by solitary confinement and guilt. Ensslin and Baader commit suicide rather than dance to the tune of the court. But they don't seem to show any real remorse or understanding.

THE BAADER-MEINHOF COMPLEX is technically good. The film-makers recreate the look and feel of Germany in the 1970s and pack a lot of material into the two and half hour run time. The problem is that they don't have an over-arching point that they are trying to make. And as a result of the "...and then this happened, and then that happened, and then this other thing happened...." approach to history, THE BAADER-MEINHOF COMPLEX, doesn't tell us anything we wouldn't know from reading a Wikipedia entry. In dealing with Irish republican terrorism in HUNGER, Steve McQueen took a radical approach. He decided that we could all look up the narrative of the campaign. He was going to cut straight to the real question: how can people murder other people in all good conscience? He did this by focusing his gaze on Bobby Sands, and on a single conversation that Sands has with a priest. I was looking for similar insight in THE BAADER-MEINHOF COMPLEX, and I never found it. So for all its superficial attention to detail and marquee actors, this film is ultimately a failure.

THE BAADER-MEINHOF COMPLEX played London 2008. It was released earlier this year in Germany, Austria, and Finland. It opens in Italy and Norway this weekend. It opens in the Netherlands on November 6th; in France on November 12th; in the UK on November 14th and in South Africa on March 20th 2009.

YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH reminds us how good Tim Roth really is

Francis Ford Coppola is a fascinating figure of cinema history - and through his story one can see refracted the rise and fall of the studio system but also the rise and fall of the first Indie movement. He is, no doubt, a director of great talent who has made pantheon movies. But he's also a director who tried to radically alter the way in which movies were financed - gambled everything - and lost. There followed a period where he was a director for hire, making mainstream films that dulled his vision. Now he returns as a successful viticulturist with a self-financed avowedly art-house movie.

YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH has some of the hallmarks of great cinema. It may have been shot on a low-budget but it looks handsome. DP Mihai Malamaire Jr creates lush, honey-toned images of WW2 Hungary, Rumania and Switzerland that let us slide into a glamourous world of Nazi spies, spa-town casinos and private banks. We are following our protagonist, a 70 year-old philosopher called Dominic, played by Tim Roth. Dominic is about to attempt suicide - his life's attempt to write his only book a failure. But instead he is struck by lightning and - miraculously survives. Not only is he alive, but he is thirty-years younger and blessed with the ability to absorb knowledge from books instantaneously and even to bend matter to his will. Thanks to his friendly doctor (Bruno Ganz) Dominic escapes both the clutches of the Nazis and the lures of the Americans (Matt Damon) both of whom want to claim his as a freakish prize. All is well until, a decade later, he stumbles upon a girl (Alexandra Maria Lara) who looks just like the woman he loved and lost in his youth.

The film moves like a series of surreal dreams, with sounds and images tumbling over one another. The opening credits are wonderful, and this magical tone continues. The calm centre of this strange world is Tim Roth's Dominic. Roth's performance is outstanding: he is able to play a seventy year old and a regenerated forty-year old who still has the stiffness of an old man. He has genuine chemistry with Maria Lara. I think this is the kind of the film that you have to let yourself go with, rather than trying to join up every plot point. I was absolutely riveted by the imagery and by Dominic's bizarre journey. I only lost faith in the film in the final act where Dominic meets his lover again - the story became a little too contrived and absurd for me to believe in it. Nonetheless, the beautiful visuals and compelling central performance make this a must-see movie, and I look forward to seeing Coppola's new brand of art-house movies in future.

YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH played Rome 2007 and was released in Italy, Belgium and France earlier this year. It is currently on release in the UK and the US.

DER UNTERGANG/THE DOWNFALL - Hitler's bunker recreated

Director Oliver Hirschbiegel has created an amazing movie in THE DOWNFALL. It is a masterly recreation of the final days in Hitler's Berlin bunker just before the Soviet invasion. The movie is based on the seminal book by respected historian Joachim Fest, "Inside Hitler's Bunker", and the memoirs of one of Hitler's secretaries, Traudl Junge. These memoirs have also recently been shown as a "talking head" documentary - itself a film of great power.

These sources are interwoven by screen-writer Bernd Eichinger. Eichinger is perhaps better known as a producer, usually of cheesy popcorn movies, but here he has come up with something insightful and emotionally impactful. His script focuses on myriad characters - from soldiers to secretaries - fawning aristos to bewildered servants - as they mill around the bunker. The atmosphere is claustrophic, thanks to a superlatively designed set and outstanding cinematography from Rainer Klausmann.

Much controversy has attached itself to Bruno Ganz' portrayal of Hitler. To my mind, it is faultless. He does NOT create a "sympathetic" Hitler. Rather he shows a man who alternates between relatively lucid resignation and the more extreme delusional haranguing of his staff. In his resigned state he speaks intimately to friends in a more measured language than we are used to from seeing archive footage of oratorical genius. He seems to know that all is over but - and here is the evil part - blames not himself but the German people for not having the balls to see it through. Hence, his slash and burn policy. In his ranting, savage state he becomes the foaming-at-the-mouth demagogue that we usually picture him as being.

However, strange to say, I found the most affecting parts of the movie to be those that focused on the incidental characters of the story. The reactions of the sane officers to yet more ridiculous orders - the automatic efficiency of the bewildered secretaries - Eva Braun's simple-minded commitment to have a good time. And, for me, the most chilling scene was seeing true believer Magda Goebbels killing her children out of a demented, inverted kind of love.

For all this film's authenticity and bravery, it is not perfect. I felt that in the final ten minutes it reverted to Hollywood-style schmaltz. Whether true or not, the decision to end this grim movie with an image of hope seemed hackneyed and entirely misplaced, despite the evident good intentions of the director.

DER UNTERGANG/THE DOWNFALL opened in Germany in August 2004 and has since been on release in France and Austria. It is on release in the UK.