London Film Fest 2010 Day 12 - CARANCHO

I found watching CARANCHO to be a rather alienating experience. It's all very well acted, and beautifully filmed. The movie drips with social realist integrity. The central romance feels authentic and the finale builds to a point of genuine tension. But for all that, and I'm not sure why, it somehow just didn't work for me. Maybe it was the unrelentingly dour environment or the lingering sense that writer-director, Pablo Trapero, was more interested in the message than the emotional life of his characters. Maybe I just felt that the two lead characters just didn't "click" on screen. Either way, I found CARANCHO to be a far less satisfying film than his previous London Film Fest entry, LION'S DEN.

The movie is basically a story of redemption set in the grimy urban squalor of contemporary Buenos Aires, much as in LION'S DEN. Ricardo Darin (so wonderful in THE SECRET IN THEIR EYES) plays Sosa, a lawyer who lost his license, now working as an ambulance chaser for a ruthless firm, and not above fabricating claims. He is trying to rebuild his self-esteem and his integrity partly to deserve the woman he has fallen in love with - a paramedic called Lujan, played by Trapero regular, Martina Gusman. She is another vulnerable, compromised character. On the surface, she is straight medic, but underneath she's self-medicating to get through her stressful schedule. Somehow, the complex emotional relationship between these two characters, and the xposé of the ambulance chasing industry should be more compelling than it is.

CARANCHO played Cannes and Toronto 2010 and opened in Argentina and Spain earlier this year.

TETRO - They fuck you up, your mum and dad - Part Four

TETRO is a beautiful, fantastical, shamelessly self-indulgent movie about family dysfunction and the impossibility of living with a self-proclaimed genius. It is worth watching for the cinematography and Vincent Gallo's lead performance alone - but there are many other joys to be had - not least a blistering cameo from Klaus Maria Brandauer; a cheeky little Dolce Vita moment featuring Carmen Maura; and a wonderful little Red Shoes homage.

The most surprising thing about TETRO is that is was written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola - indeed, it is his first writer-director credit since THE CONVERSATION. The result is a movie that feels nothing like Coppola's mafia epics - despite some similarity in the emotional material. TETRO also feels nothing like Coppola's last movie - another self-financed (and unjustifiably maligned) art-house flick - YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH. That movie was beautifully shot, but serious, mournful, byzantine in its structure and conceit. By contrast, while TETRO may deal with the most violent of emotions, but it always has a playful, self-mocking edge. At times, it almost feels like the lighter parts of Almodovar. Every character is sometimes aware that they are striking a pose - that is, except Miranda (Maribel Verdu - Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN) who is the emotional heart of the film.

Tetro is the pen-name of playwright Angelo Tetracini (Vincent Gallo). He cut loose from his domineering, Mephisto-like conductor father (Klaus Maria Brandauer) and ran off to Buenos Aires. This movie opens as his little brother Bennie (Alden Ehrenreich - a dead-ringer for the young Leo diCaprio) shows up on his doorstep - still hero-worshipping his elder brother but also angry that Tetro left him behind with the monster-father. Tetro's girlfriend Miranda adores having Bennie around, but for Tetro to come to terms with a relationship with Bennie, he will have to confront many family ghosts. That - and a performance at a arts festival in Patagonia - provide the narrative and emotional drive of the movie.

Gallo perfectly embodies the hard-faced charisma of Tetro. Ehrenreich has just the right mix of vulnerability and chutzpah to be able to pull off the central con of Bennie finishing Tetro's long abandoned play. Verdu's Miranda is charming and credible - anchoring a movie featuring all sorts of crazy characters. I particularly loved Carmen Maura as "Alone" - the theatre critic that allows Coppola to spoof the art-house world he is at once seeking to re-engage with. But the real masterstroke is casting Klaus Maria Brandauer (MEPHISTO) as Papa Tetracini - world-famous composer, charmer and shit. The genius is that even an old and flabby Brandauer can be charming enough to convince as the seducer of his young son's girlfriend - or as the firebrand Furtwaenglerian composer. He commands attention in every scene he's in and we can well understand why his sons struggle to escape from his physical and emotional presence.

I loved TETRO - moreso on the second viewing. And I am thrilled that Coppola is moving back to these self-financed, self-penned utterly artistically liberated movies.

Additional tags: alden ehrenreich, maribel verdu, rodrigo de la serna, klaus maria brandauer, osvaldo golijov, mihai malaimare jr

TETRO played Cannes and Toronto 2009 and was released in Spain, Greece, Portugal, Italy and France last year. It was released in Hungary and Brazil earlier this year and is currently on release in the UK.

London Film Festival Day 14 - LION'S DEN / LEONERA

This festival has seen a trio of movies anchored by powerful performances by men - HUNGER, IL DIVO and THE WRESTLER. So it's refreshing to finally come across a movie that centres on the performance of a woman, and also highlights the specifically feminine issue of motherhood, and more powerfully, raising a child while incarcerated.

As the film opens, our protagonist, Julia (Martina Gusman), wakes up in bed, bruised, bloodied and in shock. She automatically goes out for the day and returns him, and only then does she realise that there is a dead man in her house. She's arrested and charged with killing the man - the lover of her boyfriend (Rodrigo Santoro). Prison overwhelms this shy pregnant woman, unwilling to shower naked, spurning the lesbian advances of her fellow inmates. By the time she is tried and convicted, three years later, she has become as brazen, strong, and willing to accept intimacy as the other prisoners. As her son grows, the question arises of what should happen to Julia's son Tomas. Julia's mother thinks that prison is no fit place for a child to live. But Julia thinks that the best place for her son is with his mother. And so we build to a tense denouement in which Julia goes to extreme lengths to protect her child.

LEONERA isn't the kind of film that's full of action and plot points. It's essentially the story of a woman who grows in self-knowledge and strength through her friendship with other women and her love for her child. Despite it's apparently dour subject matter, I can reassure you that it never drags, moves along at a swift pace, is utterly engrossing, and ultimately, uplifting.

LEONERA played Cannes, Toronto and London 2008. It was released in Argentina and Spain earlier this year. It opens in France on December 3rd and in the Netherlands on December 11th.

FAMILIA RODANTE - Are we there yet?

FAMILIA RODANTE tells the tale of an eccentric old granny who takes her extended family 1500km across country in a decrepit camper van to attend a family wedding. I know I was meant to find this bunch of eccentrics charming and their little family arguments and flirtations endearing but I just found it dull, and vaguely depressing. When I was a kid my family would take long trips to visit relations in London. This was back before the M25 or climate control existed, and we'd spending hours crawling along the M1 in an over-heated Vauxhall. You know how it is. The slightest comment on dad's map-reading abilities flares into an irritable argument. You crawl through channels on the radio but only find crappy country music. Half the passengers are asleep, their sweaty foreheads stuck to the hot polyester seat covers. Perhaps the only chance of excitement is when your idiot kid-brother sticks his head out of the window as a lorry passes. Other than that it's just monotonous countryside and the odd petrol station. Well, having suffered enough of these journeys as a kid, I feel no need to suffer through anyone else's, even if they are from Argentina.

FAMILIA RODANTE premiered at Venice 2004 and went on limited release in the UK in November 2005. It goes on limited release in the US in August 2006 but is already available on Region 2 DVD.