London Film Fest Day 12 - CRACKS

CRACKS is a coming-of-age drama set in a British girls boarding school in the 1930s. Eva Green plays the glamorous Miss G who holds the diving team in thrall, particularly the captain, Di (Juno Temple.) The order is upset when an equally glamorous new girl arrives. Fiamma is Spanish, an aristocrat, beautiful and has travelled widely. Her self-possession and sophistication stands in sharp contrast to the other girls, and Miss G soon makes her a favourite, upsetting Di. The majority of the film deal Di vacillating position in coming to terms with Fiamma’s usurpation and Miss G’s increasingly unhealthy obsession with her. The cracks of the title refer to the girls finding the cracks in Miss G’s persona, and in their faith in authority.

This story is nothing we haven’t seen before in film such as THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE and turns out to be rather more obvious and less seditious than that seminal work. The production values are all top notch (superlative photography from John Mathieson and a particularly good score from Javier Navarrete) but the story is intensely predictable from the start. In particular, anyone who sees that Fiamma has a breathing problem in the first reel can see where the movie is going. The enjoyment is thus comes from the little moments that ring true. I loved a scene where the girls prepare for a midnight feast, and another where they get excited/disappointing by the arrival or lack thereof of post from home. Anyone who went to a boarding school will agree that these moments are marvellously well done. Juno Temple gives a strong central performance as Di, and Eva Green is strong as Miss G. In terms of conveying a magnetic sexuality that inspires high school crushes, Green is just right. But I do question casting her given her accented English, or at least casting her without changing her name to hint at a more cosmopolitan heritage. But then that would work against a key point in the plot

Overall, while CRACKS is certainly an assured debut feature from Jordan Scott (daughter of Ridley) it‘s high quality production is almost too good for the rather hackneyed story of a high school infatuation gone wrong.

CRACKS played Toronto and London 2009. It will be released in the UK on December 4th and in France on December 30th.

STEALING BEAUTY - interactive voyeurism

Disturbingly leery film in which a variety of men and women are transfixed by a virginal American teen staying in Tuscany. The voyeurism hinted at in the title begins in the opening credits when our protagonist (Liv Tyler) is stealthily photographed on a plane to Sienna. It continues as the old bohemians speculate about her losing her virginity and implicates the viewer as we're forced to watch her being deflowered. This is after we've sat through two hours of flirting with a terminally ill Jeremy Irons and a whole bunch of teen angst, condensed into mind-numbingly juvenile poems. It's all left me asking, "So what?" This being a Bertolucci film it looks fantastic, of course, but without the political context or deep psychosexual drama of THE DREAMERS and LAST TANGO it all seems rather thin.

STEALING BEAUTY played Cannes 1996 and was released that year. It is available on DVD.

London Film Festival Day 1 - EASTERN PROMISES

This is NOT a review of EASTERN PROMISES. That will follow soon from my colleague. Rather, this is a critical discussion of the movie aimed at those who have seen the film and want to discuss it. SPOILERS FOLLOW.

EASTERN PROMISES is a cheap name for a rather cheap film. That is the sad conclusion I came to, having talked through my disappointment with five other people who had just seen the film. I went in with great expectations on the back of the cast and credit list. David Cronenberg's HISTORY OF VIOLENCE was one of the best films of 2005, thanks largely to a revelatory performance by Viggo Mortensen. I was also impressed by Steven Knight’s depiction of the reality of London away from the Millennium Bridge in DIRTY PRETTY THINGS. Sadly, Knight and Cronenberg let themselves down badly here.

The movie opens with a 14 year old pregnant prostitute called Tatiana collapsing in a pharmacy. Naomi Watt's nurse, Anna, helps deliver her baby and calls the time of her death. She gives the girl's diary to her Russian uncle to translate, hoping to find a next of kin to stop the baby being fostered. Uncle Stepan refuses to translate the diary because of its references to drugs, rape and prostitution, so Anna goes to a restaurant whose card is in its pages. At the restaurant an old man called Semyon claims no knowledge of the girl until Anna reveals she has a diary. He then offers to translate it. Anna meets Semyon's son Kirill (Vincent Cassel) and Kirill's henchman, Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen). She discovers that Semyon raped Tatiana and that he is now trying to eliminate Stepan and the child. She also strikes up an unlikely friendship with Nikolai. Meanwhile, Kirill has assassinated a man who accused him of being gay, with violent consequences for Nikolai. The set-up is compelling. Is Nikolai playing Kirill and Semyon off against each other, so as to assume leadership of the gang? And will he eliminate Stepan or help Anna and the child.

The plot of this movie is implausible and simplistic at every level. For instance, how is it that a prostitute who cannot even commit suicide because the windows of her brothel are barred can somehow turn up in a pharmacy at midnight? Of course, Steven Knight and David Cronenberg don't actually care about child prostitution or about the hows and whys of Tatiana’s predicament. Despite Sandra Hebron’s valiant attempt to introduce this movie as a liberal expose of the seamier side of London, Tatiana’s story serves merely as a mechanism to throw Anna and Nikolai together and get us into the world of cool gangsters and stylised violence.

An even more fundamental problem with the film is that Stephen Knight and David Cronenberg choose not to make Nikolai an interesting, conflicted character. The set up of the film captures the audience's imagination. Is Nikolai playing a long game, trying to take over the gang? Is he really a good guy? Will his conscience get the better of his ambition? Anna’s attraction to Nikolai is also more interesting because it becomes a transgressive relationship between a decent woman and a criminal. As soon as it is revealed that Nikolai is a "good guy" the movie falls apart. There is no conflict - no tension - and also no transgression in the relationship between Anna and Nikolai. They are merely two mutually attracted decent people who will not be able to have a relationship because he is working under-cover. At that point, all that is left is for David Cronenberg to give us a corny Mills-and-Boon love scene in which the two protagonists finally manage a chaste kiss. Puh-lease.

If the movie lacks interesting characters and a plausible plot, what remains? Well, this is Cronenberg so we get a lot of beautifully choreographed but largely gratuitous violence. In fact, despite the generally negative tone of this discussion, it is worth saying that in the first half of this movie, Cronenberg creates one of the most iconic movie Badasses of all time. Nikolai is absolutely brilliantly rock-hard. Take the scene where he disposes of a corpse, tie over one shoulder, cigarette in his mouth, defrosting the wallet with a hairdryer. Another absolutely iconic scene is the "Bath House" scene where a butt naked Nikolai despatches two knife-wielding assassins. This scene was so intense, so elegant and so instantly iconic that it raised applause from the packed Odeon Leicester Square audience. It also raised some laughs from those of us acknowledging our complicity in this pornographic violence and also the cartoon-like nature of the scene. David Cronenberg always lingers on the shot of the severed throat or the mutilated fingers for those few seconds too long. He’s enjoying himself in a way that makes the viewer feel uncomfortable. It’s like a school-yard dare to see who will blink first.

The movie also has some of the most instantly iconic homo-erotic scenes since Alan Bates wrestled Oliver Reed naked in Ken Russell's WOMEN IN LOVE. The naked Bath-house scene is an obvious example, but the tattooing of the stars above the heart is another, not to mention the scene between Kirill and Nikolai in the basement.

And this brings us to the heart of the film. EASTERN PROMISES is neither a thriller about child prostitution nor a transgressive romance nor a story about two do-gooders who fall in love. Rather, it is a story about a man who will kill to stop being out-ed. The whole engine of this story is that Kirill cannot bring himself to rape Tatiana because he is gay. So Semyon shows him how, knocking Tatiana up in the process. Kirill assassinates Soyka because Soyka is spreading rumours that Kirill is gay. Kirill has to force Nikolai to fuck a whore so he can get his rocks off as a voyeur. He’s clearly drinking to drown his frustrations. And Nikolai clearly uses the fact that Kirill is attracted to him to gain influence in the gang. Kirill’s dilemma is really at the heart of the story. It is, then, bizarre that Stephen Knight chooses not to focus on Kirill but on the childish love story between Nikolai and Anna in his script. It is also a weakness of the movie that Vincent Cassel, who is a great actor, has not managed to master a convincing and consistent Russian accent. By contrast, Viggo Mortensen gives a flawless performance in a flawless accent.

Ultimately, EASTERN PROMISES will be remembered for its stylish violence and its lead male performance. The story is thin and more banal than the PR campaign would have you believe. This is neither an expose of a grimy underworld, like DIRTY PRETTY THINGS, nor a compelling character study of a conflicted man, like HISTORY OF VIOLENCE. On the surface, it’s an hour of great set-up followed by an hour of a sappy love story between two banal do-gooders. It is really an equally banal and under-developed story about a man in the closet. Either way, cheap thrills aside, this movie is unworthy of its credit list.

EASTERN PROMISES played Toronto and London 2007 and is already on release in the S, Denmark, Russia, Iceland, Spain and Norway. It opens in Singapore, Australia and the UK later in October. It opens in Finland, France, Turkey, Belgium and the Netherlands in November and in Italy and Germany in December. It opens in Argentina on January 31st 2008.

A TIGER'S TAIL - directionless social criticism of the Irish boom

Ireland has accumulated massive wealth over the past ten years. Much of this wealth has been generated through property development and there are plenty of examples of corruption in the granting of planning permits on the news. A trip to Dublin today is fascinating. There's more congestion getting into town from the airport than from Heathrow to Central London. Grafton Street has smarter shops and richer customers than Bond Street. Temple Bar is full of British hen nights and stag do's - there's barely an Irishmen there. (Even the bar staff seem to come from Eastern Europe). And the top end hotels rival the most expensive European capital in price. The International Financial Centre is crammed with big name banks; the International Film Festival is approaching the glamour of London's; and house prices have rocketed......But as with most economic booms, the gap between the haves and haven-nots has widened, and for every self-made millionaire there are first-time home-buyers who have been squeezed off the bottom of the housing ladder.

Writer-director John Boorman (THE TAILOR OF PANAMA) has made a brave attempt to chronicle this modern Irish crisis of conscience. The first forty minutes or so of his film, A TIGER'S TAIL is brilliantly perceptive. Dublin is seen as a city that is constipated with traffic and so gorged on money and excessive consumption that it's literally vomiting. Brendan Gleeson plays a millionaire property developer called Michael O'Leary who has benefited from the Celtic Tiger economic boom. He's got a fabulous house, a bolshie son (Sean McGinley) and a glamourous wife (Kim Cattrall.) But he's haunted by a down-at-heel doppelganger who may be a long-lost brother and seems to be after his life.

So the movie turns from social criticism to a weak thriller of sorts. It goes seriously off the tracks when the imposter turfs the real O'Leary from the family home. Cattrall struggles with her Irish accent, and the sex scene between her and Gleeson is laughable - whether intended or not. The movie then lurches on with melodramatic reunions, implausible events and decisions, and finally stutters to a close. It's a tremendous shame that the weak writing and lack of clear vision for the project undermined the fine opening section. One for DVD at best.

A TIGER'S TAIL is on release in the UK and opens in Israel on June 28th 2007.

V for VERY SILLY but still some good whistles and bangs

Reactions to V for VENDETTA seem poles apart: in general, the respected critics hated it but movie-goers are loving it. I guess I fall somewhere between the two poles. My first reaction was huge disappointment. In an Orwellian future, the UK is controlled by a fascist government, headed up a Big Brother-like Chancellor played by the marvellous British actor John Hurt.* Hugo Weaving plays "V", a terrorist who blows up Government buildings. V saves a young girl called Evey, played by Natalie Portman, (the stripper in CLOSER and Queen Amidala in Star Wars I thru III) and she eventually joins his cause. So far, so fantastically interesting. You have to love any movie that sends up an authoritarian "Chancellor", and attacks a fascist government that infringes upon our civil liberties. I never thought that a Hollywood that cannot quite bring itself to give a gay movie the Best Picture Oscar would make a movie that portrays terrorists as heroes! I'm loving the controversy and the honest exploration of the duties that fall on a citizen in the face of a repressive society.

However, the depression kicks in when you realise that the convoluted plot has more holes in it than Rab C Nesbitt's string vest. In addition, the film is populated by a bunch of high-class British character actors. Now, this is, of course, a good thing for international audiences. But for us Brits it can jar when we are expected to accept establishment boffin Stephen Fry as an instrument of sedition. He hosts the BAFTAs!

Anyways, I watched this movie again yesterday with altered expectations and realised that I had been way too harsh. If you just want a large dollop of popcorn-style trashy entertainment, you could do worse than see V. It has all the requisite whistles and bangs, as you would expect from a movie written by the guys who gave us The Matrix and the directed by the First AD on The Matrix and Star Wars II. In addition, the whole thing is wonderfully camp, and teeters on the brink of BATMAN AND ROBIN kitsch-tastic status. I can't take it remotely seriously, but then I do not think I am meant to. (Unlike Syriana, which wanted to be taken seriously but was still hillariously twee in its rendering of the Middle-East conflict.)

V for VENDETTA was shown at Berlin 2005 and is now on release in the US, UK, Germany and Austria. It hits France on April 19th 2006. *Amusing that Winston Smith has been resurrected as Big Brother. Kind of like when the People's Republic of Sheffield's David Blunkett turned up twenty years later as the most repressive Home Secretary in post-war British history.