HALLAM FOE - a puzzling little film

HALLAM FOE is an odd, puzzling film and I'm not convinced it added up to much in the end. However, cinephiles will want to see it for Jamie Bell's brave central performance as the eponymous troubled teen.

Hallam is a seventeen year-old boy who is convinced that his mother's suicide was engineered by his step-mother (Claire Forlani with a perfect English accent.) Since the death, Hallam has retreated into his tree-house, snooping on people from afar and nurturing his paranoid delusions. Confronted by the (apparently) Macchiavellian step-mother, Hallam flees to Edinburgh. There, he takes a menial job in a hotel in order to get close to a young woman (Sophia Myles) who happens to look like his dead mother.

The movie is strong on performances and the look is suitably sinister and grim. Hallam comes across as conflicted and borderline insane - but also as charming and warm. I really cared about what happened to him. This is in sharp contrast to writer-director, David Mackenzie's, earlier film, YOUNG ADAM, which I found to be irredeemably bleak and alienating.

Where this film lost me was in the writing. The motivations of key characters seemed a bit random or insufficiently fleshed out. I never got a grip on what the dad (Ciaran Hinds) was up to for a start. And the Sophia Myles character was bizarre - in a good way I think - because instead of running screaming at the idea of having dated her stalker she actually embraces his weirdness. It's a strangely optimistic thought. Apart from all these substantive issues, some of the scenes just don't work. There's a particularly excruciating pre-coital scene in a hotel suite between Hallam and his girlfriend, for instance.

Still, it's another great performance from Jamie Bell and proves that he is maturing into an interesting actor who is willing to take on challenging roles.

HALLAM FOE played Berlin, where it won the Silver Bear, and Edinburgh 2007 and is currently on release in the UK and Germany. It opens in Swizterland on October 4th, in Belgium on October 24th and in the Netherlands on January 17th 2008.

YOUNG ADAM - irredeemably bleak and alienating

YOUNG ADAM is an earlier film by the writer-director of HALLAM FOE, David Mackenzie. The film attracted some controversy upon its initial release in 2003 because of the graphic sex scenes and a full frontal shot of Ewan Macgregor that brought down the wrath of the US censors. Apparently the US censors also have a problem with a man orally pleasuring a woman.

Behind all the hoopla we have a brutal drama about an enigmatic but slightly sinister young man called Joe whose past relationship with a woman called Cathie is called into question when her body is found in the canal where he is now working on a barge and sleeping with the barge-master's wife.

The subject-matter of the piece is similar to HALLAM FOE, insofar as it deals with a young man who feels he has no real place in society and examines his sexual relations with a number of different women with uncompromising honesty. YOUNG ADAM also shares the admirable unwillingness to explain too much, as well as rather grim production design and cinematography. David Mackenzie also elicits a captivating performance from Ewan Macgregor just as he did from Jamie Bell. But YOUNG ADAM also shares the same problems as HALLAM FOE. Some of the dialogue and sexual encounters seemed plained bizarre and I didn't always feel confident that the writer knew where he was taking his characters.

The peculiar strength and failure of YOUNG ADAM is its willingness to put a fundamentally cold, inscrutable and unsympathetic character and the heart of the story. It's a bold move. But as the movie unfolded I just felt alienated.

YOUNG ADAM played Cannes and Toronto 2003 and opened around the world that year, although in a heavily censored version in the US. It is now available on DVD.

Where's Wally?

So I got a couple of emails asking why the posts have gone from daily frequency to nada. The sad truth is that dealing with the fall-out from financial market shenanigans have trumped my extra-curricular activities to the point where I earned my BA gold card. Anyways, when the Gekkos of this world start behaving themselves/file for personal bankruptcy I'll get back to posting more regularly. Till then, my apologies for the somewhat sporadic service. We look forward to a better world where we call a spade a spade and sub-prime debt, junk, and your humble servant has time to goof off early and head to the local multiplex. Laters, Bina007.

A strangely passion-less LADY CHATTERLEY

French director Pascale Ferran has turned in a lyrical but curiously anaemic version of the infamous novel. It scores strong on its high definition photography of lush English countryside and its elegant costumes and interior design. Frankly, it looks like a Laura Ashley catalogue. Marina Hands also make a delicate and tremulous Lady Chatterley, bored, isolated and frustrated since her husband lost his legs in World War One. But Jean-Louis Coulloch's Parkin (as Mellors was in D H Lawrence's first draft) is hopelessly mis-cast. Instead of a vital man at home in nature, we have a fat, balding heavy-breather who looks a bit like Marlon Brando in LAST TANGO but without the ravaged vestiges of beauty. The sex scenes are hopelessly unerotic and hopelessly shot. The whole exercise rolls forward painfully slowly, softly lit with birds twittering in the back-ground. I have to say, I was bored rigid. And as for this movie winning a clutch of Cesars, the French equivalent of the Oscars, did none of the voters see GABRIELLE?

LADY CHATTERLEY was released in France in 2006 and played Berlin 2007. It was released in Belgium, Greece, Russia, Finland, Norway and the US earlier this year and goes on release in the UK tomorrow. It goes on release in Australia on September 6th 2007.

FANAA - bipolar Bollywood

FANAA is a film that follows the conventions of Bollywood to its own undoing. The first half is a typical sugary romance. Kajol plays a blind tourist called Zooni who falls in love with Aamir Khan's plain-talking tour guide, Rehan. It's a typical Hindi love story complete with songs, dancing and the obligatory rain-soaked love scene. It's all very conventional and even Kajol's innate charm can't rescue piss-poor songs like Des Rangila. Naturally, having fallen in love, Zooni regains her sight miraculously - a jump-the-shark moment if ever there was one.

After the interval, FANAA turns into a completely different film. It turns out that Rehan is actually a terrorist on the run from the police. He abandons Zooni and their unborn child only to resurface years later, by which time the movie has turned into a cross between SOMERSBY and a snow-bound thriller. It's all deeply unedifying and a waste of everyone's time. It's also totally unsurprising that the woman who penned this implausible drivel was also behind the tedious weepy, KABHI ALVIDA NA KEHNA.

If I have to look for a plus side, I guess I could make the dull point that all Bollywood films tends to look fabulous these days. After years of shite production values, the cinematography and special effects are of Hollywood standards. Shame about the content. Director Kunal Kohli is nothing without a good script: his previous hit HUM TUM must have been down to good chemistry between the leads.

FANAA was released in May 2006 and is available on DVD.

EL TOPO - balls-out film-making

EL TOPO is one of the weirdest movies you'll ever see. It's a cheeky surreal take on the Spaghetti Western shot by a Chilean director in Mexico. I can't explain what it's about, although PhD students can shoot theories of religious symbolism up the wazoo. All I can say is that the humble viewer is presented with images that are hillarious, disturbing and plain old bizarre for two hours. The back bone of the flick is the avenging cowboy, El Topo, who rides through a barren land with his butt naked seven year old son. The landscape is peopled with monks, lesbians, sufis and other random stuff. There's violence - both comic and brutal. And at one point, El Topo swaps his butt-naked son for an avenging chick, and then two. And then they emerge at some point in the futre from a cave (like a Mole - a ha!) and the son is now a weird-ass monk.....Anyways, I'm completely lost, but you can't help but have fun watching this ridiculousness.

It's funny isn't it? Everyone said that cheap Digital Video would liberate young film-makers from the hack studio system and allow them to truly express themselves. But all we've gotten are identikit "Sundance" rom-coms with quirky characters and faux-naif humour. Where are the truly liberated visual artists? Where are pioneers? Where are the Alejandro Jodarowsky's of today?

EL TOPO was released in 1970s and spent a year as the Midnight movie at the Elgin Theatre in New York after John Lennon and Yoko Ono championed it. It was re-released uncut and cleaned up in the UK in April 2007 and is also available on DVD.