WHEN THE DRAGON SWALLOWED THE SUN

In addition to reading the review below, you can listen to a podcast review of this film or subscribe to Bina007 Movie Reviews in iTunes.

Dirk Simon's documentary on the political conflict between Tibet and China originally played the festival circuit in 2010.  Since then, it's IMDB page has been blocked in China, and it is only now getting a theatrical release in the UK.  The way it plays is as a straightforward agit-doc, unashamedly presenting the cause of the victimised invaded Tibet, with its fragile culture deliberately and methodically stamped out by the Chinese. I have been quite scornful of this kind of film in the past. I always wonder whether anyone who wasn't always convinced of the case would choose to see a film on that subject.  But this documentary is different.  In this case, I feel that even those of us in the west who have a sort of kneejerk response to support Tibet in some vague manner, are getting an education into what's really going on with that cause. Moreover, given the length of time the film took to assemble, its patient interviews with many Tibetans inside the cause, we get insight that is not readily available elsewhere.

The documentary has three key messages for us.  The first is the most obvious: Tibet was an independent country in 1912, and was invaded by the Chinese in 1950.  It is entitled to its independence.

The second key message is that Tibet is almost uniquely ill-equipped to fight for that independence. It has a deeply entrenched state religion that is committed to peace - so much so that the Dalai Lama called the resistance fight to a halt.  It also has a still respected aristocracy whose scion is now a young teenager with little guidance, much doubt and great expectations of him.  There is a powerful scene where the boy goes to the state oracle for advise and is given the banal instruction to follow the Dalai Lama, who has himself just admitted that the fight for independence has failed, the compromise fight for autonomy has failed, and now he looks to his people for answers, just as they look to him.  Therein lies the contradiction of the Tibetan struggle.  They are fighting for modern liberal values from the starting position of a feudal, hierarchical, religious monarchy and the very power structures they seek to preserve as their culture are holding them back from protecting it.

The third key message is that China is not going to negotiate and the West is not going to intervene.  Just as in 1950, when the West cosied up to Mao hoping to provoke a Sino-Soviet split, today the West needs Chinese trade.  And as for China, she is playing a patient waiting game, for the Dalai Lama to die - and for all the resettled Han Chinese to dominate and dilute the Tibetan culture.

The overwhelming feeling at the end of this sometimes frustratingly edited and arguably overlong documentary is one of having been given valuable insight but also a sense of hopelessness.   There is a young Tibetan girl who is reduced to tears asking the interviewer what they should do.  Former resistance fighters want a campaign of civil disobedience at the cost of lives. The Dalai Lama feels that would be hopeless against the massive Chinese numbers.  Both sides are right.  And our minds are cast back to the opening scenes of the doc - where Richard Gere and Archbishop Desmond Tutu speak at a rally - and it all seems rather futile.  One wonders then, whether this documentary is also futile. Educating ourselves about the struggle that we know is likely to fail. It is depressing and yet utterly morally necessary.

WHEN THE DRAGON SWALLOWED THE SUN has a running time of 115 minutes and is rated 15 for the real images of tortured Tibetans.  The film will be released in the UK on August 16th.

ALAN PARTRIDGE: ALPHA PAPA

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I laughed at almost every line of ALAN PARTRIDGE: ALPHA PAPA. And I don't mean an inward knowing intellectual laugh but proper laugh-out-loud, can't eat my jelly babies laughing.  And so was everyone else in the cinema, which was a bit disconcerting because they had an average age of twenty which means they weren't even born when Steve Coogan's comic creation first hit the small screen.  I felt momentarily old and passed it, and in between cackling with laughter at Patridge lip synching to Roachford's late 80s hit "Cuddly Toy", I thought of LCD Soundsystem's "Losing My Edge"  - all those teenagers "in little jackets and borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered eighties".  There was some irony in seeing these "yoot" get down with Alan Partridge - a movie that is at heart about people who are losing their edge, whose faces don't fit with shiny new brands aimed at the target demographic. People who want to stick two fingers up to the airbrushed over-familiar breakfast DJs who play from carefully manicured set-lists and have about as much to do with real music as IPL has to do with real cricket.

But, anyways, back to the matter at hand!  ALAN PARTRIDGE: ALPHA PAPA is absolutely brilliant, and not just if you're a fan of his TV appearances as talk-show host and then his ignominious descent into local radio. We've got Alan as we love him - his goofy geeky fashion faux pas - his borderline sexism and racism - his sly selfish survival instinct - and most of all, his egomania.   There's something despairing and tragic about Alan, and yet, he always comes out on top, and that's why we love him.  We all have moments of pathetic desperation and Alan speaks to that. 

In his first feature film, Alan is a DJ at North Norfolk Digital - basically a media no-man's land. But he gets, and ceases his chance at fame, when his fellow DJ Pat Farrell is sacked by the station's new greed capitalist owners.  And when I say sacked, I mean shafted by a devious Alan.  Farrell goes FALLING DOWN, and starts shooting up the station, resulting in a hostage crisis that Alan mediates.  What results in a script that is absolutely packed with jokes but which also hangs together in terms of the  emotional motivation of the key characters and feels satisfying and meaty rather than just another shameless cash-in TV adaptation that has some funny scenes but no real substance.  God bless Armando Iannucci.  For giving us Alan and Malcolm Tucker.  That man shouldn't just be an OBE, he should be a bloody Duke, or Lord or something that signifies what a genius he is.  

ALAN PARTRIDGE: ALPHA PAPA has a running time of 90 minutes and is rated 15.  ALPHA PAPA premiered in Norwich on July 24th and was released in the UK on August 7th.  It opens in New Zealand on December 5th.

SOUTHCLIFFE EPISODE 2: LIGHT FALLS

Rory Kinnear as the journalist David Whitehead returning to SOUTHCLIFFE.

In the second episode of Channel 4's brooding, despairing, SOUTHCLIFFE, the narrative switches to the events just before and after the mass shooting in the sleepy British town. We see more of Rory Kinnear's buttoned up but traumatised journalist, David Whitehead, forced to return to his hometown as the body count increases, and learn a little about why he is so dismissive of the "nice small town" image.  And we see more of the killer Stephen Morton (Sean Harris) struggling to care for his ailing mother.  But the real focus of the episode are two of the families that are victims of the shooting. The first is depicted as a typical suburban loving young family, but almost predictably we learn that the father is cheating on his wife.  The second is the family of the social worker (Shirley Henderson) caring for Stephen's mum. They seem genuinely caring, worried for their teenage daughter (Kaya Scodelario) who wants to go travelling, and trying IVF for another baby. 

As in the first episode, Sean Durkin's direction is carefully paced and elliptically edited. The tone is grey and dark green - oppressive and depressing.  Rory Kinnear is superb as the stiff upper-lip journalist, stating the horrible with a matter of fact air and a repressed anger.  He's the only character where I am genuinely interested in seeing where he goes.  The first family is a cliché, but there's one single scene that redeems the plotline - when the lads are drunk, singing to Oasis in a pub, and the father starts to break down.  It's for visual images like this that we watch high class TV. The second family is better acted though - Eddie Marsan and Shirley Henderson always masterful and utterly sympathetic.   The way in which writer Tony Grisoni shows each member of that family coming to an understanding of what is happening - the sound design - the panicked voicemails - is the second piece of exceptional film-making in this otherwise rather banal episode. 

SOUTHCLIFFE EPISODE 2: LIGHT FALLS was originally broadcast in the UK on August 5th.

SOUTHCLIFFE EPISODE 1: THE HOLLOW SHORE

Sean Harris as ex-squaddie Stephen

SOUTHCLIFFE is the latest event television, which is basically a posh word for a highbrow mini-series. It follows in the steps of the Sundance Channel's TOP OF THE LAKE and ITV's hugely successful BROADCHURCH - combining an all-star cast with auteur cinema production values and gritty realism and psychological heft.   The series centres on the traumatised war veteran Stephen, played by Sean Harris (Micheletto, THE BORGIAS), and the events that lead him to go on a killing spree in his sleepy British sea-side town.  That isn't a spoiler.  Because in Tony Grisoni's intelligent and empathetic script, Stephen's actions are revealed up front. The series then becomes about why the killer did what he did, and even more, the impact on the town.

In the first episode, THE HOLLOW SHORE, we focus on the events and indignities that lead Stephen to kill.  We see Stephen frustrated with caring for his ailing mother, pissed about by friends who owe him cash, mocked by the villagers who saw through his delusions of being in the SAS, and generally despairing that nobody understands him, or the war that he has seen.  He strikes up a friendship with Chris (Joe Dempsie - Gendry in GAME OF THRONES).  A naive kid who's friend has just died in a crash and needs some structure and perhaps the adrenaline rush of war. Meanwhile, journalist and Southcliffe native David Whitehead (Rory Kinnear - Tanner in SKYFALL) is remembering his bullied childhood and drinking heavily in his adulthood.

There's a lot to admire in SOUTHCLIFFE.  It's patient, tense, beautifully shot, well-acted, and has a daring approach to narrative, folding memory into contemporary events, and challenging the concept of with-holding the killer's identity.  Director, Sean Durkin, most famous for his Sundance Festival smash, MARTHA, MARCY, MAY, MARLENE presents us a vision of the English seaside town that's muddy-grey and brown, oppressive, claustrophobic and dead-end depressing.  

But I couldn't help but think I'd seen this all before.  The traumatised ex-squaddie is a totem of post-Gulf War cinema and TV - as is the beaten down carer of the invalid parent.  Similarly, we're very familiar with the Lynchian idea that there's brutality and sadism behind the white picket fences not least from writer Tony Grisoni's most recent foray into TV, RED RIDING. SOUTHCLIFFE's going to have to provide something more radical and ground-breaking if it isn't going to be "just another" well-acted, earnest British drama. 

SOUTHCLIFFE EPISODE 1: THE HOLLOW SHORE was first broadcast in the UK on August 4th 2013.

ONLY GOD FORGIVES

ONLY GOD FORGIVES is a visually stunning, austere, balletic movie that happens to contain one scene of particularly gruesome violence that has had critics up in arms at its "torture porn" aesthetic. I think this is a gross misunderstanding of what this film is trying to do and explore, and a rather facile reason to dismiss it. A more serious criticism is that the austerity - the slow tracking camera - the carefully staged tableaux - become wearying in their purity, and alienating insofar as they flatten out and forbid any real emotional engagement.

The plot is almost impossible to spoil - the movie is all concept and very little development. In a highly stylised but contemporary Bangkok an American crime family falls foul of a Thai cop cum avenging angel called Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm). Chang arranges for the death of the paedophile son Billy (Tom Burke - THE HOURS), which prompts the emotionally manipulative matriarch Crystal (Kristin Scott-Thomas) to order her other son Julian (Ryan Gosling) to be avenged in turn.  This unleashes a wave of death with an unflinching logic - no-one who is guilty escapes, other than the man who, accepting his guilt, seeks an escape. 

The style of this movie is similarly unflinching and unrelenting.  Nicholas Windig Refn retreats from the small semblance of emotional authenticity and narrative contained in DRIVE to the more arthouse purity of his Mads Mikkelsen Viking flick VALHALLA RISING.  There's a sense in which that character, as well as Driver, reach their apotheosis in Chang  - the man whose motivation is primal and almost robotic.  He has no emotion - barely breaks a sweat - we get that he has a daughter but could any of us say that he is attached to her? 

In fact, the only real emotional relationship for us to get invested in, is that between Crystal and her son.  The typically elegant Kristin Scott Thomas is transformed into the Real Housewives of Psychoville, channelling Donatella Versace, Lady Macbeth, Livia from THE SOPRANOS.  Her performance elicits the few laughs of the movie, and could easily have slipped into spoof.  There's one moment when she's almost as nutso as MOMMY DEAREST, but somehow the film just manages to stay on the right side of serious.

As for Ryan Gosling, he's paring down the character of Driver into something even less dialogue-driven, and yet conveying a guilt, an honour, and a pent-up anger that is powerful and ultimately gives us the only catharsis of this movie. In a moment of levity, I thought he was like the Hulk, deliberately trying to constrain his anger. And then, at times I thought Julian was (rather improbably) like Alex Marchmain in BRIDESHEAD REVISITED, using a hooker to shield himself from his mother/wife. 

Finally, to the real star of the show - cinematographer Larry Smith's breath-taking visuals - which combine the surreal, hyper-designed colour-schemes of a David Lynch nightmare and the slow deliberate tracking of Kubrick.  While the director has asserted that he was inspired by Gaspar Noe's ENTER THE VOID, look at those bar scenes and tell me you're not thinking of the Twin Peaks' Red Room. Watch Chang singing schmaltzy Thai karaoke songs in an eerie tableaux setting, sometimes with the sound overdubbed, and tell me you're not thinking of the Club Silencio scene in MULHOLLAND DRIVE where the old woman lip synchs to a cover of Roy Orbison's Crying.  The sound design from Cliff Martinez is similarly fantastic and at times I felt like I didn't need any dialogue at all - just this expressionist electronic take on religious organ music and the Lynchian visuals. 

I guess I should address some of the objections to this film? Is it just torture porn? No.  The violence is largely off screen and is certainly at the service of Chang's deep ethics. The one full-on torture scene is difficult, but is in the context of a movie that is a massive Biblical metaphor, it serves a purpose in illustrating the "if the eye offends thee" vengeance imperative. To that end, it feels like some of the violence in Park Chan-Wook movies. And the final scene of grotesquerie is a masterpiece - echoing the seminal penetration scene in Georges Bataille's Ma Mere. 

Is the movie condescending toward its oriental setting?  No. It's making a point about how Westerners can view Thailand as a place to escape and indulge their base desires, and how frustrating and infuriating this must be for the local population.  The key scene between Chang and Julian is absolutely crucial in this respect. In fact, the choice of using Thai language title cards for this movie with English subtitles is a very clear move not to pander to Westerners. 

What can I say? I was transfixed by this film. I found it to be intelligent, deliberately styled, and, perhaps astonishingly, laugh-out-loud funny. It was absorbing even as I acknowledged that I didn't really care about the characters. It just wasn't that kind of movie.

This movie is available as a podcast below, or by subscribing to Bina007 Movie Reviews in iTunes.

ONLY GOD FORGIVES played Cannes 2013, and opened earlier this year in France, Belgium, Denmark, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, Poland and Turkey. It is currently on release in Australia, Germany, Canada, the USA, Israel, Portugal, Iceland, New Zealand, Ireland and the UK. It opens on August 8th in Hungary; on August 22nd in Singapore; on September 20th in Latvia and Mexico; on September 26th in Russia; on November 1st in Spain and in January 2014 in Japan.

ONLY GOD FORGIVES has a running time of 90 minutes and is rated R in the USA and 18 in the UK for strong bloody violence. 

A FIELD IN ENGLAND

Rounding out our Ben Wheatley retrospective, we come to his latest release, A FIELD IN ENGLAND.  This was remarkable for being the first British movie to be released simultaneously in the cinema, on TV and on demand.   I completely understand why Wheatley was in favour of this type of release. Going for a TV and OD release means that his film will be seen by far more people, and generate far more buzz, than with a conventional limited art-house cinema release followed at a distance by a DVD release. It's also another sign of the trend wherein TV and cinema have merged. In the old days, there was a snobbery about quality work being put out in cinemas, and TV being of lesser quality.  But now, with the HBO-isation of TV, we can see long-form drama of infinitely higher quality than shitty genre films, and budgets per minute that match anything Hollywood has to offer.  We're rapidly coming to a place where cinema, TV, ipads and phones are just media on which the content is delivered, and the hierarchy between them is being dissolved. To be sure, for any beautifully shot visual work, the bigger the screen the better, and there's always something to be said for the group experience, but modern life doesn't allow for the reverence of the movie theatre.  The common sense solution is simultaneous release.  To be sure, I'd urge you to watch visually arresting movies like A FIELD IN ENGLAND on a big screen. But if you don't live near an art-house cinema, that you can watch on its "opening weekend" is fantastic, even as the significance of that moniker in a Netflix mega-release world diminishes.

All of which is pre-amble to the review of the actual film, which is remarkable for its content as much as for the method of its release. 

The movie is set in the mid seventeenth century, during the English civil war - a period of history much under-filmed.  As the film opens, we meet a motley crew of deserters - Whitehead, an alchemist, fleeing his master, Trower, and Jacob and Friend, two deserters being marshalled by Cutler.   They amble about in a comedy of manners - the crude deserters making jokes about constipation and searching for an alehouse, while Whitehead asserts his delicate intellectual superiority.  The crew then come across the enigmatic O'Neill who, broadly speaking, asserts his authority, gets the group high on magic mushrooms, and forces them to dig for some unspecified, potentially magical, treasure. And then, in classic Ben Wheatley style, it all goes horribly, sickeningly wrong. 

For his fourth feature, Wheatley once again does something utterly different. After the domestic gangster flick that was DOWN TERRACE, and the cultish horror of KILL LIST, and the very darkly funny SIGHTSEERS, we get a period, black-and-white, cultish, trippy horror movie that defines all genre conventions.  A FIELD IN ENGLAND has elements of all of Wheatley's previous films.  We've got darkly funny comedy - jokes about constipation and nagging wives  - we've got a fascination with the mythic pagan magic of the English countryside - and we've got the seemingly banal slip into the bonkers and then finally the truly frightening.  And in terms of the formal direction, while this movie is in black and white, in period costume, and shot in a single film, A FIELD IN ENGLAND retains the elegant framing of DP Laurie Rose - arresting images that stay with us long after the movie is over - and ellipses that jolt us - in this movie, living tableaux. 

My view is that A FIELD IN ENGLAND is Wheatley most formally imaginative and daring film, and the visuals and sound mix are stunning.  There's a seen with a man being harnessed and driven like a horse that's as horrific as anything more graphic later in the film.  I love the casting of Reece Sheersmith, of A LEAGUE OF GENTLEMEN fame, as Whitehead, and Wheatley regular Michael Smiley as O'Neill. And I love some of the early dark humour:

Friend: You think about a thing before you touch it, am I right? 

Whitehead: Is that not usual? 

Friend: Not in Essex. 

Brilliant!

A FIELD IN ENGLAND was released simultaneously in cinemas, on demand, and on TV on July 5th. It has a running time of 87 minutes and is rated 15 in the UK for strong language, one occurrence of very strong violence and gory images.

A podcast review of this film is available directly here, and by subscribing to Bina007 Movie Reviews in iTunes.