Quai des Orfèvres (France 1947)

Dora photographs Jenny in Quai des Orfèvres

I picked this up in a bargain bin of DVDs -- pleased with myself because I'd been wanting to watch it for a while. Later I was deflated when I noticed that a trio of Henri-Georges Clouzot's most famous films (this one plus Le Corbeau and Le Salaire de la peur) were on offer at a better overall price in an online store. C'est la vie! But I wasn't disappointed by my purchase, even though it was a dodgy DVD that kept crashing during the opening menus. Optimum are to be applauded for releasing French classical cinema, but they don't offer much in the way of extras -- only a trailer on this DVD.

Quai des Orfèvres came to my attention after I'd watched 36, Quai des Orfèvres (France 2004) the policier starring Daniel Auteuil and Gérard Depardieu. Several commentators made reference to the earlier film and some suggested that the newer film was a remake. The title of both refers to the address of the headquarters of the most important French police organisations – something like the equivalent of '(New) Scotland Yard' in the UK. However, the title is the only direct link between the two films and the title of the earlier film is not particularly revealing since although the narrative does feature a lengthy interrogation at police headquarters, it is primarily a film noir melodrama.

Clouzot has suffered in retrospect from his decision in 1942 to work for the German 'front' studio Continental during the Occupation. One of the films he made then, Le Corbeau (The Raven) was named as 'propagandist' and Clouzot was denounced as a collaborationist. I saw the film a couple of years ago during the Leeds Film Quarter experiment and it is clear now that the film was much more ambiguous (it concerns a flurry of poison pen letters that gradually undermine a small town community).

A useful essay by Fiona Watson on the Senses of Cinema site gives a clue to Clouzot's influences and importance as a filmmaker. She tells us that Clouzot began working for Ufa at Babelsburg in 1932 dubbing films and this was where he developed an interest in the work of Fritz Lang. Later it became clear that whilst Clouzot had learned much from Lang, his competitor in the 1950s would be Hitchcock and the two would vie for the title of 'Master of Suspense'. Many of the American reviewers of those Clouzot films available as subtitled DVDs begin with the Hitchcock comparison, but this might not be the best place to start with Quai des Orfèvres.

My own interest in French films of the late 1940s and early 1950s has always been fuelled by a desire to test out the criticisms contained in the polemics by Truffaut and the other Cahiers writers. Was the French 'Quality Cinema' of the period as hidebound and stuffy -- 'le cinéma du papa' -- as they maintained? Watson points out that Truffaut was obsessed with Le Corbeau as a teenager, memorising whole chunks of dialogue and I did start thinking about one aspect of Truffaut's own work -- his interest in French popular culture -- as I watched Quai des Orfèvres.

The film focuses on an unusual ménage à trois. Maurice is a trained musician reduced to working as an accompanist. At the same time, his rather dim but attractive young wife, 'Jenny Lamour', is beginning to gain attention as a chanteuse. The couple live in a flat and below them isthe studio of a 'glamour photographer', Dora, who is in love with Jenny. When Jenny accidentally kills an ageing lecher (who sends young women to be photographed in 'erotic poses' by Dora) the other two both become involved in trying to avert Jenny's arrest. Although Dora is not an 'out' lesbian, the inference is clear and I was reminded of the representation of the lesbian relationship in Rossellini's Rome Open City, which must have shocked American audiences around the same time as Quai des Orfèvres was released in France.

As well as the music hall scenes of the chanteuse and the glamour photography shoots, the film also offers the auditioning rooms of a showbiz agent and the backstage of a circus in its overall representation of Parisian popular culture. The second half of the film involves the investigation of the death by an eccentric (but effective) police inspector. There is an intriguing mixture of comedy, suspense and detail of procedure in the investigation and the presence of a pack of hungry newshounds made me think of His Girl Friday. The other factor in this mixture of emotions is that the later action takes place in a snowstorm on Christmas Eve and as if to emphasise a Dickens connection, the inspector's adopted son (an African boy from the Inspector's time in the army) turns up at the police station almost like Tiny Tim. This delirious concoction is beautifully staged and photographed, echoing both pre-war French and Langian noirs and also the similar noir melodramas being produced in both the US and the UK in the late 1940s. In this respect it confirms the Cahiers view of 'quality cinema' -- it's also based on a 1942 novel. What it lacks in comparison to some of the American and British films is the new sense of 'street realism' that was introduced around this time.

The critic who really despised Clouzot was Jacques Rivette who described him as "sickening", whereas Godard merely rated Clouzot as not as interesting a filmmaker as Roger Vadim. Clouzot's crime was, like Réné Clément and Claude Autant-Lara, to be interested only in 'style' and to disavow 'social cinema'. Sometimes, the New Wave critics do seem very precious and it seems to me that a film like Quai des Orfèvres is stylish, entertaining and, if not a comment on the 'reality' of its period, at least populated with interesting and richly detailed characters.

Yella (Germany 2007)

Nina Hoss as Yella

I missed Christian Petzold's appearance at the Bradford Film Festival earlier this year, so it was good to catch up with his latest release, Yella on DVD. Yella is an intriguing film that creates a metaphor about both a sense of East Germans looking for an escape to a better future and a sense of the empty and soulless capitalism of the West, represented here by the glass-walled offices rented by venture capital companies on the Autobahne outside major cities.

The striking Nina Hoss plays a young woman who leaves her abusive husband in the East seeking a new job on the other side of the Elbe. What she finds is a situation in which another version of her husband -- a more successful and organised venture capitalist -- properly appreciates her skills as an accountant. Or does she? The film has a twist. It was recommended to me as rather like Kim Ki-duk's 3-Iron and, surprisingly perhaps, I can see the connection. The twist will no doubt anger some audiences -- perhaps it will be thought obvious, perhaps it will be taken to be wilfully obscure. Either way, it works for me and I found the film to be a much more interesting account of East and West than the more hyped films such as The Lives of Others. Yella is beautifully filmed and carefully and intelligently directed. The DVD release by Artificial Eye (Region 2) has interviews with both Petzold and Hoss that are revealing of the methods used. I hope more of Petzold's films are released in the UK.

Happy-Go-Lucky

Sally Hawkins is Poppy in Happy-Go-Lucky

I decided to see the latest Mike Leigh film in the cinema because (a) it focuses on a primary school teacher in North London (a job that means quite a lot in our household) and (b) it won the major prize in Berlin and was widely touted as being 'upbeat'.

The screening at Leeds Vue, The Light was interrupted by a fire alarm, but the cinema management handled the ensuing melee quite well and it didn't spoil the film for us (complimentary tickets was a nice idea too).

Overall, I thought the film was, as usual, impressive as a production with direction, cinematography and acting of the highest standard, but 'upbeat'? -- hardly. I do wonder what people remember about Leigh when they make these kinds of judgments. I've missed some of Leigh's later films (Naked, Career Girls etc.) but I've seen the rest, including all the TV plays. Happy-Go-Lucky for me is absolutely in the mainstream of Leigh's work. The central character is complex and interesting, but although I warmed to her as a good classroom teacher, I'm sure she would drive me mad in a few weeks. Some of the other characterisations are excellent. I liked the housemate, the school headteacher and a wonderful flamenco dance teacher.

The crunch in Leigh's films comes with the creation of characters and situations which are essentially 'real' – we've all met these people and we've been in situations like this. But Leigh then pushes both characterisation and situation that little bit further. Here the typical situation is the lead character Poppy's family argument with her two sisters, one a controlling conformist, the other a more 'out of it' student. But this is only a sub-plot next to Poppy's main confrontation with her increasingly intolerant driving instructor. This has great potential and I can see that Leigh could be argued to deliver a justified pay-off that is certainly not conventional. My problem is that this involves yet another working-class character in a Mike Leigh film who is portrayed as a grotesque. It's a sterling performance by Eddie Marsan (excellent in Vera Drake) but like The Office and other comedies of embarrassment, it's very difficult to watch. For me, that extra push makes it difficult to accept the disturbance that Leigh engenders in the relationship -- I can't engage at the very moment Leigh makes his point.

I'm quite happy to accept that the fault is mine in having too rosy a view of the world, but I consistently find Leigh too cruel in his depictions. I'm also less interested in his stories because I can't recognise any coherent political perspective. The Leigh film that remains enjoyable for me is Topsy Turvy, the Gilbert & Sullivan biopic. I want to enjoy all the skill and artistry, so I hope Mike Leigh comes up with a different kind of narrative soon.

Uwasa no onna (Japan 1954)

Mother (Tanaka Kinuyo) and daughter (Kuga Mishiko) in conflict.

In one of my fantasies, I learn how to manage time so well that I am able to work my way through all the available films of the directors I love. In reality, this means being decisive now and again and buying a DVD which might get watched.

Mizoguchi Kenji is my sentimental favourite amongst the Japanese and I was delighted to discover that Masters of Cinema are releasing a series of double DVD packs of his films. Of course, this means that I will probably have to buy films that I have already got (or rent the films separately). However, in the case of Uwasa no onna it has been paired with Chikamatsu monogatari, which I think I did see many years ago, but certainly haven't got.

Uwasa no onna is an untranslatable title that has sometimes been rendered as 'Woman of Rumour' or 'Woman in the rumour' – summoning up a common Mizoguchi theme of the lives of women in the context of restrictive social mores. This is one of Mizoguchi's contemporary set films (although most of it takes place in the 'pleasure' district of Kyoto, where many of the women are employed as geisha). It's a melodrama based on a triangle of mother, daughter and young male doctor. The great Tanaka Kinuyo plays the mother, a widow who has invested in a geisha house. Her daughter returns from Tokyo after a failed suicide and is shown as shamed by her mother's profession. The doctor who comes to visit her is the 'house doctor' in whom the mother has more than a professional interest.

The DVD carries a Tony Rayns introduction in which spends most of the time discussing how Mizoguchi didn't wish to make the film which was forced on him by his studio Daiei and how it was the last film he made with Tanaka, with whom he fell out when she became a successful director herself (the first significant female director in Japan). The introduction is both tantalising and frustrating. Rayns reminds us that Mizoguchi himself knew about the world of the pleasure houses (i.e. brothels) both from personal experience (common and acceptable for middle-class Japanese men of his era) and from his research for several other films which explored the same milieu. In this sense, it is clear why Daiei thought that this was a suitable property. It was written by Yoda Yoshikata, Mizoguchi's long-term collaborator and Narusawa Masashige, who would go on to be a major collaborator, so something was wrong if Mizoguchi turned away from the script. Rayns suggests that he was simply tired after winning three successive prizes at Venice or disdainful of what was clearly a straightforward genre piece. Daiei's motives become clear in the trailer included on the DVD which announces a 'dramatic epic' with all the sumptuousness of the geisha world. These now seem rather ridiculous claims for what turned out to be an 84 min film with relatively little visual splendour and none of the bravura camerawork that graces a film like Sansho Dayu from the same year.

But this lack of epic scale doesn't detract from my pleasure in watching the film. What I see is the competent genre work of a team of highly skilled filmmakers and performers. Most of all it makes me wonder about how films like this were seen in Japan in the 1950s. Presumably, this would have been half of a double bill in an upmarket cinema in Tokyo or Osaka. What would it have shown with? Were cinemas at this time controlled by the studios themselves? As one of the newer, smaller studios did Daiei have access to their own cinemas or did they have to rely on their larger competitors for bookings? An interesting brief history of Daiei by Greg Shoemaker answers some of these questions, but raises further seeming contradictions -- writing in a fantasy magazine, Shoemaker is more interested in the science fiction and exploitation films which Daiei were making in the same period. Mizoguchi's more artistic work was an important part of Daiei's attempts to produce commercially successful period films that would appeal to foreign markets (hence the festival screenings). The more generically inclined period films would then become reliable commercial earners at home in the later 1950s and early 1960s. But though I love Mizoguchi's period films, I find his contemporary films equally interesting. My question remains. Who were the audiences who got to see what appear now to be small genre pictures for older middle class audiences – in the 1950s perhaps the equivalent of audiences who enjoyed Douglas Sirk's melodramas?

The obvious thing to do is to compare Mizoguchi's contemporary films with those of Ozu and Naruse -- something increasingly possible now that the DVDs are appearing. Mizoguchi seems to me the more painterly (he was a trained painter I think), less realist but perhaps more concerned overall with ideas of art and society. I think three representations will remain with me from the film. First, the daughter (played by Kuga Mishiko) reminds me so much of Audrey Hepburn and is wonderfully fresh and modern in a mise en scène which is otherwise so traditional. Secondly, Mizoguchi offers us the contrast of the stage life and 'real life' with performances of both kabuki and noh plays (the latter being relatively rare in contemporary set films). Finally (and another Mizoguchi trait) is the sense of community shown by the girls in the house who effectively introduce us to all sides of the courtesan's life.

A note on the DVD: these are direct transfers from Daiei masters and surprisingly for UK DVDs they are NTSC discs. My DVD player/TV set can cope, but the image is never as good as PAL and appears here as rather lacking in contrast. It works fine on my Mac, though here the primitive sound quality is more evident. The DVD twin pack also has a small 56 page booklet, most of which deals with Chikamatsu monogatari, but there is a short extract from Keiko McDonald's out of print book on Mizoguchi. I found this useful in thinking about the mise en scène of the geisha house itself with the contrast between the cramped quarters of the girls and the more lavish use of space (so precious in Japanese buildings) in the mother's and daughter's rooms. No mention of Mizoguchi's reluctance here but McDonald does note, the Western style of camera work and editing and she concludes that Mizoguchi was, in terms of social critique, adopting an attitude of detachment and of "showing us how it is".

The final page of the booklet is something to cheer every cinephile – a set of instructions about how to watch a film in Academy ratio on a modern TV set, complete with illustrations showing how the image will be distorted or cropped on widescreen TVs set to 'fill the screen' defaults. What an excellent idea -- all DVDs should carry this!

Battle for Haditha (UK 2007)

I remember enjoying and being impressed by one of Nick Broomfield's early works, Soldier Girls (1981). His later high profile series of authored, 'performative' documentaries such as Biggie and Tupac (2002) tended to leave me cold. I could see that they were important in terms of introducing new documentary styles but I just found his presence irritating. I was therefore intrigued by his turn to documentary drama in Ghosts (2006) which I was glad I caught on the big screen. I wish that was where I saw Battle for Haditha.

Instead, I saw this film about the Iraq War on Channel 4. It was broadcast on the day it was released on DVD in the UK. It did in fact get a cinema release – one week in three cinemas according to the UKFC website. I assume that this was to get some reviews and to qualify for awards. This wouldn't matter except that I was shocked to discover that the film was shot on Super 35 and the film print was 'Scope 2.35:1. The Channel 4 broadcast was 16:9 or thereabouts (whereas Film 4 usually gets aspect ratios correct). I don't really feel like I've seen a film properly if it is in the wrong ratio and coupled with the annoying ad breaks this ruined my concentration. More 4 screened a documentary co-directed by Broomfield's son immediately after the Battle for Haditha ended. At one point they trailed the doc. in an ad break and I became confused – I thought the film had started again. If Channel 4 does get some public money after all its lobbying I suggest that Ofcom forces them to restrict ads to the gaps between programmes, not during them.

This long preamble is just to make the point that I find it difficult to judge a film that has aroused controversy – because its presentation was so flawed. The events depicted took place in 2005 and Broomfield recreated them in Jordan using non-actors with some connection to the original 'players' in the incident. The main American character, the marine corporal, was played by an ex-marine who had been wounded in Iraq (and who shows his battle scars in one sequence). The case of the marines who were accused of murdering civilians after a roadside bomb exploded has not yet been resolved. This has led to some attacks on Broomfield, as has the overall representation of the Americans. Yet the film does attempt to portray three sides to the argument in a dispassionate way – the marines, the 'insurgents' (both foreign fighters and locals) and the local families who were both innocent bystanders and victims of the conflict.

I don't think it is Broomfield's fault that I had least sympathy with the marines. I know soldiers have to be tough and that these young men have been brutalised by the war. In principle, I don't hold them responsible for what Bush and Blair have unleashed. But I found it hard to engage with faceless guys in combat gear who seem to shout and swear most of the time. Most people would surely sympathise with the families, including the young couple pictured above, whose lives are shattered. Oddly though, it is the two men who plant the bomb who seem to be the characters we get to know best. At least they have a reason for what they do -- and remorse when it goes wrong. The real villains of the story are the American commanders and the Al Quaeda/insurgent leaders.

The film is very well made on a tiny budget of $2 million, but in the end I'm not sure whether it 'works' in terms of the documentary drama style. It doesn't, for me, have either the fluid action of Paul Greengrass, the melodrama intensity of Ken Loach or the real sense of 'being there' that Michael Winterbottom achieves. But if I'd seen it in a cinema I might feel differently about it.

The Wedding (Wesele) (Poland 2004)

After a hectic few weeks, the chance to watch a film in peace was too good to miss, even if it was related to our Central European Cinema course. Wesele actually translates as 'Wedding Reception' (I read somewhere). Although a new script by the writer/director Wojciech Smarzowski, there appear to be references to an Andrzej Wajda film from 1973 which was itself based on a play from the turn of the century (19th/20th). Certainly this has all the elements of a traditional wedding farce/black comedy, especially one set in a rural village.

The film trundles along at a fair pace with everything fuelled by copious amounts of Slovakian vodka. As the events unfold, they bring ruin to the bride's father who works on the basis that any problem can be solved by bribery. Perhaps his worst mistake is to be too mean to pay for anything legitimately and so all his cut-price plans backfire. The film is clearly some form of satire with lots of symbolism. The central narrative premise is that the father has bought a new Audi cheaply via an in-law of the local priest as a wedding present for the couple. But the deal requires the grandfather to give up two hectares of land -- which he decides not to do. That land should be the crucial element suggests a traditional tale about peasants and access to land (although the real reason that it is so valuable rests on a familiar modern development).

Apart from the endemic corruption and alcohol consumption, the other striking features include the venal priest and the call to all the men to release their macho desires. This isn't unique to Poland by any means, although the combination of Catholicism, vodka and nationalism is probably unique to the region (i.e. parts of Central Europe). I was at various times reminded of Bunuel (the peasant's orgy in Viridiana) and Milos Forman's The Fireman's Ball – partly because of the array of older and less 'beautiful' characters and the occasional, almost documentary inserts of ordinary people having a good time. The final shots of the guests departing, taken from a high angle, also made me think of a Cuban film, The Waiting Room (in which bus travellers are marooned in a provincial bus station). All these three films represent communal celebrations which in some way (certainly not the same way in each film) explore the nation as community.

I'm sure I didn't get all the jokes but the Poles in the audience certainly laughed. It was a digital print and therefore in the National Media Museum's largest screen. In the more intimate atmosphere of the smaller cinema it might have been a different experience. Exhibitors Dogwoof are showing their Polish films in one-off shows in small towns across the UK. I wonder what it is like watching this in a rural area in the UK?

Anna M.

I've spent an interesting time trying to decipher Anna M., a French film generally touted as in the mould of The Page Turner or Haneke films such as Hidden or The Piano Teacher. In fact it is something rather different and much more like À la folie . . . pas du tout, a film I used with students very successfully a few years ago. And the connection is quite spooky since the young woman playing Anna, a stunning performance by Isabelle Carré, was also one of the main players in À la folie. In the earlier film, Carré played the wife of a doctor who becomes the focus for an erotic obsession by a young artist played by Audrey Tatou. In Anna M., she is the young woman with erotomania -- an obsessive love for the doctor who treats her after a failed suicide attempt. The two films share several narrative elements and even one identical shot, but overall they are quite different with À la folie working as a 'twist' narrative and being driven by Audrey Tatou's distinctive screen persona. Anna M. is, in one sense, more conventional, but also more puzzling since its 'significant objects' and the clues they hold to Anna's life are harder to pin down.

Anna M. is, I think, an auteur movie in the French sense. At least it was hailed at Berlin this year and its director Michel Spinosa has been interviewed as an auteur on several sites. I noted however, that in France it opened on 91 screens, expanding to 99 before dropping out of the French Top 20. (In the UK it opened on two prints from Metrodome.) The newspaper reviewers have been OK-ish about the film, but it has suffered the fate of many similar films. For the cinephiles, it is tainted by a too strong a reliance on genre and for the popular critics it is too slow or confusing in telling its story. I'm so tired of this, why not just deal with it on its own terms?

As with À la folie, I was drawn to comparisons with Polanski rather than the obvious Hollywood films (Fatal Attraction, Play Misty For Me etc.). Repulsion and The Tenant are two possible Polanski models. I quite like the 'collapse into melodrama' as one reviewer puts it and I enjoyed the frisson of horror in scenes with children and also Anna's relationship with her mother (with its oblique nod towards Carrie). As Sight & Sounds reviewer suggests, there are hints that mother too may have history of mental illness. Bizarrely, most of the UK critics make little mention of the central cultural references in the narrative. Eventually I tracked down the painting which seems to link Anna's obsession to the doctor -- The Childhood of the Virgin by the 17th century Spanish painter, Francisco de Zurbarán . I don't want to give the ending away, except to say that it is quite baffling unless you accept the obvious explanation (and, yes, the painting features). (The ending is filmed in the French Alps as one of the public funding agencies involved is the Centre Européen Cinématographique Rhône-Alpes.)

Anna works in the National Library restoring antique books (and stealing several, it would seem). She also connects the doctor with The Song of Songs. As an ignoramus in terms of Biblical and classical education I didn't get much from these references as I watched the film, having to do my homework when I got home. Rather different cultural references are the songs from CocoRosie and Au Revoir Simone. I was reminded (somehow!) of watching Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides, which conveys a sense of the ethereal world view of (suicidal) teenage girls. But perhaps this is not surprising since all the music for The Virgin Suicides came from the French duo, who recently toured with . . . CocoRosie. Isn't the internet wonderful?

Both The Virgin Suicides and À la folie were directed by women. I must find out what women filmmakers and theorists have made of Anna M. -- a film which takes an almost forensic interest in Isabelle Carré's body, primarily as a means of staying as close as possible to Anna's perspective on the world. Nevertheless, it raises interesting questions about the male and female 'gaze'.

The other interesting feature of Anna M. is its CinemaScope ratio and amazing mise en scene. Again, I have to give credit to Catherine Wheatley in Sight & Sound for pointing out that the warm palette complements the choice of locations in suggesting late 19th century Vienna rather than 21st century Paris and that this fits with the Freudian allusions to the 'case of' Anna M.

Can I show this to students? I'm not sure.

Talk to Me

Kasi Lemmons and Taraji P. Henson on the set of Talk to Me

I can't remember the last time I had so much fun in a cinema. Talk to Me has to be one of my favourite films of the year. I've always liked Don Cheadle and I've been a big fan of Chiwetel Ejiofor since Dirty Pretty Things. Director Kasi Lemmons I knew from that wonderful melodrama Eve's Bayou so I was looking forward to Talk to Me -- I just didn't expect it to be so knock-out.

The structure of the film is that of the classic show-business biopic, although the action is compressed into the period 1966-72 with a brief coda ten years later. Many critics are sniffy about biopics, but if I'm interested in the star/personality, I can live with a conventional story arc. The difference here is that by starting in the mid 1960s, we don't learn anything immediately about the early lives of the two central characters, Petey Greene and Dewey Hughes. Instead the narrative has to contrive ways of getting the two to tell each other about their backgrounds. One of the best examples of this is the terrific pool game in which Hughes/Ejiofor turns the tables on Greene/Cheadle.

Petey Greene was a radio star in Washington DC who was famous for 'keeping it real' and building up a large African-American audience during the period of Civil Rights triumphs leading into the Black Power period (when the backlash was felt). The film can thus draw on music, humour and politics as well as melodrama in terms of personal relationships. Perhaps the movie won't be such an emotional experience for younger audiences, but I found the sequences dealing with the assassination of Martin Luther King enormously affecting. The music throughout was terrific (the great Terence Blanchard creating the score) but when Cheadle played Sam Cooke's A Change is Gonna Come I was destroyed.

At heart, the movie is a male melodrama and deals with the emotional relationship between the two male characters. In a central dialogue exchange they both assert that they need each other -- Dewey can do the things Petey can't and Petey can say the things Dewey can't. The two men symbolise the different approaches by African-American men towards 'getting on' and preserving a sense of clear personal identity -- 'keeping it real'. The whole film hinges on the ability of the two actors to represent the nuances as well as the dramatic emotional highs and lows of this relationship. In a way, I think that Cheadle has the slightly easier task. He has to represent a fast-talking 'larger than life' character. He does this brilliantly but we have seen him do it before. On the other hand, Ejiofor has a much less defined character -- in the sense that Dewey has to be represented as 'buttoned-up' and conservative. But the character changes over the course of the narrative. Ejiofor actually has more to do to get this across, even if the performance has to be 'smaller' than Cheadle's. I confess that I watched Ejiofor so closely that I sometimes thought I could see him changing gear. I had a similar feeling watching Samantha Morton, another actor I rate very highly, in the marvellous Control. I decided then that my 'gaze' was far too focused on the one character and that in the context of the narrative, the performance worked very well. I think the same about Ejiofor as Dewey (and many respected critics have praised Ejiofor for the role). What certainly worked well was the changing facial hair and head hair of the characters. Ejiofor in full beard at the end of the film was significantly different from the rather preppy young man at the beginning.

Costume as well as hair was terrific and gave me lots of pleasure as well as neatly marking the transition through the late 1960s into the 1970s. It also enhanced the very big performance by Taraji P. Henson which had a section of the audience behind me in full appreciative voice. I guess some might question the portrayal of the woman who formed the third point of a triangle with Petey and Dewey as quite so 'out there' in a film directed by a woman. However, I think Kasi Lemmons handled the male relationship very well and the women in the narrative are necessarily in the background -- a consequence of sticking close to the facts in a biopic perhaps. There were some great performances from players in the minor roles, especially Martin Sheen as the studio boss and his secretary/receptionist Freda played by Alison Sealy-Smith who said more with a raised eyebrow than many actors manage with several lines of dialogue. Some critics have suggested that the early comic scenes in the radio station are very different in tone to some of the more dramatic scenes that come later. Again, it is demanded by the biopic structure and it works for me. Thinking about those scenes, I'm reminded of the wonderful ensemble playing in Robert Altman's Cookie's Fortune.

I'm looking forward to watching the film again on DVD -- I understand that on the US DVD there are some interesting deleted scenes. Overall a great film -- and another triumph for the Canadian film industry since the studio work was all filmed in Toronto as far as I could work out.

Kilometro 31

Earlier this week, I went to Cineworld to see the Mexican horror movie, Kilómetro 31, with Nick. This was the third time we have been in the 'De Luxe' screen with the reclining seats as the only patrons. The previous occasions were also for subtitled films (the first Grudge film and Denys Arcand's Oscar winner, The Barbararian Invasions). Each of these three films represented a chance taken by a distributor in opening subtitled prints in a multiplex. All clearly failed in Bradford (although to be fair, it was the early evening show). What to make of this? I checked the UK Film Council's box office chart at the end of the week and Kilómetro 31 recorded one of the lowest screen averages of any film on a release of more than a few prints in my memory -- an average of £187 for 27 prints giving a weekly box office of not much more than £5,ooo. That's a pretty poor return for Yume Pictures who must have spent £25,000 getting the prints out. Unfortunately there was little if any promotion and only limited support from the specialised press. Yume have done some good work in getting cult films out there, but they boobed this time.

One question is whether the film would have done better showing a few weeks later at the National Media Museum -- i.e. on a 'specialised screen'. It might, but I also remember that The Host struggled last year at this time in both multiplexes and on specialised screens. Like The Host, Kilómetro 31 is not a 'specialised' film. It's a popular genre movie that in its domestic market did sensational business and ended up as one of Mexico's top box office films of recent years with 3.6 million admissions. The real problem is that UK audiences are not prepared to go for subtitled popular films. The arthouse audience seems to think that such films will be trashy and offensive and the popular audience perhaps thinks that they can't enjoy a film with subtitles. This last doesn't seem to be the case with the subtitled films I have shown to large student groups.

But is it any good you ask? We both thought that there were problems of pacing and plotting, but that overall it worked well and would certainly be worth showing to a student audience. For slightly older audiences (i.e. early 20s) it may be that the film suffers from coming at the tale end of the Ring Cycle and its American remakes. The ingredients are all familiar in the watery environments, young women with long black hair and a ghost child straight of The Grudge. Younger audiences might find these elements slightly less familiar. Of course, these generic tropes make the film much easier for critics to dismiss -- stand up Xan Brooks in the Grauniad with a fairly sloppy mini-review. Once again, the venerable Philip French in the Observer shows a more measured approach, recognising what Kilómetro 31 actually is and granting that it does its job pretty well.

The story is based on a 'local myth' which is a familiar narrative in other horror movies. In this case it is La Llorona or the 'Crying Woman' who appears to motorists on the highway and who in her way is just as dangerous as the mad hitchhiker of urban myths (or indeed as the old women who seduce and murder passing samurai in Japanese horror). Director Rigoberto Castañeda has claimed that the script took a long time to develop and that he was not directly influenced by The Grudge which appeared during the shoot. Hmm, perhaps! But The Ring was certainly out earlier. Does it matter? Not really, what is interesting is how the familiar elements are used and what they mean in a Mexican setting.

One interesting link is to Alfonso Cuarón's Y tu mamá también in which the three central characters -- from Mexico City -- tour rural areas and Cuarón uses a voiceover to tell the audience something about the lives of the people by the roadside and how they have been overlooked, oppressed by the urban 'neo-colonialists'. The four central characters here are urban motorists driving through a suburb where, at the time of colonisation, an Indian mother lost her child because of maltreatment by the Spanish (or as the subtitles intriguingly put it 'a Spaniard man'). Like Y tu mamá también, Kilómetro 31 has a Spanish character as one of the protagonists. The film is a Mexican-Spanish co-production, but the inclusion of the Spanish character is also an important narrative element.

A second link is to other US horror narratives such as the Poltergeist films, in which a modern town/suburb is built over traditional burial grounds, allowing both a thematic of colonialism/materialism and the narrative promise of the 'return' of a ghost, who cannot sleep until injustice has been put right. This focus on the 'phantasm' is something which Guillermo del Toro has spoken about at length, especially in relation to his ghost creation in The Devil's Backbone. I wonder what del Toro thinks of Kilómetro 31? The Mexican reviewers have generally claimed that Kilometro 31 is a 'return' for Mexican horror after a 20 year absence. They tend not to count del Toro's Cronos (which I would certainly call horror), so I'm not sure what was the last Mexican horror film to be seen outside the country.

Finally, it's worth saying that the film looks good in 'Scope with a familiar (from The Ring) blue-green palette. Perhaps the most striking visual aspect is the director's penchant for extreme close-ups. One kiss in particular sees two noses in profile edging towards each other from either side of the 'Scope screen. Very disturbing!

Brick Lane

Tannishtha Chatterjee as Nazneen in Brick Lane

Seems a long time since I last posted. October/November are the busiest time of the year for me and I've taught lots of films, some several times over in the last few weeks. Perhaps between now and the New Year I'll get to see more for pleasure.

And so to Brick Lane with no prior thoughts, having not read the book but aware of the controversy. I enjoyed the film, but I can recognise that there are problems. The most obvious comparison for me is with My Son the Fanatic (UK 1997), one of my favourite films of the 1990s. It isn't that the narratives are necessarily similar, but something about the general theme of generations and coming to terms with living in another country -- as well as a rather gentle and muted mise en scene disrupted by occasional bursts of colour and excitement. With Udayan Prasad directing Hanif Kureshi's script, I think Fanatic wins out, but Brick Lane has much going for it.

I was impressed with the even-handedness of Brick Lane. The husband is not an ogre, but a well-meaning and thoughtful man with genuine feelings. The family feels like a recognisable family and the mother/central character should break the hardest heart. I've seen several reviews that make comparisons to Satyajit Ray, which seems a little strong, if well-meaning. In some ways the flashbacks to Bengal were the problem for me. I can see why they are there and separately, the scenes in Bengal and Whitechapel worked. But cut them together and I wasn't sure. I gather from some reviews that this is an issue in adapting the book and perhaps that is why Fanatic with its original script seems more coherent. What does work very well in Brick Lane for me is the music and I'm rediscovering the beautiful voice of Natacha Atlas all over again.

Generally, I love 'Scope films and the opening scenes of Brick Lane -- in Bengal -- work very well visually, but I'm less sure about the aesthetic decision when the film moves to London. There is nothing wrong with a London drama in 'Scope (Michael Winterbottom's Wonderland is one of my favourite films) but it does suggest a 'big' film, either in scale or in melodrama excess. Brick Lane is perhaps a 'small film'. But, despite my cavils, one which is well worth watching.

Tough enough?

I was pleasantly surprised by Knallhart (Tough Enough) a German film from 2006 which sneaked out in September in the UK without my noticing it. I caught it at Cornerhouse in Manchester and was glad I did. It's always good to see a film when you know nothing about it and this intrigued me from the off. The 15 year-old central character is well drawn and offers a range of emotions that seemed believable. It's a film which in different ways reminded me of La Haine and Sweet Sixteen and I can't think of higher praise.

Michael Polischka is a 15 year-old with an attractive mother of "only just over 30" as she reminds him. At the beginning of the story, Michael and his mother are thrown out on the street by her rich lover in the leafy suburbs. Michael finds himself in a tough inner city area of Berlin in a dismal flat and forced to attend an inner city school which seems rough even by UK standards. And the story moves on from there in quite conventional ways. The film makes the usual connections between crime and delinquent youth and recent immigrant communities, in this case two East European youths, who befriend Michael at school and take him home to chill out, and the 'enemy' gang, led by a Turkish youth. Eventually Michael gets involved as a drug-runner working for a suave and attractive young Turkish crime lord. He also casts envious eyes at Turkish family life (and a gorgeous young Turkish woman). The ending is well handled and explains the enigmatic beginning -- all in all a well-executed youth picture/crime story which offers a view of the 'New Berlin'. Well worth catching.

Who is The Brave One?

The answer to the question may be Jodie Foster who stars in The Brave One. It might be Neil Jordan for taking on the direction. Both of them risked a critical mauling, but seem to have been rescued at the pass by the great American audience. I'm not sure if it is the prospect of this audience or the film itself which frightens me more. I've rarely been so exercised by a film.

I'm a Jodie Foster supporter, though I haven't seen that many of her films. I could say much the same about Neil Jordan, whose Hollywood pictures have never attracted me as much as the Irish/British ones. Putting the two together should promise something worthwhile. And indeed, for most of this film, Foster is excellent and Jordan provides several standout sequences. The script, however just isn't up to the job for me. As several critics have pointed out, the problem lies somewhere in the film's reference to genre repertoires. If The Brave One is judged as a 'revenge' thriller, it falls far short of the narrative economy and sheer drive of Abel Ferrara's Ms 45. I've not seen Death Wish, but I've read suggestions that it too is superior as a genre/expoitation film (whatever may be the worries about its politics). The Brave One wants to be more than an exploitation film but it lacks the clear sense of purpose that a film like A History of Violence offers. Instead, it features various subplots like the potential romance between cop and victim/avenger (prompting references to Jane Campion's In the Cut, a film which itself has genre problems, but which overall is more coherent) and the cod philosophy associated with a protagonist who is a very rare breed, a radio soundscape designer cum commentator. These aspects of the film mean it has the potential to be an interesting character study.

But I have to own up. My real problem is with American politics and gun control (the lack of it – the Jodie Foster character gets around it immediately). As a European, I just can't take seriously a film with no sense of moral purpose whatsoever apart from the belief that this 'good person' can do whatever they need to do to regain their confidence after a brutal attack. So, people are killed as if they were not human beings and a supposedly liberal character and a police officer can ignore the law without any sense of loss or any impact on their sense of moral well-being or mental health. In 1983, Tony Garnett, best known as a producer for Ken Loach, directed his second feature, Handgun, set in America and featuring a woman who is raped and who buys a gun seeking revenge. I don't remember the film in any detail, but I'm sure it was a considered argument against the use of firearms. In one of the more obvious role models for The Brave One, the Scorsese/Schrader Taxi Driver from 1976, there is a single major shootout, a psychotic protagonist and a deeply moral and disturbing take on American urban culture at the time of the withdrawal from Vietnam. In The Brave One there is a mention of Iraq and a character representing the terrors of wars in Africa where children are armed and trained to kill their parents (I'm assuming the character who makes this comment is from Sierra Leone). There are, I think, eight killings in The Brave One that are apparently 'justified'.

If you want to get depressed, read the IMDB comments. The first one I read that made a concerted attack on the film's politics as rightist ended up by claiming that it would be supported by "rabid feminists". As the Americans say, 'Go figure!'.

Daratt

Ali Barkai as Atim and Youssouf Djaoro as Nassara in Daratt

Daratt (Dry Season) (Chad/France/Belgium/Austria 2006) is a simple tale which nevertheless seems to say a great deal. It takes place in Chad where a 'Justice and Retribution' Commission is reporting on war crimes after a long civil war. Atim (a name that means orphan) is summoned by his grandfather and instructed to find the man who killed his father and execute him. Atim sets off for the city and finds the man (Nassara), now a baker with a young wife and suffering from various wounds and ailments. Atim is hired by Nassara to work in his bakery, despite his aggressive stance. Eventually, Nassara comes to rely on Atim – will the execution take place?

I found the film engrossing despite its slow pace. It's a while since I've seen any new African films (I actually have the previous film by this director on DVD, but I've not watched it -- I will now) and I'm struggling to place it in relation to what I know. There is little here of either the magical realism of a Souleymane Cissé, the politics of a Sembene Ousmane or the postmodernism of a Djibril Diop Mambéty. Perhaps the films of Idrissa Ouedraogo are more relevant. Visually, this film is very spare with long shots and MLS of dusty streets and the bakery with occasional MCUs and CUs. The nighttime scenes are distinctive with Atim walking into pools of light and then back into total blackness.

Atim is at once a 'country boy' in the city and a modern 'rebel' figure. When he jokes on his mobile 'phone and suddenly sprays his armpits with deodorant, we are reminded that this is a young man in a young man's world. He speaks only rarely and it is a sign of the desperate loneliness that Nassara feels, that he quickly grows to love Atim despite constant rebuffs. I'm strongly tempted to see the film as in some way metaphorical in that Atim represents a future in which the young men of Chad can escape from the ravages of the past and come to terms with reconciliation without losing everything of tradition. Perhaps I'm being too optimistic -- I hope not. Definitely worth seeing.

Floating Clouds and Late Chrysanthemums

The second Naruse Mikio screening at the National Media Museum this week provided an interesting comparison with When A Woman Ascends the Stairs. The same two stars, Takamine Hideko and Masayuki Mori were the leads in Floating Clouds (Japan 1955) and the focus was again on a 'suffering' woman in a melodrama, but there were also some striking differences.

First Floating Clouds was shot in Academy ratio, 1.33:1. Naruse does not have a distinctive visual style and the change of screen size should not be too significant, but for me the 'Scope film seemed much more coherent in its use of framing and composition. Floating Clouds was quite conventionally shot and perhaps it was the rather abrupt edits marking shifts in time periods (i.e. character's memories) that made it feel less coherent. Many of the scenes in small houses and narrow alleys in Tokyo were reminiscent of Ozu's Tokyo Story. However, where Ozu's camera often stays at the eye level of a child or someone kneeling on a tatami mat, Naruse simply follows the characters -- when they are in a traditional room, the camera is low level but at other times it rises with them.

Floating Clouds has the attention to social detail that I'm coming to realise is a Naruse trait. The story deals with a couple returning to Japan after the war has ended from their posting with a forestry team in Indo-China (presumably Vietnam). The misery of the Occupation and the struggle to survive economically and morally provides the context for an abortive romance. Unlike When A Woman Ascends The Stairs, written by Kikushima Ryuzo, responsible for many of Kurosawa's scripts, Floating Clouds is an adaptation of a novel by the very popular Hayashi Fumiko. In fact, Floating Clouds was the fifth Naruse film based on Ms Hayashi's novels. Perhaps then Floating Clouds is more like the norm for Naruse? When I got to see Late Chrysanthemums (Japan 1954) just a few days later, this naive assumption was soon discarded.

In the pub after the screening someone suggested that the film was 'Bressonian' and that seems like a good reference. Whereas Floating Clouds is a fairly conventional melodrama in terms of structure and presentation, Late Chrysanthemums, based on three short stories by Hayashi, is almost a pure character piece with little plot but a lot of opportunity to reflect on the lives of ageing geisha. Four women in early middle age, like four flowers whose bloom is fading, struggle to make ends meet. Or at least three of them do. The fourth has become a moneylender (and property speculator), but money can't buy her happiness and she is disappointed to find that men only want to borrow money. This film seemed linked, thematically and structurally, more to When A Woman Ascends the Stairs. Once again, we get the detail of everyday life in Tokyo. If anything, there are even more scenes of money changing hands. Aesthetically, the film seems more fluent and coherent than Floating Clouds, which now seems much more of a genre piece.

The two earlier films did make me think about Ozu. They show ordinary families in ordinary settings (although Ozu's families are perhaps more genteel). There are plenty of Ozu railway scenes. Neither Ozu or Naruse got commercial releases in the UK in the 1950s and in retrospect it's not difficult to see why. Mizoguchi and Kurosawa offered films that were at once more 'exotic', more exciting, more expressionist and more obviously 'humanist'. Naruse's films do require an appreciation of the day to day nuances of Japanese cultural life. Late Chrysanthemums also refers to memories of Manchuria (and rather surprisingly, to the prospect of going to Korea) -- some knowledge of Japanese imperialism is required to fully appreciate these references. I'm not sure I would have appreciated Naruse when I was younger and when i was even more ignorant of Japanese culture.

I'm glad I saw these films and I'll look out for the DVD titles that are already published.

Tanzania and Nollywood

Yvone Cherry and Stephen Kanumba as the couple in She Is My Sister

There are only a handful of Tanzanian films produced each year and few of these are screened outside the festival circuit. As a consequence, I've never seen one. When the British had colonies in Africa their policy was to offer training in making documentaries and instructional films. One consequence of this in East Africa is a general lack of commercial, entertainment-based filmmaking. Something similar was also the case in West Africa, but in Nigeria and Ghana an alternative, highly populist, video cinema movement began in the 1980s. 'Nollywood' now claims to be the world's third biggest film industry after India and the US, with hundreds of cheap video films produced each year.

Nollywood has now spread to East Africa and I was fortunate to be given a VCD of a joint Tanzanian/Nigerian production entitled She Is My Sister (2007). This follows a previous joint venture Dar 2 Lagos (2007). I was given She Is My Sister because it is performed mostly in English. Most Tanzanian cultural products use Swahili but in this case three of the leads are Nigerian (as is the director) so English may simply have been more convenient. However, I'm not sure how that would affect the potential market for the film.

VCD is the preferred format for cheap film distribution in South and South East Asia and I've also noticed them in the Middle East, so it's no surprise to find films on VCD in Africa as well. The image quality on my computer is not great, but it is watchable. There are two discs in the box and the total film length is around 74 minutes with 6 minutes of trailers on Disc 1.

She Is My Sister is recognisable as a melodrama in terms of its plot and exaggerated acting style. To deal with the stylistic features first, there is little to say. The film is presented in a standard TV ratio of 4:3. There are a couple of establishing shots of streets in Dar es Salaam, but otherwise the film is composed in medium shot, like a television soap opera, with occasional close-ups and occasional tableaux to show characters in their surroundings as in the shot of the couple with their new furniture above. The overall style is quite constrained compared to the trailers for other productions. (The trailers are highly wrought with flash edits and zooms, but this may simply be a trailer style.) Overall, the camerawork and editing is competent, although some shots are held for far too long. (At the beginning of the film we have to watch nearly every passenger get off a long distance coach before we meet the first significant character.)

Far more interesting is the overall narrative. This is in part a universal morality tale. Melodrama has often been an important mode for exploring social relationships at times of major societal change -- such as in Europe in the 19th century. She Is My Sister focuses on a young woman, Rose, from a rural village who gets to university and then is able to get a job/open a business selling imported electronics goods. This all happens before the narrative begins and we see her return to her village where she finds her childhood sweetheart who she takes back to the city and introduces to her girlfriends. The 'country bumpkin', Danny, turns out to be very good at running the shop and before long the couple are married with a small child. Danny, played by Steven Kanumba who also wrote the script and seems to be one of Tanzania's successful young stars, also becomes very attractive to Rose's friend Flora. Flora is a repugnant character, an uber bitch played with relish by Nigerian actress Nkiru Silvanus. When she steals Danny, Rose's whole life falls apart.

The plot is very thin and there are few surprises. The only narrative device of note is the use of flashback so that at the beginning Rose's sister arrives in the city for a visit and discovers Rose no longer lives in a 'gated mansion', but is now in a squalid back street apartment. Rose then tells her the story . . . It is the elements of the narrative that are interesting. The rural/city contrast is often represented by an opposition of cunning v. authenticity and here the couple from the country are corrupted by the city lifestyle. The woman has an education, but she has been seduced by material gain and may lose everything when her man succumbs to the sophisticated woman. As in many of the Nollywood films, there is a second part to the story according to the title at the end of the film which warns us to "Watch out for She Is My Sister 2". Perhaps Rose fights back?

Tanzania is a poor country, but most of the action in this film takes place in a world of flatscreen TVs, gated houses, servants and expensively decorated rooms. There is clearly an aspirational lifestyle being offered. The film has an 18 certificate, but there is no overt sexuality or graphic violence. Perhaps the immorality alone is enough to get this rating? Tanzania has strong Christian and Muslim communities. I don't know if this has had an impact on certification. There is a hint of possible domestic violence, but nothing like what is evident in the Swahili language films trailed on the VCD in which violence, mainly, but not always, by men towards women seems to be a common feature.

Aflad.co.uk is a UK online seller of Nigerian VCD/DVDs.

Provocation

Lisa Ray and John Abraham in Water.

I finally managed to see Deepa Mehta's Water (Canada/India 2005) and I surprised myself by being quite moved by the film which deals with a clash between the tradition of widows being effectively imprisoned for the rest of their lives and the possibility of change in India coming from Ghandian political ideas. The focus of the narrative is a romance between a young widow and a law student and its impact on two other widows. My sense was that, despite the controversy which caused production in India to be stopped and moved to Sri Lanka and the film's subsequent success in gaining an Oscar nomination, the UK reviews were rather lukewarm. I remember enjoying Fire (1996), the first of the 'elemental trilogy', but also finding it a strange Indian/Western hybrid. I'm intending to watch Earth (1998) later this week.

Water, I was convinced, was an Indian film. I didn't research the film before I watched it so I wasn't aware that it had been filmed in Sri Lanka. However, I did get a sense during the screening of watching landscapes in South India rather than on the Ganges. Lisa Ray and John Abraham were new to me. I can understand some of the comments about the realism question. Both actors are very beautiful and their parentage (Ray is Indian/Polish and Abraham is Iranian/Indian Christian) means that they look exotic in an Indian setting. But really it isn't a problem and in a way their casting adds another level of meaning to any reading of the narrative. I was also surprised to be offered a selection of A. R. Rahman songs. At least one of these was mixed badly in the film print I watched, but overall they seemed to work.

The big issue, of course, is whether the film works in the same way in the West as in India. On IMDB, the Canadian reviews are generally excellent, partly pride in Canadian Cinema, partly a Western liberal response to the plight of widows in 1930s India, I guess. IMDB reviews and comments by Indians on the other hand are sometimes extremely negative. I attribute this to the obverse of the Canadian response -- a feeling that the filmmaker has somehow betrayed Indian culture/is not proud of Indian Cinema, but also from a Hindu perspective, the film is disrespectful of religious teachings. There is a great deal about the controversy over Water scattered across the internet and I don't particularly want to get embroiled in the politics of Hindu Nationalism. What interests me here is what the Indian critics have to say about the film -- as a film. I came across this blog, seemingly by an NRI/desi with deep knowledge of Indian 'parallel cinema', that offered a withering appraisal -- much of it focusing on aspects of the film requiring cultural knowledge. For instance, the spoken Hindi in the film is 'stilted' and doesn't convey any authenticity. Similarly, the saris are polyester, the taxis in the street are wrong, the costumes are wrong and so is the representation of Ghandi at the end of the film. The blogger is angry with the film on nearly every level, including what is seen as a crass use of quotes from Hindu writings. Overall, the blogger pines for the directors and stars of parallel cinema. Lisa Ray and John Abraham are criticised for their acting. I'm always worried by these criticisms since appraisal of acting styles is often highly subjective. However, I can see that the film would have been very different if Shabana Azmi and Nandita Das had appeared as the two adult widows (the third widow is a child) as Deepa Mehta originally intended. (A report on the original shoot with an image of Azmi and Das is on this Bright Lights Film Journal page.)

I wish my knowledge of parallel cinema was more extensive, but I've seen quite a few and Water wouldn't stand up to a comparison with the films of Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen or of Shyam Benegal. There were moments when the scenario and some aspects of the cinematography reminded me of those earlier films (I think it's the second film of the Apu Trilogy from Ray, Aparajito (1956) which features the ghats of Benares) but overall Deepa Mehta's aim was different. Like Mira Nair, she is trying to make films about Indian culture for both a Western audience and a younger popular audience in India. And on this score, according to a number of Indian reviews, she seems to have succeeded. The film is: "Art without being arty, which is truly rare and wonderful" as one young Indian blogger puts it. This doesn't negate the cultural criticism (and I did find more) and I think that is a weakness. On the other hand, shifting production to Sri Lanka must have been a nightmare and to manage to acheive what she has in the circumstances deserves support. To attract audiences to a consideration of social issues, even if it involves some misunderstandings is something Bollywood hasn't managed. Despite the criticisms some Indians seem to have supported Water as an Oscar contender (as the Canadian foreign language entry) over the Indian entry Rang De Basanti -- I guess I should see that soon and look at a comparison.

Perfection?

Takamine Hideko as Keiko, the Mama-san in a Ginza bar.

When A Woman Ascends The Stairs (Japan 1960, dir. Naruse Mikio) has just about everything I could wish for in a movie – a beautiful heroine presented in a B+W 'Scope melodrama in which she must make almost impossible decisions about how to gain her independence in patriarchal Japan. Whilst the story reminded me very much of Mizoguchi Kenji's suffering women, the milieu of early 1960s Tokyo was reminiscent of Kurosawa's The Bad Sleep Well (also 1960) and Masumura Yasuzo's A Wife Confesses (1962). However, Naruse's mise en scène seems less expressionist -- or perhaps just more subtle than that of the other three directors. The compositions are careful and usually quite simple and the story is carried by the acting and the use of locations, costume and set design. What impressed me most about the film was the wealth of social detail.

Tokyo in 1960 seems on the cusp of the great leap forward towards the Japanese economic resurgence. The cars on the street are still American and in the bars the brands are British, French or American. Keiko's apartment is 'modern', but her family home in the suburbs by the river could still be part of 1930s Tokyo. The mixing of traditional and modern/Western costume, decor and food tells us a great deal about the characters. Keiko is always dressed traditionally ('conservatively', as she tells her mother).

The central premise of the narrative is that the 30 year-old widow Keiko is facing the reality of her situation as a popular hostess (in fact the senior hostess or Mama-san) of a bar in Ginza, Tokyo's entertainment district. Her options appear to be to set up her own bar or to marry one of her rich clients. She can't really afford to stand still. Everyone is struggling to make their way in the new world of potential prosperity, so whatever she chooses she will have to face the unpalatable consequences of her actions (e.g. other hostesses who have set up in their own bars have been driven to suicide by the economic pressure involved in borrowing money and repaying the interest). The social context is economically summed up in Keiko's voiceover in which she tells that at 11.30 each night, 15,000 women in Ginza leave the bars and other places of entertainment. The first-class women take taxis, the second-class take the train to the suburbs and the others go home with their clients.

There are two more Naruse films in the short season in Bradford. I can't wait.

Losing the plot

I really wanted to like Grow Your Own, a British film supported by the UK Film Council which received a decent release, but attracted generally sparse audiences.

It features two ingredients I'm passionate about -- the treatment of refugees and the allotment movement -- and it's written, in part at least, by Frank Cottrell Boyce. Boyce is one of the most respected scriptwriters in the UK and he has produced great scripts for Michael Winterbottom and Danny Boyle. His name on the credits was certainly what attracted me, alongside a strong cast. According to the attractive, but over-designed, website for the film, originally the story was going to be a documentary. The idea came from the experience of asylum seekers from Kosovo and Angola who were offered the chance to work on their own allotments in Liverpool as part of a scheme set up by a psychotherapist. Because asylum seekers can't take paid work, the chance to work on the allotment gives them a focus.

The script for the feature film includes the stories of three families of asylum seekers and the initial hostility they face from the local allotment-holders. I think these stories are strong and a moving drama could have been the result. Unfortunately, what finally emerged was a meld of the emotional drama and a rather tired and silly social comedy which to me seemed like a throwback to Ealing in the predictability of much of the action. Boyce says in the Production Notes that he wanted to give it a 'Bill Forsyth feel'. I think I can see why he thought this would work and there is a quirkiness about the set-up which could be developed in ways similar to Comfort and Joy (1984). However, such a strategy would need a highly skilled and sensitive director and Richard Laxton is a TV director with just one feature credit -- the critically derided Life and Lyrics (2006). I haven't seen anything else by this director, so it would be unfair to judge him on this film. Intriguingly the film was shot in CinemaScope and features an unusual colour palette (painting the sheds on the allotment is a plot feature). In fact, the setting in Liverpool is visually striking and unusual with lots of potential.

I don't really understand what went wrong. The co-writer Carl Hunter from the Liverpool band The Farm had the original idea and he was also a producer. I can only assume that someone lost their nerve in allowing the comic elements to become dominant. The central relationship between a South Chinese family group and an ex merchant seaman on an adjacent plot has all the elements for great drama (including black comedy), but it isn't allowed to develop. At one point the script even clumsily spells out what has happened in dialogue -- even though we have already begun to understand events through the sensitive performance by Benedict Wong.

There are plenty of good things in the film and I laughed several times, but overall I just felt it didn't hang together -- the music wasn't well used either). I hope Frank Cottrell Boyce bounces back soon.

Mani Ratnam's Yuva

Somehow, I found the time to watch one of the Mani Ratnam films I'd collected. Yuva (2004) represents something that used to happen in European Cinema in the 1920s and early 1930s quite regularly, but only rarely since – the same script made almost simultaneously in two different languages with different actors. Yuva is the Hindi version of a Tamil film produced by Ratnam's Madras Talkies. An accident delayed shooting on one film and both versions ended up opening on the same day.

The Hindi version did make it to the UK but I missed it. I found a DVD on the Lovefilm rental site. It's a poor quality DVD with a low resolution image, poor sound and dreadful English subtitles – not only with woeful spelling and grammar, but also out of synch with the images. It's very difficult to work out who is saying what to whom. The fact that I still enjoyed the film very much is a tribute to the professionalism of the creative team.

Yuva is an important film for several reasons -- even though it seems to have flopped at the box office. The title refers to 'youth', I think, though the youngest of the lead actors was about 26 in 2004. The story involves the chance meeting of three men on the Howrah Bridge in Kolkotta. As with his earlier film, Alai Payuthey (2000), the opening incident then moves into flashback to tell the stories behind the meetings before returning to the 'present' for the last hour (160 mins movie). The three men represent different class positions and different basic ideologies and the story focuses upon the attempts by student politicians to take a stand against a corrupt party machine. The great Om Puri, so well known in the UK, plays the politician villain to perfection.

The film is star studded, although I've seen comments that suggest that for Abhishek Bachchan, this film was very important since by accepting a 'heavy' role, he widened his range successfully. I did feel that the other actors were familiar, but it was only afterwards that I realised that three of them were in the Othello adaptation, Omkara (2006).

There is a great deal of violence in the film and the finale is rather cartoon-like. However, the violence is necessary, I think, and I thought Bachchan made an excellent villain. There are three aspects of the film I really liked. One was the political narrative and the way in which the script touched on what I take to be current political issues across India. The second was the range of songs and I loved the 'political' song sequence. Ratnam does seem to use song sequences differently than in mainstream Hindi films. Finally, it was just great to see a film set in Kolkotta. Several commentators have complained that only Om Puri managed a Bengali accent. I'm not equipped to spot that, but I appreciated the views of the city (although I noted that thanks went to Southern Railways, so I wondered how much footage was shot in Madras?). I realise that although over the years I have seen quite a few Bengali films, they have all been art films or 'parallel cinema' films. This was the first Hindi film I'd seen set in the city and it was good to see it soon after The Namesake. What a treat too to see trams and the metro as well as trains – Mani Ratnam's films seem full of scenes on public transport of all kinds as well as motorbikes and cars.

There is an interesting review of the film on this American university site, although I'm not sure that I totally agree with its analysis of the closing sequence of the film. It does seem odd that Ratnam chose to set the political narrative in West Bengal, although if he had to transpose it from the south, it probably makes more sense than placing it in other northern states. I suspect that I need to know much more about Bengali political parties to read the ending properly.

I'm going to try another Ratnam film soon.

Helpless, helpless

"There is a town in North Ontario,
With dream comfort memory to spare,
And in my mind I still need a place to go,
All my changes were there."

k.d. lang sings Neil Young's words for 'Helpless' at the end of Sarah Polley's wonderful film Away From Her (a recording taken from her album of Canadian songs entitled 'Hymns of the 49th Parallel'). Young's words are powerfully suggestive of the emotions in the film and the cover of k.d. lang's album could be a still from the film.

I was certainly helpless from about twenty minutes in when I began to weep (possibly as the strains to 'Harvest Moon' started on the soundtrack) and couldn't stop throughout the rest of the film. I had approached the screening with much trepidation. Like most people my age I've had some experience of Alzheimer's disease in the family and the prospect of Julie Christie gradually deteriorating was worrying to say the least. But what I watched was a sensitive and moving story of a marriage which was not sentimental or romantic, but nevertheless optimistic.

On reflection, this is a film in which a quartet (or possibly a quintet) of women effectively help a man to come to terms with being parted from his partner of 44 years (i.e. being 'away from her'). Some of the women help with compassion, the care home manager is coldly (and irritatingly) efficient, another woman is 'plain talking'. The chief nurse is the compassionate one – but is also to the point in her criticism of him. And at the centre is Fiona (Julie Christie) devastatingly beautiful and knowing, even as her hold on memory unravels. The man, Grant (a great performance of bewilderment by the veteran Canadian actor Gordon Pinsent), worries that she may be putting on an act -- and perhaps she is because she does manage to get him to question what he has done during the marriage.

I've read some interesting reviews, including one on the Village Voice website by Ella Taylor. I haven't see too many comments about the style of the film, except to suggest that it is 'conservative'. I think it is probably a good idea for a first time director to be cautious in presenting a story, so that isn't necessarily a bad thing. The overwhelming sense is of whiteness, blankness and cold, which seems appropriate. The only visual flourish I remember is the series of cross-fades which removes the visiting relatives from the dining tables in the care home -- an appropriate and effective device.

I don't think I've read any of Alice Munro's short stories (this film is adapted from 'The Bear Came Over the Mountain'), but this reminds me of other Canadian women writers. There is something of Carol Shields and Margaret Atwood in it -- and also something older and more Nordic (perhaps it's the landscape). Fiona is supposed to be from Icelandic stock and Grant reads to her from Auden and Louis MacNeice's book 'Letters from Iceland'. Trying to research those Canadian stories I've read (and regrettably forgotten) I came across Marjorie Anderson, an academic and author whose bio explains that she is of Icelandic fisher stock from a community on Lake Winnipeg -- a background which is presumably common in Manitoba and Ontario. There is something about the landscape of Ontario , the Protestantism, the Northern European culture, that creates a tone that you just don't find in American movies. It's evident in this film (in the landscape seen through the car windows and in the "brand spanking new" facility that is Meadowdale (or similarly horrible name for a care home)). I'm nudged to think of Cronenberg films like Crash, eXistenZ and A History of Violence (filmed in Canada). Anglophone Canadian Cinema is usually 'weird' -- but in a good way! This film is simply very good. I must watch more Canadian movies and I'll certainly be looking out for Sarah Polley, who sounds rather like Jodie Foster in beginning as a child star and making it to respected indy star and now acclaimed director at 27.

(The film was actually shot in Paris and Kitchener in Southern Ontario. My research turned up a literary genre which was new to me -- 'Southern Ontario Gothic'. This includes Munro and Atwood and also my favourite, Robertson Davies. It includes the elements I listed above and tends towards themes of moral hypocrisy according to Wikipedia. Isn't the internet wonderful? But why isn't anyone making movies based on Robertson Davies? I guess they would just be too 'weird'.)