Finally, a Powell nominee that looks, feels and, most of all, sounds like an award winner. Berberian Sound Studio, from Katalin Varga director Peter Strickland, stars Toby Jones as a sound technician recruited to work on a Suspiria-esque Italian horror film in the early 70s. More at home with gentle documentaries about the English countryside than graphic tales of undead witches, Jones soon finds his grip on reality loosening.
It’s difficult to describe the plot in any more detail: it’s essentially a journey into the protagonist’s fracturing psyche. So while those seeking a traditional narrative may be left frustrated, anyone who wants to see the tools of cinema used to surprising and creative effect can expect a treat. I was reminded of The Artist by the way sound is used to play with and confound audience expectations, while the sense of menace and disorientation has much in common with David Lynch (I was particularly put in mind of Inland Empire).
Spaghetti horrror buffs may well also be intrigued (it did cross my mind that the film might also turn up at FrightFest); it’s clear Strickland knows his Argento, and while some genre fans might be baffled by the closing scenes, I’ve seen Lucio Fulci films that made a lot less sense.
It’s one of the best films at the Festival, and one which clearly loves film – both as an artform and a physical object. Highly recommended.
Three days in to this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival, and while I haven’t seen any major stinkers, there’s been nothing to blow me away either. Let’s start with the longest. Blood of My Blood is a three hour drama set in Lisbon, based around the travails of Maria (Rita Blanco) and her extended family. The themes are family loyalty and sacrifice, but the tools unfortunately include a plot reveal straight from the box of melodramatic cliches. Also, a climactic scene is overly unpleasant – that’s enough forced blow jobs for one year, Edinburgh, thanks all the same.
Lovely Molly is the latest from Eduardo Blair Witch Sanchez, and suffers from overfamiliarity. Not only does the use of video footage recall his debut (although this is not a found footage film), but plot elements recall recent releases such as The Silent House and The Pact.
Gretchen Lodge is very good as newlywed Molly, who moves with her husband Tim into her parents’ home. Pretty soon, things are going bump in the night and family skeletons are emerging from the closet. Is this an actual haunting, or is Molly going nuts?
The answer seemed pretty obvious to me, despite some attempts to imply a supernatural dimension – which Sanchez admitted in the Q&A were bumped up after early test screenings. Although that does give us one memorably eerie image at the close, it also means the story doesn’t completely satisfy at either level. An OK watch that doesn’t offer anything new, you can safely wait until this one’s on telly.
That’s also true of Flying Blind, a BBC production starring Helen McCrory as an aerospace engineer who starts a relationship with Algerian student – OR IS HE? – played by Najib Oudghiri. Though nicely played and good to look at (Bristolians can play spot the location), the central relationship feels like a dramatic construct rather than anything real. If the superior Page Eight last year couldn’t muster a cinema release, there’s no reason for this not to go straight to BBC 2.
Better things came with Life Without Principle, Johnny To’s crime thriller set against a global financial shitstorm. Various characters – among them a cop, a gangster, a bank saleswoman, and a bunch of financially strapped innocent bystanders – are involved in are affected by the murder of a loan shark. I’d bet my money on a Hollywood remake of this coming our way before long, so invest some time in the original.
Finally, one of my favourites to date. The best thing about festivals is sitting down for a film about which you no little and expect nothing, and being delighted by the result. That’s what happened with Flicker, a deadpan Swedish comedy centred around the struggling Unicom Telecommunications company.
Attempting to launch a new 4G network, but faced with a misguided advertising campaign and customer dissatisfaction and regular sabotage, the company also has staff who aren’t quite up to the challenge. Chief among them is sad sack Kenneth (Jacob Nordenson), whose recurring IT problems leave a crucial report incomplete, and Trod (Knell Bergqvist), the company head, who is heroically unaware of his own inadequacy.
Though we eventually realise the film is set in 2011, the design seems to have been pickled in the 70s. Almost everything at Unicom (including the cars, the decor, and Kenneth’s entire wardrobe) is in shades of brown. (Maybe bits of Sweden do look like this, but it seems unlikely.) Their attempts at promotional launches are no more up to date.
A number of plots intertwine, occasionally threatening to tip from somewhat black comedy to outright tragedy, while never quite doing so. Occasionally absurdist, with moments of outright slapstick, the film is quite a charmer. Lovely closing shot, too.
Alexandre O Philippe’s documentary The People vs George Lucas, shown at Edinburgh a couple of years ago, was a hugely entertaining look at Star Wars fans’ love/hate relationship with their favourite films,and their creator. His latest also looks at how celebrity culture affects and inspires its followers, through the story of the cephalopod who enjoyed a stunning run of accurate predictions during the 2010 world cup.
Opening on a melancholy note with Paul’s funeral, the film then looks at his rise to fame, his effect on those around him, and the question of whether or not his predictions were anything more than a massive fluke. Many of those interviewed – Paul’s UK-based agent, for one – clearly have their tongues in their cheeks at least part of the time, but the film is careful to allow Paul, and the other animals who make brief appearances, to retain their dignity. It’s like a more flippant version of last year’s Project Nim. Even the psychics who claim to receive messages from the deceased octopus are not mocked (at least not openly; the viewer can draw their own conclusions). It’s a nice balancing act that results in an entertaining film that asks sensible questions about a silly subject; although the relatively brief running time is quite long enough.
7 Days in Havana
A portmanteau movie from directors including Benicio del Toro, Gaspar Noe and Laurent Cantet (among others) that comprises seven short films set in the titular Cuban city. That’s quite a few shorts, and I did feel that maybe 5 days in Havana would have allowed several of them valuable extra breathing space. As it is, the stories are on the slight side, starting with Josh Hutcherson as a young actor who has a brief encounter on s drunken night out. Emir Kusturica amusingly plays himself as a drunk, grudgingly accepting an award from the Havana Film Festival, but the most memorable and disturbing segment is Noe’s voodoo vignette. While as a full movie it may not totally satisfy, Havana itself – as always – looks, and sounds, beautiful.
Killer Joe
This year’s opening film is a lurid, violent, occasionally funny slice of melodrama from William Friedkin; though if I hadn’t known, I might have taken it for a lost work by Oliver Stone.
Matthew McConaughey is on great form in the title role, as a cop who moonlights as a hired killer. He’s employed by a spectacularly dumb white trash family for a plan masterminded by Chris (Emile Hirsch) to kill his mother for the insurance payout. As Joe normally demands payment up front, Chris agrees to put up his younger sister Dottie up as collateral. Dottie (Juno Temple) appears to be away with the fairies for much of the time, but to what extent is tough to say.
Obviously, the plan goes wrong, and it does so in a fairly OTT manner. I was unaware going in that the film is based on a play (by Tracey Letts) but it became obvious well before the end. It actually feels like something Quentin Tarantino trying to write like Tennessee Williams; the mix of explicit violence and black comedy is sometimes uncomfortable, and the characters never feel as though they have any existence beyond the stage.
I only spent a day at the International Festival of Science Fiction and Fantastic Film, but the four films I saw managed to cover a pretty good range: two documentaries, one actual sf film and one fantasy gave a pleasingly varied spread.
The day started with a definite highlight: a new film directed by William Shatner. There’s a sentence I never thought I’d type. And yet it’s true: his documentary The Captains managed to be funny, interesting and moving.
The basic idea is that Shatner is jetting around the world to interview the various other actors to have played Captains in various versions of Star Trek: Patrick Stewart, Avery Brooks, Kate Mulgrew, Scott Bakula and Chris Pine. There’s every reason to fear this might not work. Shatner, after all, is probably the closest thing America has to Tom Baker. Like Baker, he is indelibly linked to a role in a sci-fi series, and has been happily playing a caricatured version of himself for so long that it’s impossible to tell where the persona ends and the real person begins. But while there’s a fair amount of Shatner doing his thing (wandering around a Trek convention and enjoying the whoops as people notice him), there’s also plenty of space for the other actors to talk – although Brooks prefers to answer questions through the magical language of jazz rather than English. (Is he like this all the time? It must be exhausting for everyone else.)
Along the way, interesting parallels emerge: all the actors had a stage background before being cast in Trek (though the tiny clip we see of Shatner in Shakespeare suggests his liking for generous slices of ham didn’t start with Where No Man Has Gone Before). A couple cite great teachers for inspiring their interest in the arts. All talk about how the long hours demanded by weekly TV shows affected their personal lives; in the most moving sequence, a clip of Shatner and Bakula laughing ruefully over stories of their divorces (Bakula’s was during his time on Quantum Leap) segues to Stewart admitting that his greatest regret is how he behaved during his two marriages.
Shatner doesn’t completely put his ego aside. He credits Stewart’s approach to the role, as stated during their interview, with helping him overcome his embarrassment at being associated with Trek. At that point, the cynic in me did perk up, asking: Really, Bill? You had this epiphany only just now, after how many films and conventions, during the making of your film? While I don’t doubt that Shatner’s perception of his most famous work has shifted in the way he describes, the idea that it took this long felt driven more by the need to give the documentary a narrative resolution than by strict chronological accuracy. But that’s a minor point. The Captains is a very entertaining film, and while it is obviously of particular interest to Trek fans, it should also appeal to anyone interested in hearing actors talk about their craft.
The second documentary of the day, Eric Solstein’s The Golden Age of Science Fiction, is likely to appeal to a narrower audience. The subject is John W Campbell Jr, legendary editor of Astounding Science Fiction magazine whose reign spanned over thirty years. The picture that emerges from the various talking heads is occasionally contradictory; the jury may be permanently out on whether he was the appalling racist and anti-semite painted in some anecdotes, or whether, as other suggest, he just liked being contrary to inspire a reaction. The most interesting part of the film is a 1965 short by James Gunn, Lunch with John Campbell, which records a lunch-cum-editorial discussion between Campbell and two of his writers, including Harry Harrison, as they attempt to pitch Campbell an SF version of Lifeboat. Later, I wondered what they would have made of Eric Hayden’s The Last Push, which was a lifeboat story of sorts. Khary Payton (who is very good) plays astronaut Michael Forrest, who is woken from hibernation by a technical malfunction aboard the first manned flight to Jupiter’s moon Europa, where evidence of life has been spotted. With his co-pilot dead and the habitation module wrecked, Forrest is stuck in a tiny room, with communication subject to long delays, obliged to rewire the ships engines in order to get back to Earth – a journey which takes several years.
You can’t imagine this particular space oddity having much life outside festivals; certainly it would be too tough a sell for a theatrical release and I must confess that had I been watching on DVD, my finger may have connected with the fast forward button. The real issue is that it’s a struggle to imagine Forrest, or anyone, staying sane, stuck in one room over that length of time (and I was impressed with the way his one set of clothes still looked as good as new at the end – maybe they’re made from some super futuristic fabric). Payton just about keeps it believable, and the film does have some very pretty FX shots, but this is ultimately a noble effort that doesn’t quite come off.
My final film of the day, Kurt Kuenne’s Shuffle, was a very different kettle of fish. A romantic fantasy, it follows photographer Lovell Milo (TJ Thyne) who is, for reasons unknown to him, living his days in a completely random order. One day he is 92; the next, 30; the next, ten. He becomes convinced this is happening so that he can change a tragic event in his life; all he has to do is work out what that was, when it happened, and how he can avoid it.
Festival Director Louis Savy assured me this film would make me cry. I insisted that was highly unlikely, on the grounds that I am cold and dead inside, while secretly hoping he was right. Sadly, my tear ducts remained dry; although some scenes do pack a decent punch – particularly those between the young Lovell and his fairly monstrous father – the resolution becomes too treacly for me (part of the problem is the string-heavy, romantic score, which Kuenne also composed). It’s ultimately closer to It’s a Wonderful Life than Memento, but I don’t doubt that’s completely what Kuenne was aiming for. I’m also sure that plenty of people will love it dearly, and that’s absolutely fair enough.
Albatross: Enjoyable coming of age yarn that plays a little like Tamara Drewe, though for my money it’s a lot more entertaining. The middle aged writer this time is Sebastian Koch, still living off and haunted by the success of his debut novel a couple of decades previously. The object of his desire is Emilia (Jessica Brown-Findlay), a free spirit, aspiring writer and new best friend to his daughter Beth (Felicity Jones).
Emilia is a gift of a role for Brown-Findlay, who will deservedly get a lot more work from this film (I was trying to remember what I recognised her from – turned out to be an episode of Misfits, though she was also in Downton Abbey). Koch and Jones are also strong, as is Julia Ormonds as Beth’s bitter mother. It is perhaps a bit too tidily structured (it’s like, everyone in the film has an albatross round their neck, yeah?) but a very worthwhile watch nonetheless.
Rabies: This Israeli horror starts like many a torture porn flick: a young woman is caught in a trap in the woods, a young man is struggling to free her, a killer is on the prowl. Once the rest of the characters turn up – two couples looking for a tennis club, a couple of cops – it becomes more of a black comedy. On those terms it works pretty well, though it does stretch credulity that so many stupid people could show up in the same remote spot in such a tight time period. The film has some decent jumps among the running around in the woods, and a good punchline, but the high level of fuckwittery on display makes you want to throttle many of the characters.
Troll Hunter: The hotly anticipated found footage comedy horror from Norway. A trio of students are attempting to make a film about an apparent poacher: it’s not really spoiling things to say he turns out to be a troll hunter, secretly employed by the Norwegian authorities to manage the country’s troll population.
My expectations for this were probably too high, and I suspect I’ll like it more on a second viewing. First time round I felt the need for more scares among the comedy, and a subplot about one of the characters becoming ill ends up going nowhere. But the basic concept is strong, and the trolls themselves are beautifully rendered, looking just like you imagined them in childhood.
The Divide: There seem to be a quite a few apocalypses on screen at Edinburgh this year (apocalypti?), and this is the most depressing. After someone – we never know who – drops a nuke on New York, a group of characters hole up in a bunker under their apartment building to wait for rescue, which doesn’t come. Things get gradually worse and worse for them, and the luckless audience. I can’t honestly recommend that anyone see this film, but if you want something that crushes all sense of hope and fills you with loathing and contempt for your fellow man, then this certainly does the job.
Finally, The Caller. A slightly odd selection for the Festival – it’s not bad by any means, but I’m not clear what it’s doing here rather than the shelves of HMV in a box with ‘the stars of Twilight and True Blood’ plastered across it.
Rachel Lefevre moves into an old apartment after splitting from her violent husband, where she starts getting phone calls from a woman who thinks it’s 1977. Our heroine decides it would be a good idea to encourage her to be less of a doormat, only to inadvertantly create a monster – a crazed murderer who who is able to bump off the people she cares about before she’s even met them.
It reminded me of Asif Kapadia’s The Return, in that it’s a straight to DVD premise with greater stylistic aspirations. Lefevre and her love interest Stephen Moyer are both good, but it’s one of those films that will work just as well on TV.
Interestingly, the first two documentaries I’ve seen at Edinburgh this year have followed very similar plot arcs. Both concern an individual who is feted from an early age for his unusual intellectual abilities. In both films, the subject becomes a media darling before his unpredictable and aggressive behaviour begins to drive his friends away. He becomes a lonely, tragic individual before a late partial redemption, thanks to old friends and supportive well-wishers, allows him to live out his days in a degree of comfort and security. Both tell their stories through a.mix of archive footage and interviews with people who knew and worked with the subject, who is now deceased.
Also, they’re both excellent.
The comparison does fall down in that genius chess player Bobby Fischer- subject of Bobby Fischer Against the World- was brought down by his own paranoia and madness, whereas Nim Chimsky- the primate whose life is explored in Project Nim – was exploited from birth by humans whose motives he could not possibly understand. He was initially part of an experiment to study apes’ potential to learn to communicate like humans, being raised in a family like human baby, and taught sign language. Later, as he became too strong and unpredictable to control, he ended up in an animal experimentation lab.
A number of his teachers clearly feel a degree of guilt for the part they played in Nim’s unnatural life (though the project’s originator might benefit from a little more self awareness). Nim’s essential powerlessness makes his story the more emotionally affecting of the two, but both films are highly recommended.
The first couple of days of screenings here have been a mixed bag. John Michael Macdonald’s The Guard turned out to be a fine choice for opening film: a hugely entertaining crowd pleaser which sees In Bruges meet Lethal Weapon. The shared lineage with the former film is evident throughout; not only are the directors brothers, there’s the presence of Brendan Gleeson, on top form with the hilariously sweary dialogue. Here, Gleeson’s deceptively undistinguished Garda officer is teamed with Don Cheadle’s FBI agent to track down team of drug smugglers led by Liam Cunningham and Mark Strong. The Argentine end of the world drama Phase 7 had it’s moments, but some odd shiftsin tone meant I couldn’t enjoy it as much as I would have liked. As society collapses under the onslaught of a deadly virus, a young couple hole up in their apartment block while their neighbours take up arms against each other. The scenario is played mostly straight, but with occasional jarring lurches into black comedy and slapstick that do little more than diffuse tension. Worse, the central couple are quite annoying – he guy is petulant and unreliable, while the woman spends most of her time complaining (often with some cause, but still). I was also distracted by the score, which is a homage (or rip off, if you’re feeling less charitable) of John Carpenter’s back catalogue. I’ve seen worse, but it’s not a total success. Much better is Tomboy, a tween variant on Boy’s Don’t Cry, from Water Lillies director Celine Sciamma. Lead character, a 10 year old girl called Laure, moves house and impulsively pretends to the local kids that she’s a boy. It’s very plausible at first – lead Zoe Heran is remarkable, and the film actually conceals her gender for the first 10 minutes – but the illusion proves harder and harder to maintain, and you’re soon dreading the inevitable. A moving, believable film with a collection of superb child performances. The Hungarian auteur Bela Tarr makes films for people who find the works of Ingmar Bergman to be on the frenetic side. Turin Horse, which may apparently be his final work, is described in the programme this: “In Turin in 1889, the philosopher Fredrich Nietzsche stopped a cab driver from whipping his horse and promptly collapsed, spending hs remaining years in more or less demented silence.” Quite what this has to do with the events we seeon screen I’m unclear, though “demented silence” is certainly how the two main characters live. A man and his adult daughter living in an isolated house on a permanently windswept plain, we see then going about their daily routine: feeding the horse, cleaning, cooking (their diet consists of boiled potatoes and nothing else). Gradually we become aware that something is wrong: a neighbour visits with warnings of doom, the horse become sick and refuses to eat. Just what apocalyptic events are unfolding we never learn: we simply observe the two people descend into silent, baffled despair. Tarr – who has also programmed some vintage Hungarian cinema for this year’s EIFF – can only be described as an acquired taste. His work makes no concessions to those who enjoy such things as plot and dialogue. You have to be willing to immerse yourself in his bleak, black and white, doom-laden visions to get any kind of pleasure from this film; not everyone will be willing to make that kind of leap.
So with about a month to go before it starts, the Edinburgh Film Festival programme has been released. And it’s… interesting.
This year’s EIFF has been hit by funding cuts – a deal with the UK Film Council to support the move to June ended last year – and it’s noticeably smaller than before. Big premieres are noticeable by their absence (there’s no closing night film, for example, and no Best of the Fest on the final Sunday… maybe they’re not anticipating many sellouts). More puzzlingly, there’s no Michael Powell Award for Best British Film, which was something that made Edinburgh stand out from the rash of festivals, and can’t have encouraged the submission of potentially major films.
One film widely expected to be in the programme was We Need to Talk about Kevin, starring as it does EIFF Patron Tilda Swinton. Unfortunately, it’s late 2011 UK release date means Artificial Eye are holding it back – a perfectly sensible decision from their point of view (a UK premiere at the London Film Festival will make more sense), and there’s nothing new about big Cannes titles failing to show up in Edinburgh.
The Festival has retreated entirely from the Cineworld to the Cameo and Filmhouse (plus a few others). No doubt some will see this as a good thing – there is grumbling from the some sections of the press every year about having to see films in a multiplex usually patronised by – shudder – ordinary cinemagoers. To this I say, bollocks. Quite apart from the fact that a Festival of this nature ought to be reaching out to the non-Sight and Sound reading contingent, the Cineworld is a perfectly acceptable venue. Certainly, after a few screenings on the trot in the cramped and often stifling Filmhouse 1, I invariably find myself thinking wistfully of its generous leg room and air conditioning.
Given that last years EIFF was widely reported to have seen a drop in audiences (though by how much, and how it compared to the Festival’s last year in August, I don’t know; can anyone point me to the info?) it will be interesting to see how the organisers spin the eventual ticket sales for 2011. I’m not suggesting that ticket sales are the only indicator of a Festival’s success, but if last year’s event is being tagged by some as a disappointment, how will they react to an inevitable drop in a Festival almost half the size of its predecessor?
So, what have we got? The theme is ‘All That Heaven Allows’, which means… um… well, I’m not sure, really. It does involve a screening of the Douglas Sirk film of the same name, though. And it has involved films being picked by a number of guest curators. Some of these are very interesting choices; Bela Tarr, for example. He’s programmed Passion, a 1955 Hungarian version of The Postman Always Rings Twice. I can’t imagine getting too many other chances to see that. But there are quite a lot of guest curators, and they only seem to have picked one or two titles each. I would have preferred to have seen a more substantial selection from one or two curators.
But that’s enough grumbling; what am I actually looking forward to seeing? Well, The Guard looks like a promising pick for the opening night. I rarely get a must-see feeling about big screen documentaries, but a sensible link up with Sheffield’s documentary festival has created a strong non-fiction strand; my top picks are Bobby Fischer Against the World, Sound it Out (about an independent record shop) and Project Nim, from James Man on Wire Marsh. Studio Ghibli bring us the Mary Norton adaptation The Borrower Arietty (though the purist in me is vaguely resentful we seem to be getting the dubbed version). There’s The Last Circus, the new Alex de la Iglesia, and a number of horror/fantasy titles; I’m most anticipating Norwegian mockumentary Troll Hunter, but there’s also the Argentine end of the world tale Phase 7, and something called Rabies, about which the brochure seems oddly sheepish (“Horror fans will love this”, we’re assured, though it’s “silly”).
But brochure copy only tells you so much; the jury will remain out (even though Edinburgh doesn’t have a jury this year) until we’ve been able to see the films. It’s a big year for the EIFF, one the organisers readily describe as being transitional, and I’m hoping it will work. Either way, it will be interesting to see the choices the Festival makes for its future.
By some measure the most intense 105 minutes I’ve spent in a cinema this year, Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan is a melodramatic psychological horror that plunges the viewer into the disintegrating mind of a young woman.
Natalie Portman stars as Nina, a driven ballerina whose major career break – the chance to perform the dual roles of the White and Black Swans in Swan Lake – places an intolerable strain on her psyche.
Early on, the company director Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassell) helpfully explains the plot of Swan Lake for us, dwelling on the conflict between the good White Swan and her evil lustful twin, the Black Swan.Leroy has no doubt that Natalie is up to the role of the White Swan, but doubts she can embody the wilder, sensuous Black.But he nevertheless decides to give her a chance at the role.She continues to struggle: she constantly strives for perfection, but her idea of perfection is a purely technical one that doesn’t help her inhabit both roles.Egged on by her controlling mother, whose own dance career was cut short when Nina was conceived, Nina clearly has long-term issues with self harm (she scratches herself obsessively, and it’s safe to add anorexia into the mix).She also starts to feel increasingly threatened by Lily, a rival dancer who is… well, more of a Black Swan type.
The plot could have come from a 60s B movie; indeed, I couldn’t shake the idea that a version of the same script made 40 – 50 years earlier would have had Roger Corman and Vincent Price’s names in the credits (though whether Price would have been in the Cassell or Portman role is a question I couldn’t quite resolve).But the execution is another matter.I haven’t seen an Aronofsky film since Pi – not that I’ve particularly tried to avoid his stuff, it’s just sort of happened – so I can’t say if Black Swan is representative of his work (he states in the LFF catalogue that he sees it as a companion piece to The Wrestler, both films being about performers who use their bodies to express their souls).It’s certainly not an easy watch.Not only do we see the appalling punishment to which ballet dancers subject their feet (you want to beg them to take up a safer career, like maybe boxing, or juggling chainsaws while blindfold) but as Nina starts to hallucinate, various nasty things happen to nails in close up.I haven’t had to look away from the screen so often since Saw III.
What the film does brilliantly is oblige us to share Nina’s increasingly shaky grip on reality.It starts early on as Nina glimpses someone on the subway train who appears to be her double; we later discover that this is Lily, who gets off at the wrong stop on her way to her first rehearsal, but we – like Nina – are rattled already.The doppelganger theme continues as Nina feels under attack variously from Lily – who may or may not be seeking to replace her – but from an apparently imaginary double.It’s normally easy to spot which scenes in a film are real (in the context of the narrative) and which are fake.It’s less so in this one.
What really anchors the film is Natalie Portman as Nina; she is superb, and a sure bet for an Oscar nomination.A less committed performance would have sunk the film, leaving us laughing as the plot, and the imagery, becomes ever more hysterical.Portman is absolutely believable as the controlled, repressed, heartbreakingly fragile Nina.Aronofsky’s visual and audio tricks take the film into the realm of madness; his star keeps it firmly believable.
Black Swan is probably not for everyone, and may well be a love it or hate it film.I thought it was amazing, and would absolutely urge anyone interested to see it in a cinema for the most immersive experience possible.
George Clooney as a hitman dodging bullets in picturesque Italian towns sounds like a winner.However, Anton Corbijn’s follow up to Control takes a more existential route than the average moviegoer might wish.
Clooney stars as a butterfly loving assassin/gun supplier who, in the opening sequence, is targeted by couple of Swedes who have it in for him.Following the ensuing carnage – which includes one jaw-dropping shock moment – he is sent by his boss to Italy to hide out.Here, he hangs out in coffee bars, chats to a local priest, and contemplates the emptiness of his life while getting closer to a prostitute – despite having learned the hard way that friends are a bad idea in his game.
The film looks good, with beautiful locations and a hot cast.Emotionally, though, it’s cold.The film is as taciturn as its lead character, aiming very much for an arthouse atmosphere, even in the action scenes.It would not have been a surprise to see the director’s credit reading, ‘Steven Soderbergh, after Antonini’.I was also reminded of Asif Kapadia’s The Warrior, another arthouse flick dressed up – possibly by the marketers rather than the makers – to look like an action thriller.
There’s plenty to admire here, but the general public may feel the film has been missold.
Gareth Negus 