Heading in the Wrong Direction (From The Oxford Times)

Heading in the Wrong Direction

8:01am Thursday 17th September 2009

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After pleading last week for British films to depict something other than rappers dealing drugs on inner-city housing estates and kids with attitude rebelling against their neglectful single mothers, it seems a touch invidious to castigate an effort by a feature debutant that attempts to combine political critique with abrasive action. However, Tristan Loraine's 31 North 62 East is so poor that it would amount to journalistic negligence not to expose its inadequacies and wonder how on earth it managed to secure a general release when dozens of more deserving British features go unseen outside the festival circuit.

Having revealed how the world's airlines turn a blind eye to the contamination of in-flight air in the estimable documentary Welcome to Toxic Airlines, former pilot Loraine switches his attention to governmental expediency and the dirtiness of warfare in this thuddingly boorish thriller. Stuffed with plot, but bereft of characterisation, the wilfully obfuscatory action hurtles along, as Heather Pearce seeks to divulge how prime minister John Rhys-Davies sold out her soldier sister in Afghanistan to save a vote-winning £80 billion arms deal.

Despite shooting in Jordan in a laudable bid for authenticity, the picture too often resembles a bargain-basement 1970s actioner, right down to the emphasis on hi-tec gadgetry and the risible songs on the soundtrack. Neither the desert interrogation sequences nor Pearce's abduction and torture of aide Marina Sirtis ring true, while Craig Fairbrass's bunker management of a special forces rescue bid falls far short of the gung-ho Hollywood heroics that Loraine and his scriptwriting brother Leofwine evidently had in mind.

As one would expect, Sue Gibson's photography is admirable, but the stance on government duplicity is wince-inducingly naive and the ease with which the conspiracy collapses in a climactic press conference is frankly incredible. Saddled with some woeful dialogue, the cast makes a decent fist of investing the clunky action with some gravitas. But with Rhys-Davies gorging himself on the scenery as the most monstrously venal PM in British screen history, this is mediocre in the extreme.

An unwaveringly deluded belief in one's own talent is the worst trait that any wannabe artist can possess, as Lesley Manning ably demonstrates in her droll adaptation of Martin Wagner's stage play, The Agent. But while novelist Stephen Kennedy clings to the conviction that his second tome is a masterly insight into the realities of life in a northern mining community, cocky London agent William Beck has his eyes fixed too firmly on the bottom line to see whether it has any actual merit beneath the authorial bluff.

However, with Kennedy's insistence being motivated as much by the need to save his failing marriage as by any creative pride, he is as aware as Beck of the tyranny of profitability and, thus, for all his accusations of philistinism, he proves to be just as prepared to sell his soul for lucre as acclaim.

With the focus falling so firmly on the battle of cultures and wills, Manning wisely eschews cinematics here to reinforce the mood of mannish intensity. She's well served by Kennedy and Beck (recreating their stage roles), whose respective need for affirmation and indifference to literature make them admirable adversaries. However, despite its pacy eloquence, Wagner's storyline too often strains credibility, especially when Kennedy produces park playground photographs of Beck with his mistress and their young son and threatens to spill the beans to the agent's refined wife, Aislinn Mangan, unless he secures a bumper payday.

The subsequent telephone bidding war is equally infeasible. But it's so crisply scripted and edited that it's possible to overlook the insufferably self-congratulatory aura that pervades Beck's coda meeting with publisher Maureen Lipman. This twist ending reeks of contrivance. But that's partly the point, as life invariably reflects poor melodrama not great art.

By contrast, Marco Bechis seeks to combine neo-realism with mysticism in Birdwatchers, a compassionate and often poetic drama set in Brazil's Mato Grosso do Sul and played out to exquisite motets by the 18th-century Jesuit missionary composer, Domenico Zipoli. However, this never quite succeeds in articulating its central message about the historical and contemporary rapacity of intrusive forces.

Bent on reclaiming an ancestral tekoha, tribal leader Ambrosio Vilhalva quits the federal reserve and moves on to farmer Leonardo Medeiros's field. However, poverty and lust compel his followers to betray the cause, with tragic consequences. Chief among them is Abrisio da Silva Pedro, who is friends with Vilhalva's neglected son, Ademilson Concianza Verga. Despite being trained to become a shaman, Da Silva Pedro's commitment is shaken by a spate of suicides amongst his neighbours, Vilhalva's drunken tyranny and mother Alicelia Batista Cabreira's lusty pursuit of Claudio Santamaria, the `scarecrow' installed in a caravan by Medeiros to keep the Indians off his land. However, he is also led astray by Medeiros's bikini-wearing, motorbike-riding teenage daughter, Fabiane Pereira da Silva.

Brazil's indigenous tribes have endured 500 years of slow genocide. Yet by opening this well-meaning, but clumsily didactic tract with a scene of some Guarani-Kaiowà posing as Amazonian savages for the benefit of a boatload of tourists, Bechis hoists himself by his own petard, as it's always thuddingly apparent that the non-professional performers are enacting caricatures assigned them by a conscience-stricken liberal. Furthermore, he reduces Medeiros and wife Chiara Caselli to imperialist ciphers, which has the unfortunate effect of making Da Silva Pedro's fling with their precocious daughter seem melodramatic and contrived rather than symbolic and significant.

In conjunction with cinematographer Alemao Nagamine, Bechis achieves a tangible sense of place. But his story lacks nuance and emotional equilibrium. The same can also occasionally be said for Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige's documentary Je Veux Voir, which follows Catherine Deneuve on a journey to Lebanon's border with Israel through the devastation caused by the 2006 incursion. Sharing a car with local actor Rabih Mroué, Deneuve admits that she may not understand everything she is going to see, but she wants to witness first-hand the scarred landscape that has become so familiar to outsiders from 25 years of ghastly news broadcasts.

Setting off from a downtown Beirut hotel, Deneuve and Mroué are followed by a vehicle containing a camera crew and their minders. However, this conceit is scarcely maintained, as Joreige and Hadjithomas periodically break convoy to locate the couple's car in its contrasting contexts. This artificiality could so easily have hamstrung the enterprise. But Deneuve and Mroué push through the awkward civility of their initial meeting to strike up a riveting rapport that flits between her scolding him for not wearing his seatbelt, him pointing out significant landmarks, her asking about his youth in Bint El Jbeil and him translating her lines from Belle de Jour into Arabic.

But while the human element proves diverting, the focus rarely strays from the tell-tale signs that Lebanon is a country on the edge of a precipice - bombed-out apartments in the capital's suburbs (where the dispossessed refuse to let them film); roadside posters extolling the martyrs of the Amal movement; Israeli spy planes causing sonic booms over verdant countryside; minor roads pocked with landmines; and entire settlements reduced to rubble, including the one in which Mroué spent his childhood summers. Deneuve and Mroué impressively invest the blend of improvised and scripted sequences with a sense of authenticity. But nothing could be more harrowingly real than the sight of an nation laid waste by its neighbour.

A community of a a much cosier kind comes under scrutiny in Corinna Villari-McFarlane and Robert Cannan's Three Miles North of Molkom.

Held in the northern Swedish forest retreat of Angsbacka, the One Mind Festival attracts a variety of people seeking enlightenment and inner peace. Among the crop entrusted to Siddhartha, a harbour master with an inflated sense of self and a predatory eye for vulnerable ladies, are glamorous pop singer Regina Lund, the down-to-earth Marit, the emotionally fragile Mervi (who has recently been told she's suffering from a serious illness), the flower-childlike Ljus, the willing Peter (who is attending with his two sons while trying to decide whether his marriage is worth saving) and the gregarious and highly sceptical Nick, an Australian rugby coach who initially derides what he fears before falling under the gathering's unique and delightfully eccentric spell.

Despite pleading with viewers not to mock New Age philosophy, firewalking, tree-hugging, sauna therapy, tantric sex and trance healing until they've tried them, this amusing study of the lengths to which people will go solve their problems also warns that for every shaman there's a charlatan.

The ease with which the earnest can be exploited is also the subject of Luis Lopez and Trisha Ziff's documentary, Chevolution, which is playing at The ICA in London.

Alberto Korda's photograph of bereted revolutionary Che Guevara was the most reproduced image of the 20th century. It was taken at a 1960 memorial rally in Havana, but Cuba's eschewal of copyright law meant that `Guerillero Heroico' was seized upon by opportunistic entrepreneurs like Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli and an unholy alliance of advertisers, merchandisers and Warhol wannabes, who rapidly detached the expression of paternalistic pity from its socio-political context and invested it with an iconic enigmaticism that has only been shared by the `Mona Lisa'.

This slick chronicle of the commodification of Che's gaze is a triumph of graphic research and editorial dexterity. But it's also a provocative analysis of the extent to which artists retain dominion over their creations after they have had new and often contradictory meanings bestowed upon them by a public often ignorant of their true historical or cultural significance. The contributions of actors like Antonio Banderas and Gael García Bernal (who have both played Che on screen) are rather negligible, while the presence of Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams and Rage Against the Machine's Tom Morello proves something of a distraction. But it's fascinating to listen to Irish artist Jim Fitzpatrick recalling how he devised the distinctive 1968 poster version of the portrait - with its coarse black outline, red background and handpainted yellow star - and to Korda's daughter, Diana Diaz, who has decided to establish legal ownership of an image whose enduring idealistic appeal has been so firmly rooted in its universal accessibility.

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