Abandon All Hope in the Village of the Damned (From The Oxford Times)

Abandon All Hope in the Village of the Damned

8:34am Thursday 12th November 2009

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Audiences and critics like to compartmentalise film-makers. A convenient label somehow makes their work easier to understand.

The Austrian auteur Michael Haneke has been categorised as a difficult director, who explores the darker side of the modern psyche through his presentation of repressed emotion and shocking violence and his refusal to provide easy answers. Yet, such simplifications fail to reflect the complexity of Haneke's attitude to both humanity and cinema. In addition to discussing such contentious themes as xenophobia, victimisation, consumerism and the impact of the mass media on the intellect and the emotions, Haneke has also explored the illusory nature of the moving image. Indeed, few have made more devastating use of off-screen space to provoke spectators into questioning their complicity in the realities, fantasies and nightmares they are witnessing.

Suffused with the influence of Kieslowski, Tarkovsky, Straub, Antonioni and Bresson, Haneke's oeuvre has been accused of bleakness, sensationalism and excessive didacticism. Yet, having not started directing features until he was 47, he has never felt the need to pander to commercial or critical expectation. Thus, his films have an intelligence, insight and integrity that make them as compelling as they're distinctive. And, in The White Ribbon, Haneke has created his masterpiece.

The winner of the Palme d'or at Cannes, this immaculate monochrome melodrama revisits the bucolic north German village of Eichwald on the eve of the Great War to detect the first buds of Nazism flourishing in the populace's unquestioning adherence to aristocratic authoritarianism and Protestant patriarchy. However, this is also a universal treatise on the rise of fanaticism and the susceptibility of youth to the bad example of its elders.

The action opens with doctor Rainer Bock being thrown from his horse by a trip wire across the entrance to his property. With the locals still debating who could have perpetrated such a dangerous prank, the wife of farmer Branko Samarovski has a fatal accident at baron Ulrich Tukur's sawmill and her son wreaks revenge by destroying his cabbage crop during the harvest festival celebrations. Soon afterwards, the baron's son, Fion Mutert, is strung up and whipped at the mill, while steward Josef Bierbichler's newborn baby catches a chill after a window is deliberately left open in its room.

In the midst of such mayhem, thirtysomething schoolteacher Christian Friedel begins courting teenage governess Leonie Benesch. But when she is dismissed by baroness Ursina Lardi for letting Mutert out of her sight, their engagement is put on hold by Benesch's strict father, Detlev Buck. Calvinist pastor Burghart Klaussner imposes an even stricter regime on his offspring, however, and he compels adolescents Maria-Victoria Dragus and Leonard Proxauf to sport white ribbons to remind them of their immaturity and their duty to remain pure. However, Friedel begins to detect something more sinister is occurring in this village of the damned, especially when midwife Susanne Lothar's Down Syndrome son (Eddy Grahl) is beaten in precisely the manner dreamt by Bierbichler's daughter, Janina Fautz.

The police are summoned, but their investigations prove fruitless and any chance of the truth emerging is suppressed when Klaussner threatens Friedel with disgrace if he persists in his suspicion that the local children, under Dragus and Proxauf's leadership, have been responsible for the heinous misdeeds. However, the baroness's decision to join her lover in Italy, the sudden disappearance of the doctor's family and the outbreak of war in the summer of 1914 serve to distract and unite a community whose invidious insularity is already doomed.

There's more than a whiff of Heimat - not to mention Bergman and Dreyer - about the narrated, linear action, which was scripted with the assistance of the master French scribe, Jean-Claude Carrière, and is chillingly subtitled `A German Children's Story'. Despite the chaste romance between Friedel and Benesch and a charmingly selfless gesture by Klaussner's youngest son after his father's pet bird is slaughtered, the overriding mood is one of malice and menace. The cruelty that Bock exhibits towards the devoted Lothar and the insouciance with which he abuses daughter Roxane Duran finds echo in Klaussner's use of corporal punishment and ritual humiliation and Tukur's tyrannical indifference to his wife's feelings or his tenants' circumstances. Yet it's the ease with which this perniciousness has seeped into the subconscious of the next generation that most disconcerts.

The ensemble performances are outstanding, as are Christoph Kanter's production design and Christian Berger's photography. But it's Haneke's vision and control that imbues the ever-more suspenseful and harrowing events with an oppressive sense of psychological and historical significance.

If Haneke's subtext is humanity's inexorable drift into insentience, Sophie Barthes's debut feature, Cold Souls, draws its inspiration from Carl Jung's tract on the interpretation of dreams, Modern Man in Search of a Soul.

Paul Giamatti stars as a New York actor of the same name, who is having problems getting into character for a stage production of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya. Without telling wife Emily Watson, he makes an appointment with doctor David Strathairn, who has perfected a technique for removing the soul and replacing it with one more suited to the patient's temperament. Despite misgivings, Giamatti plumps for the soul of a Russian poet and is soon dazzling his director with his passionately perceptive performances in rehearsals.

On the downside, however, Giamatti begins having eerie dreams and Watson no longer recognises the man she married. Moreover, mule Dina Korzun has stolen Giamatti's chickpea-sized soul from its store on Roosevelt Island so it can be implanted into Russian soap actress Katheryn Winnick, whose spouse is Korzun's mobster boss, Sergei Kolesnikov. On learning the truth, Giamatti heads to St Petersburg. But reclaiming his soul proves trickier than he had anticipated - even after Winnick discovers that her new soul isn't Al Pacino's, as she had been promised - while Korzun has to deal with the growing risk she faces from residues building up from her trafficking activities and the guilt she feels for tricking impoverished Oksana Lada into selling her soul in order to survive.

Opening with a quote from René Descartes, this is stuffed with references to surrealists like André Breton and Boris Vian, absurdists like Eugène Ionesco and Jean Tardieu and such screen auteurs as Federico Fellini, Andrei Tarkovsky and Luis Buñuel. However, the dominant influences here are Russian novelist Nikolai Gogol, Woody Allen (for whom the Giamatti role was originally written) and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, as the laudably deadpan action slips deftly between facets of Dead Souls, Sleeper and Being John Malkovich.

Giamatti anchors proceedings with a knowing turn, while Andrij Parekh's chilly interiors nimbly complement the wintry images of Coney Island and St Petersburg. However, Barthes loses her way during the Russian segment, as philosophical fantasy gives way to sentimental melodrama and the wry ingenuity of the comedy succumbs to superficial self-satisfaction.

The search for emotional fulfilment, cheap thrills and life-changing epiphanies continues in Masayuki Miyano's Lala Pipo. Adapted from a novel by Hideo Okuda, this is a kinky, comic-book variation on La Ronde that interweaves vignettes about six lost souls in red-light Tokyo. Yet, for all the surreal brashness of the hyper-colourful imagery and the audacity of the stylised structure, this actually casts a melancholic verdict on the breakdown of communication and the devaluation of sex. Indeed, it's less a study in exploitation than in isolation and the fact that people occasionally do distasteful things for justifiable reasons.

Technical writer Sarutoki Minagawa is a self-loathing slob whose bitterness at not having the creative freedom to express himself is compounded by the fact his upstairs neighbour seems to have an endless supply of female visitors. Despairing at being reduced to listening to their moans through the ceiling while teetering on a pile of books, Minagawa endures humiliating conversations with his penis (which is a foul-mouthed green muppet). So, when chubby anime voice artist Tomoko Murakami flirts with him in a bar, he has no hesitation in going back to her apartment.

Yuri Nakamura is a demure shopgirl, who allows herself to be recruited to work in a hostess bar by sex trade scout, Hiroki Narimiya. Wholly uncomfortable with communicating with her clients, Nakamura consents to progressing from prostitution to pornography and feels protected and wanted when Narimiya pulps the lonely bureaucrat who wants to take their business-only relationship further. However, Narimiya is arrested for extortion and GBH just after he has arranged for Nakamura to make a mother-daughter scenario with `mature nymphomaniac' Mari Hamada, unaware that the women are related in real life.

Just as Nakamura is willing to debase herself to find security, so Hamada seeks escape from the squalor in which she is forced to live with her loyal husband because she once left her mother-in-law to die in an upstairs room and has been piling up rubbish ever since to block the staircase and disguise the stench. By contrast, Murakami dwells in a pink lacy wonderland. But this kitschy setting is familiar to thousands from the sex tapes she shoots with cameras hidden behind the bric-a-brac on her shelves. Minagawa is the latest of her victims, but caprice is about to pitch her into Narimiya's orbit.

Miyano links the episodes together with a dextrous mix of coarse comedy and unexpected poignancy. The appalling meeting between Nakamura and Hamada is handled with particular discretion. But the storyline involving Yoshiyuki Morishita and his superhero fantasies resolutely refuses to integrate into the whole. There's a chauvinist edge to Morishita's fantasies about being a manga colossus bestriding Godzilla-style cityscapes in a uniform fitted with a phallic firearm. But his punishment seems more than a little extreme when he is raped by the yakuza who has turned the back room of his shop into a bordello.

Away from the seedier side of life, Sergey Dvortsevoy restores some faith in humanity in Tulpan, a tale of the Kazakh steppe that simultaneously humbles and lifts the spirits.

Discharged from the Russian navy, Askhat Kuchinchirekov returns to the arid southern region of Betpak Dala to share a yurt with older sister Samal Yeslyamova, bossy brother-in-law Ondasyn Besikbasov and their three rowdy children. Kuchinchirekov aims to have a flock of his own, but he needs a wife to attend to the household chores. So, with Besikbasov and Boney M-loving best buddy Tulepbergen Baisakalov in tow, he arranges a meeting with the only eligible girl for miles around.

Watching from behind a curtain, Tulpan is far from impressed with either Kuchinchirekov's tales of giant octopodes or the rather shoddy chandelier he has brought as a betrothal gift. Moreover, she thinks his ears are too big. However, Kuchinchirekov persuades himself he's in love with the unseen enigma and vows to win her over and, in the process, prove to the doubting Besikbasov that he has the makings of a shepherd.

Drawing on his documentary background, Dvortsevoy has produced a compelling portrait of nomadic life in the Central Asian wilderness that is positively Flahertyesque in a Story of the Weeping Camel sort of way. Jolanta Dylewska's photography magnificently captures the rough poetry of the flora and fauna, while Dvortsevoy exhibits a moving sensitivity to the sights and sounds of the desert.

The lengthy sequences showing the birth and resuscitation of some lambs are especially enthralling. But this is also a very human story, with Yeslyamova almost treating the unworldly Kuchinchirekov as a fourth child, alongside the willingly industrious nine year-old Nurzhigit Zhapabayev (who memorises radio newscasts to relay to his father during the interminable evenings, as dust storms whistle and spiral outside), the ever-singing Mahabbat Turganbayeva and the youngest tot, Bereke Turganbayev, who charges everywhere on a wooden hobbyhorse, while testing the durability of his pet tortoise.

Moreover, there is plenty of dry humour to relish. The gold-toothed Baisakalov (who is determined to move to the city) shows Tulpan's parents a photo of Prince Charles to demonstrate that Kuchinchirekov's ears aren't that big after all, while the sight of a mother camel trotting after the bandaged baby sat in the sidecar of the vet's motorcycle is as poignantly droll as the idealised future that Kuchinchirekov has drawn on the underside of his naval uniform collar.

A mix of whimsical and raucous wit also informs The Magic Hour. However, there's also some affecting drama on show in this thought-provoking portmanteau of short films by five disabled film-makers, which has been produced by Special People director Justin Edgar.

John Williams's `Paraphernalia' centres on the love-hate relationship between young Elijah Muhammad and the embarrassingly lo-tech, nannyish robot who refuses to let him have any fun. However, as the story neatly slips from fantasy to reality, it becomes clear that the boy has been daydreaming about the dialysis machine that keeps him alive.

In stark contrast with this gentle item, William Mager's `Hands Solo' is a saucy mockumentary about deaf actor Matt Kirby, whose signing skills are so slick that he becomes a porn star with the manual dexterity to send co-star Nicola Stapleton into an orgasmic coma. However, with his movie banned for safety reasons, Kirby begins to question the value of his infamy and seeks to patch up his romance with childhood sweetheart Deepa Shastri. With its ironic narration and savvy stylisation, this is easily the most technically ambitious of the quartet, although some of the jokes are a little inconsistent.

The craftsmanship is also the strong point of Andrew Gibbs's claymation vignette, `Buttermouth'. When Clara first enters a dingy apartment and dons a cardigan whose familiar pattern reassures an elderly blind woman, this measured mini-saga feels decidedly disconcerting. But when the mother discovers the sacrifices that her daughter has made to disguise their dire poverty, this study in filial devotion takes on a poignancy that is all the more effective for its restraint.

Produced by the Void Mediabox Group's `The Hunger House' also celebrates loyalty in extremis. Set during the Second World War, it follows friends Scott Swadkins and Jason Maza as they are arrested by the Gestapo and taken for assessment under the Aktion T4 euthanasia programme. Judged solely on his physical appearance, Swadkins is detained. But the epileptic Maza is allowed to leave, as the doctors believe his lie that he is completely healthy. However, he thinks better of abandoning his pal and returns to share his fate.

Concisely scripted and unfussily played, this lacks period authenticity (presumably because of budgetary constraint). But, in terms of its dignified simplicity, it bears comparison with Jochen Alexander Freydank's Oscar-winning short, Toyland.

Concluding the quintet is`Follow Me On My Journey to Die', in which director Katherine Arianello also stars as a wheelchair-bound artist who announces her imminent demise in order to raise her profile. However, dedicated, but deluded acolytes Jenna Harrison, Claire Amias and India Wadsworth (who each nurses a pathetic body image issue) take Arianello's threat at face value, as do the members of the Turner Prize committee, who are more than willing to tick a quota box by declaring her the winner - providing she actually dies.

Lampooning the art establishment with undisguised glee, this sharp tale takes a macabre twist when Arianello fakes her death in an explosion and heads incognito for Barbados. However, she forgot to tell her air-headed minions, who enter into a suicide pact that makes the headlines as Arianello awaits her flight.

Proficient and pertinent, this is as patchy as multi-storied movies tend to be. But it's also a laudable achievement that deserves to be seen. And connecting with the widest audience possible has always been the ambition of internet pioneer Josh Harris, whose erratic career is chronicled by Ondi Timoner in We Live in Public.

Edited down from over 5000 hours of footage amassed over a decade, this is a scruffily effective study of a man who brimmed with zeitgeist-shaping ideas before he jacked it all in to run an apple farm in upstate New York. Harris emerges as a perturbing hybrid of loner, visionary, narcissist, sadist, artist and crank. But there's no doubting the acuity of his prescience or his grasp of the modern celebrity-obsessed, gadgetphile psyche.

Having made $80 million through his Pseudo TV network, Harris lost some of it during the dotcom slump and the rest in staging Orwellian-cum-Warholian extravaganzas like the Big Brotheresque `Quiet' - in which 100 volunteers existed on camera 24/7 in a neo-fascistic commune stationed in the basement of a Big Apple hotel - and `We Live in Public', a more intimate project conducted with girlfriend Tanya Corrin that saw them competing for online affection with an ever-dwindling fan base as their Truman Show-style escapade consecutively lost its novelty value, eroded their passion for each other and tipped the compulsively videographing Harris towards a nervous breakdown.

Perpetually uncertain whether to collaborate or exploit, Harris clearly sees himself as a by-product of his love-starved, TV-saturated 60s childhood, who identifies more with such art pranksters as Marcel Duchamp and Ray Johnson than the wannabes and liggers who used to flock to the infamous `aphrodisiac parties' he threw in the 1990s. As something of an insider, Timoner seems reluctant to cast too many stones, while her technique demonstrated a surprisingly conservative reliance on talking heads, clips of Gilligan's Island and footage from Harris's surveillance freak shows. Yet, this portrait of a control freak losing the plot is frantically compelling. Moreover, as a snapshot of our times and how the techno-connectivity of MySpace, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter warped human behaviour and conquered the globe, it's demoralisingly chilling.

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