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Don't You Know It's Gonna Be...

8:04am Thursday 24th September 2009

Photograph of the Author By Parky at the Pictures »

Perhaps one of the most striking things about the ongoing recession has been the absence of street protest. An inevitable rent-a-crowd was mobilised to fulminate from a safe distance at the leaders attending the G20 summit in April, but, otherwise, there have been no union rallies, inner-city riots or well-mannered assemblages of those hard-working families that Gordon Brown is always going on about. What a difference four decades make!

The soixante huitards who took to the boulevards of Paris in the spring of 1968 believed that they could shatter the old and construct a new society that re-embraced the revolutionary principles of liberty, fraternity and equality. But, as Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau conclude in Born in `68, one person's idealism is invariably another's despotism.

Disappointed by Charles De Gaulle's ascent from the ashes and the capitulation of the Left, Laetitia Casta and her free lovers Yannick Rénier and Yann Tregouet set up a commune in an abandoned farm in the medieval Dordogne town of Figeac. Locals Marc and Christine Citti welcome them with genial rustic curiosity. But a bond develops between the pair and Casta's conservative brother, Gaëtan Gallier, who remains in the area and marries Algerian refugee Fejira Daliba, while Casta is left only with the support of best friend Kate Moran to raise her children after Tregouet goes off to fight the cause and Rénier returns to the capital to teach.

As the years pass and governments edge further to the Right, Casta's offspring, Sabrina Seyvecou and Theo Frilet, reject her flower power ethos and stumble into the problems of a fast-changing world. Seyvecous marries Iranian émigré Slimane Yefsah, but quickly comes to resent his chauvinism, while Frilet and the Cittis' son, Edouard Collin, discover they are HIV+. Moreover, Tregouet is now a wanted man and his brief return south changes everyone's lives forever.

A worthy companion piece to Marco Tullio Giordana's Best of Youth (2003), this epic survey of 40 years of personal and political turmoil shows how many chances for rapprochement the global community has frittered between the May Days and the Credit Crunch. The episodic scenario just about holds together over the 1968-81 and 1982-2007 time frames. But there is a lack of sociological and philosophical trenchancy that occasionally pushes the action towards arthouse soap, particularly during the latter stages when, in quick succession, Casta falls in love and discovers she's terminally ill and Seyvecou and Frilet find cosy resolutions to their romantic quandaries. Perhaps the protestors had it right when they chanted, `Vous finirez tous par crever du confort' (`You will all wind up dying of comfort').

Production designer Denis Moutereau, set decorator Maëlig Hamard and costumier Catherine Rigault rise to their challenges with aplomb, while Matthieu Poirot-Delpech's photography is as piquant as Philippe Miller's score. The performances match the efficiency of the direction (although no one seems to age very much). But this laudably ambitious history lesson never comes close to the mastery of Edgar Reitz's Heimat films, which always managed to show how the national impacted upon the individual without resorting to nostalgia, hindsight or melodrama.

If, for all its scope and ambition, Born in `68 feels a little familiar, there is absolutely nothing derivative about British director Dominic Murphy's commendably outré debut, White Lightnin'.

Based on the life of Jesco White, this is as visually assured as it's audacious. Murphy's background in commercials is readily apparent in the slickly edited, colour-drained images. But his storytelling inexperience is cruelly exposed by the shallowness of the characterisation and the failure to provide anything more than superficial psychological justification for his anti-hero's periodic bouts of rage and brutality.

Hooked on lighter fluid at the age of six, Jesco (Owen Campbell) hero worships his Appalachian mountain dancing daddy, D-Ray (Muse Watson), even though he prefers the company of applauding audiences to his adoring son and regularly turns him into the cops for spells in a boot camp borstal. Ingestion and incarceration eventually warp Jesco's mind. Yet when his father is murdered by a couple of drunken rednecks, the now twentysomething Jesco (Edward Hogg) is released into the custody of his indifferent mother (Stephanie Astalos-Jones), who bequeaths him D-Ray's dancing shoes and packs him off to make the best of his miserable existence.

Jesco and his guitarist Bob (Wallace Merck) find a niche playing venues in hardscrabble backwaters and he falls head over heels for Cilla (Carrie Fisher), a married mother who abandons her family to party on the road with her dishevelled beau and keep house in his rickety shack. But Jesco's unpredictability eventually takes its toll and, after he threatens the black guys flirting with Cilla at a bar, she leaves him and his increasingly demented thoughts turn to avenging himself on D-Ray's killers, Long (Kirk Bovill) and Davey (Raymond Waring).

Recalling Charles Manson both in his appearance and his charismatic craziness, Edward Hogg is laudably unhinged as the `Dancing Outlaw'. But he is always Murphy's puppet, whether tapping gamely to driving rhythms, erupting into cleaver-wielding fury, writhing in epiphanal ecstasy or mutilating himself in a grotesque woodland act of eucharistic atonement. Despite the pyrotechnics provided by cinematographer Tim Maurice-Jones and editor Sam Sneade, the action is pretty mundane, with Eddy Moretti and Shane Smith's screenplay relying heavily on Hogg's aw shucks narration. Consequently, any points about the impact of poverty, domestic dysfunction, substance abuse and fundamental religion on the white trash mentality are rather lost in the melee. But the use of Hasil Adkins's frantic rockabilly on the soundtrack is as inspired as the casting of the typically excellent Carrie Fisher.

If White Lightnin' couldn't give a hillbilly's cuss about the audience's reaction, the week's other all-dancing offering couldn't work harder to be genial and quirky. Unfortunately, the effort that's gone into actress Lucy Akhurst's directorial bow, Morris: A Life With Bells On, is all-too-apparent and, consequently, this cod documentary about a West Country morris troupe struggles to raise more than a handful of smiles.

Screenwriter Charles Thomas Oldham stars as the maverick squire of the Milsham Morris, whose willingness to incorporate extreme moves delights academic Harriet Walter, but so dismays Morris Circle executive Derek Jacobi that Oldham is barred from attempting the mythical Threeple Hammer Damson that would have elevated him to morris greatness. However, he finds a more willing audience for New Morris in Orange County, where he also falls in love with African-American publicist, Naomie Harris. But settling down in the back of beyond turns out to be tougher than Oldham had anticipated and the lure of traditional morris and a pint of cloudy scrumpy eventually proves too strong.

With Aidan McArdle linking the increasingly contrived episodes as the documentarist profiling Oldham, the plot begins lurching unconvincingly once loyal sidekick Jasper Britton dies and the folksy tone shifts into camp Californian kitsch. The cast couldn't be more willing, with Ian Hart being particularly zealous as a Oldham's chief rival. But, for all the gentle jibes at the jargon and conventions of morris, as well as the simple pleasures of country life, the satire simply isn't sharp or amusing enough to sustain 100 minutes.

To their great credit, Akhurst and Oldham strain every sinew to emulate the improvised insouciance of Christopher Guest's impeccable mockumentaries. But Lee Basannavar and Michael Tchoubouroff simply pile mockney cliché upon caricature in Jack Said, Paul Tranter's adaptation of his own graphic novel that serves as a prequel to the 2008 Guy Ritchie hommage, Jack Says.

The eponymous anti-hero is played by Simon Phillips, who is asked by dodgy pal Danny Dyer to keep an eye on his opera-loving sister, Rita Ramnani, while he lays low after swindling guv'nor Mike Reid (who actually died before shooting started and appears only in the form fleeting footage and a passable impersonation by David Hahn). Naturally, Ramnani falls for the slobbish Phillips, unaware that he is really an undercover cop who reports to superior Julian Lee when not doing dirty jobs for Reid's ruthlessly ambitious daughter, Ashlie Walker, like chopping the fingers off crooked snooker player, Jimmy White.

With Phillips learning that Walker's sister, Rebecca Keatley, turned supergrass on her father's murder and that Russian mobster Michael Tchoubouroff is also on Dyer's tail, it's only a matter of time before the solids make contact with the air conditioning. But it's hard to care what happens to anyone in this cheap, noirish cross between King Lear and Sin City. Even the showdown in Amsterdam is resoundingly anti-climactic.

Dyer steals scenes for fun in a cameo that feels like a favour for a friend. But while Phillips manages some dishevelled charm and Walker occasionally hints at femme fatality, the remaining cast feel like extras from an episode of The Bill. The scripting is equally small screen, as can be evinced from the twice-repeated line, `some journeys are measured by what you sacrifice to get there'. Sadly, this one isn't worth the bus ride to the cinema.

Compounding its misfortunes, Jack Said just happens to be released in the same week that sees the revival of Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972). The winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture, this is regularly ranked among the top five films of all time. Yet there's a cruel irony in the fact that the feature which seemed to proclaim a new dawn in grown-up movie-making turned out only to be the harbinger of the accursed kidpix era.

After reeling through the 1960s, punch-drunk from the dual effects of the European new waves and the collapse of the studio system, Hollywood seemed to have found a fresh formula, in which literate construction counted for more than comic-book accessibility and intelligence mattered more than gimmickry. Along with Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye (1973) and Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974), Coppola's majestic adaptation of Mario Puzo's novel revealed the relevance of the crime picture to the state of the nation under President Richard Nixon. Moreover, it revived a genre calcified by its own conventions.

Relaxing the wisecracking pace of earlier outings, it brought a dignity and epic sweep to mob movies. It also introduced the gangster who made it to the top of the world and stayed there - unlike James Cagney's Public Enemy or Edward G. Robinson's Little Caesar, whose moment of triumph signalled the start of their fall. It also reinforced the primacy of performance over star presence, with the Oscar-winning Marlon Brando's Method intensity being emulated by Al Pacino, James Caan, John Cazale and Robert Duvall, and skillfully complemented by more traditional screen actors like Diane Keaton and Sterling Hayden. But a mechanical shark and events in a galaxy far, far away put paid to any hopes of a New Hollywood.


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