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Rent or Buy

7:49am Thursday 22nd October 2009

Photograph of the Author By Parky at the Pictures »

Thus far, it's been possible to give Jean-Claude Brisseau the benefit of the doubt. Secret Things (2002) and The Exterminating Angels (2006) may have generated headlines for all the wrong reasons, but there was still an element of intellectual curiosity behind their blatant eroticism. With A L'Aventure, however, Brisseau's veneer of cerebrality cracks to reveal a softcore superficiality that, for all its arch cinematicism, is never remotely sensual.

Tired of having to justify her sexual needs to her immature boyfriend, Carole Brana dumps him for hypnotist Arnaud Binard, who challenges her to lose her inhibitions in order to attain the transcendence she craves. Taxi driver Etienne Chicot similarly uses psychoanalysis and astrophysics to persuade her to abandon conformity, accept her insignificance in the great scheme of things and simply enjoy herself while she can. Consequently, Brana decides to devote herself to the pursuit of the ultimate orgasm and allows herself to be seduced by Binard's old flame, Lise Bellynck, who, in turn, introduces her to the liberating power of submission with kinky architect's mistress Nadia Chibani.

Brisseau has always insisted that his work delves deeply into such buzz issues as feminist politics, morality, voyeurism and the nature of being. But, in this verbose dissertation on the falsity of love and the transience of pleasure, there's less to the interminable confessional monologues than meets the ear. Wilfrid Sempé's photography is immaculate and the handsome, but thespingly limited cast is achingly sincere. There's even a surprising tenderness to some of the graphic carnality. But it's difficult to take seriously a film that places such emphasis on religious ecstasy and levitation in positing sex as the purest form of existence.

Abbas Kiarostami comes much closer to understanding the female psyche in Shirin, which consists solely of a group of women watching a movie adaptation of Nezami Ganjavi's 12th-century fable about the rivalry for an Armenian princess between a sculptor and the Persian prince, who sacrifices everything to find her. The storyline is an irrelevance, however, despite the impassioned performances of the unseen vocal cast and the emotive score composed by Morteza Hananeh and Hossein Dehlavi. What matters here is the art of screen acting, the perceptiveness of the camera and the power of cinema to manipulate.

By all accounts, Kiarostami mocked up an auditorium in his living room and coaxed 113 actresses into exhibiting a range of emotions while following three dots on a blank sheet of paper. With Juliette Binoche among those enduring the relentless gaze of Gelareh Kiazand's camera, this is a compelling study of such basic audience responses as rapture, distraction, longing, fear, laughter and tears. Paradoxically, it's also a subversion of narrative norms that celebrates cinema's ability to offer consolation, as it compels the viewer to speculate upon the personality and domestic situation that prompts each woman's reaction to the unseen scenario. Moreover, Kiarostami courageously confounds the chauvinist attitudes of Islamic fundamentalism by challenging the wearing of burqas through his use of evocative close-ups to showcase the expressive beauty of the hijab-framed female face.

The efficacy of a well-composed image proves equally key to Jan Troell's Everlasting Moments, an elegiac memoir of an ancestor-in-law who defied the conventions of her day to became a pioneering photographer. Bathing the action in natural light and an ethereal sepia that never detracts from the gnawing realism of his scenario, Troell and co-cinematographer Mischa Gavrjusjov succeed in capturing the sights and sounds of working-class Sweden at the turn of the last century, as well as the social, political and cultural forces that helped reshape it.

With husband Mikael Persbrandt is idle during the 1907 Malmo dock strike, Finnish-born Maria Heiskanen is left with little option but to pawn the Contessa camera she had won in a lottery years before. However, kindly Danish photographer Jesper Christensen is so taken by the guileless housewife that he encourages her to begin taking pictures and provides her with the necessary paraphernalia free of charge. Heiskanen surprises herself with her eye for a haunting image. But her drunken, womanising spouse resents her dalliance with things he doesn't understand and it's only while he's fighting the Great War that she begins to profit from her art.

With the restoration of peace, the family relocates to the countryside and, with the adulterous Persbrandt still as unreliable as ever, Heiskanen concentrates on raising her seven offspring. But when he unexpectedly becomes a prosperous carter, the ailing Heiskanen takes the opportunity to revisit Christensen before he departs for a new life with his grandchildren.

Combining heritage sensitivity with cinematic sensuality, this is a work of artisanal and emotional honesty that's as pleasurable as it's poignant. Exhibiting quiet dignity in her drudgery, Heiskanen is simply superb as the foreigner whose ability to see what others overlook enables her to endure her hardships and disappointments. She's ably supported by the boorish Persbrandt and the solicitous Christensen. But the key to her performance is Troell's direction, which is as distinguished as the meticulous production design and the glorious imagery.

Pawel Edelman's cinematography, Magdalena Dipont's art direction and Magdalena Biedrzycka's costumes prove equally crucial to Andrzej Wajda's Oscar-nominated Katyn, which recreates the Soviet massacre of over 20,000 Polish officers in a Belorussian forest in the spring of 1940. Some of Wajda's finest films have been set during the Second World War and, in considering one of the conflict's most shameful episodes, he combines details from his family history, contemporary letters and diaries and an acclaimed novel by Andrzej Mularczyk to assess the impact of the atrocity on a nation under the heel of its perpetrator.

Having failed to persuade husband Artur Zmijewski to abandon his cavalry regiment, Maja Ostaszewska learns of his fate from survivor Andrzej Chyra. However, his advancement in Krakow's Communist establishment depends on his acquiescence in the lie that Katyn was a Nazi war crime. But, with his sisters Magdalena Cielecka and Agnieszka Glinska taking opposite sides in the postwar power struggle, Chyra is soon troubled by his conscience.

With its sombre complexity, this is a punishingly dispassionate account of tumultuous times, with the climactic depiction of the methodical slaughter being particularly harrowing. Milenia Fielder's editing and the use of Krzysztof Penderecki's emotive music are also exemplary. But it's Wajda's filmic instinct and unwavering control that gives this imposing picture its power.

Another dark period is recalled in Pablo Larrain's Tony Manero. Set in Chile in 1978, as General Pinochet's reign of terror was plumbing new depths of fascistic depravity, the action revolves around Alfredo Castro, a shady fiftysomething whose obsession with the character played by John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever prompts him to enter a TV talent contest impersonating his idol. But there's nothing quaint about Castro or his fixation, as he murders a woman he has saved from muggers to pawn her television for the cash he needs for a glass dance floor.

The psychotic Castro's private life is no more salubrious, as he leches after needy girlfriend Amparo Noguera's nubile daughter Paola Lattus and strings along Elsa Poblete, who owns the shabby Santiago cantina where Castro reproduces the dance moves he has studied dozens of times at the neighbourhood cinema. Indeed, the possessed and ultra-possessive Castro refuses to allow it to show anything else but John Badham's disco classic and he goes so far as to pulp the projectionist when he dares to screen Grease and scatologically sabotages fellow fan Héctor Morales's white suit before he can take a tilt at the fleeting fame Castro so craves.

This is much more than a quirky study in monomania, however. It's also a disconcerting memoir of Pinochet's pitiless tyranny and the genuine fear of arrest, torture and murder that all Chileans felt at a time when political activism could carry a death sentence and when feuds between friends, relations and total strangers could be solved by a CIA-sponsored policeman's knock on the door. In moments that teeter between the bleakly comic and the sickeningly creepy, Larrain uses Castro's dismal sex life as a metaphor for the deluded potency of the dictator's self-image and the grotesque decrepitude of the country's infrastructure. But even though it unremittingly strives to present the growingly unhinged Castro's amoral perspective, Sergio Armstrong's dogged, Dardenne-like 16mm camera still sees enough brutal truth to distinguish grim reality from absurdist fantasy.

Whereas Larrain convincingly recreates the 1970s, Fred Cavayé's visceral thriller, Anything for Her, feels like it could easily have been made at any time during that decade by a journeyman director like Georges Lautner or Henri Verneuil, with Alain Delon or Jean-Paul Belmondo playing the devoted husband who decides to spring his wife from prison after she is falsely accused of killing her boss. The debuting Cavayé and Vincent Lindon make a similarly bullish team. The underrated Lindon exudes a seething sense of macho injustice as the Parisian teacher who bases his plot on an old lag's warning that getting out is easy, but staying free is impossible, while Cavayé hurtles Alain Duplantier's camera through bruising action sequences that contrast effectively with more cerebral moments of calculating precision that recall Robert Bresson's rigorous studies of criminal ingenuity, A Man Escaped (1956) and Pickpocket (1959).

Yet, while it's rooted in fact, the storyline occasionally requires the suspension of disbelief. Moreover, it leaves a few questions unanswered, as, notwithstanding a fuzzy flashback, it's never entirely proven that Kruger is innocent of the car park murder for which she gets 20 years. Yet while this element of doubt deprives Lindon's scheme of righteous heroism, it makes his encounters with lowlifes like a dangerous drug dealer and his audacious bid to get both Kruger and their young son to a downtown hotel and thence to the airport all the more deliciously reckless. So while this shamelessly manipulates the viewer, it nonetheless makes for consistently slick and often gripping entertainment.

The same is true, in a much cosier way, of Doris Dörrie's Cherry Blossoms, a mischievous variation on Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story (1953) that is held together by a manfully moving performance by Elmar Wepper, as the small-town civil servant seeking to fulfil his wife's last wish.

Ironically, he was supposed to die first. But Hannelore Elsner kept his fatal diagnosis secret, as she dutifully accompanied him on trip to Berlin to visit to their ungrateful children, Felix Eitner and Birgit Minichmayr. Nadja Uhl, the latter's lesbian girlfriend, extended the couple more kindness, however, taking Elsner to the Butoh dance show that brought her closer to their estranged, Japanese-based son, Maximilian Brückner. However, when Elsner expires unexpectedly, Wepper ventures to Tokyo so she can experience the sights and sounds that his intransigence had prevented her from seeing.

Wandering the streets wearing Elsner's cardigan and skirt beneath his overcoat, Wepper cuts a truly tragi-comic figure. He risks losing the sympathy gained from Brückner's cool welcome by visiting a pole-dancing club and a massage parlour. But once he makes the acquaintance of Butoh busker Aya Irizuki, he steps out on the road to redemption that leads to the foot of Mount Fuji.

Full of gentle humour and unforced pathos, this is a minor delight. Hanno Lentz's photography is exquisite, while the performances are pitched to perfection. But the balance is provided by Dörrie, who stipples the action with subtle metaphors while avoiding cross-cultural platitudes and quaint kitsch. If only a British director could produce something as original and poignant!


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