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Sample the Festival Delights in This Tempting Continental Selection

7:52am Thursday 22nd October 2009

Photograph of the Author By Parky at the Pictures »

Half a century has passed since the nouvelle vague first impacted upon international cinema and two of its leading lights are still going strong at the BFI 53rd London Film Festival. Claude Chabrol racks up his 58th feature with Bellamy - which stars Gérard Depardieu as a police detective unable to resist investigating an insurance scam while holidaying in Nimes - while Jacques Rivette, his less prolific, but perhaps more discerning erstwhile colleague on the noted journal Cahiers du Cinéma, notches his 23rd with Around a Small Mountain, a circus story starring Jane Birkin as the disgraced acrobat who finally comes to terms with an incident in her past thanks to stranger Sergio Castellito.

With Agnès Varda, Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais still active - and Chris Marker and Eric Rohmer only just retired in their 80s - the French New Wave must rank as the most enduring, if not the most influential movement in screen history. Yet, as Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea reveal in the documentary Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno, it had all but ended by the time one of the despised old guard embarked upon a psychological thriller that seemingly had the potential to become one of the most audiovisually audacious films ever made. Possibly the greatest `making of' documentary ever produced, this is a mesmerising memoir whose experimental colour images of Romy Schneider will leave an indelible impression.

The French Revolutions strand has always ensured that LFF is packed with Gallic goodies. But this year's crop is particularly impressive, especially as it showcases work by so many women film-makers. Twenty-one years after she debuted with Chocolat, Claire Denis returns to Africa for White Material, in which Isabelle Huppert defies ex-husband Christophe Lambert to keep control of her coffee plantation in the face of an impending civil war. Seventeenth-century damsel Lola Créton proves equally durable in dealing with monstrous spouse Dominique Thomas in Bluebeard, Catherine Breillat's re-imagining of Charles Perrault's fairytale that is ingeniously interspersed with a 1950s subplot about two squabbling siblings.

Passions are also aroused in Catherine Corsini's Leaving, which sees physiotherapist and mother of two Kristin Scott-Thomas fall for labourer Sergi López, as he converts part of the house she shares with doctor husband Yvan Attal into a consulting room. And another family falls apart in onetime critic Mia Hansen-Løve's The Father of My Children, a film à clef about revered producer Humbert Balsan, in which Louis-Do de Lencquesaing's unswerving commitment to art cinema takes its toll on wife Chiara Caselli and oldest daughter, Alice de Lencquesaing.

The domestic dysfunction takes on a more surreal tone in Gaspar Noé's Enter the Void, as drug dealer Nathaniel Brown defies death to make good the childhood promise never to leave her that he made to stripper sister Paz de la Huerta after their parents were killed in a car crash. However, angry loner Romain Duris finds the perpetual presence of derelict Jean-Hugues Anglade more of an irritant in Patrice Chéreau's disconcertingly claustrophobic psychological drama, Persecution, while Arly Jover and Philippe Katerine deeply resent respective spouses Yvan Attal and Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi rekindling old flames in Cédric Kahn's Chabrolian study of bad bourgeois manners, Regrets.

The liaisons prove even more dangerous in Jacques Audiard's crunching prison drama, A Prophet, as illiterate Arab teenager Tahar Rahim pals up with Corsican gang leader Niels Arestrup before starting to establish his own power base. By contrast, nun Julie Sokolowski's problems begin in Bruno Dumont's Hadewijch when she leaves the confines of the cloister and finds her religious convictions being challenged and exploited by banlieue youth Yassine Salihine and his Muslim fundamentalist brother, Karl Sarafidis. Dany Boon also considers terrorism to be a valid means of expression in Jean-Pierre Jeunet's pacy and punningly fantastical satire, Micmacs. However, he intends to blow up the premises of two major arms manufacturers, with a little help from André Dussolier, Dominique Pinon and Yolande Moreau.

It's doubtful whether Michel Vaujour would have much time for the Heath Robinson-like innovation demonstrated by Boon and his confrères. But, as he reveals to Fabienne Godet in My Greatest Escape, he wasn't short on ingenuity himself, as he sought new ways of breaking out of prison. Compelling and occasionally disconcerting, this is joined in the Gallic actualité department by Michel Gondry's tribute to his great aunt Suzette in The Thorn in the Heart and Frederick Wiseman's typically perceptive institutional studies in La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet.

Fact also plays a key part in André Téchiné's The Girl on the Train. Starring Emilie Dequenne, Catherine Deneuve and Michel Blanc, this has been adapted by Jean-Marie Besset from his own stage play, which was inspired by the notorious 2004 case of Marie L, who claimed to have been attacked on the RER between Louvres and Sarcelles stations by a gang of anti-Semitic black and Arab youths, who cut her hair and drew swastikas on her torso while her fellow passengers sat idly by. And another attention-seeking caper misfires in British director Andrew Kötting's French-language drama, Ivul, as teenager Jacob Auzanneau vows never again to set foot on the ground after his Russian father, Jean-Luc Bideau, banishes him from the house for making incestuous advances towards his older sister, Adélaïde Leroux.

This year sees a record number of Italian directors attending the festival to introduce their films. Several of the titles have an eye on the past, with Marco Bellocchio witnessing the rise of Benito Mussolini (Filippo Timi) from the viewpoint of put-upon mistress Ida Dalser (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) in Vincere, while Giorgio Diritti assesses the impact of German troops on the farming villages outside Bologna during the latter stages of the Second World War in The Man Who Will Come. And there's also a factual basis to Michele Placido's The Big Dream, as cop-cum-aspiring actor Riccardo Scamarcio finds himself questioning his values after he infiltrates the student protest groups hoping to change the world in the spring of 1968.

Things go out even less according to plan for ex-policeman Filippo Timi after he speed dates motel maid Ksenia Rappoport in Giuseppe Capotondi's audaciously noirish debut The Double Hour and Giuseppe Piccioni casts the spotlight on another ill-fated relationship, as disillusioned writer Jacopo Maria Bicocchi falls for swimming teacher with a shady past Sonia Bergamasco in Giulia Doesn't Date at Night. Having successfully adapted Niccolò Ammaniti's I'm Not Scared, Gabriele Salvatores brings the same power and control to his latest bestseller, As God Commands, a hybrid thriller-psychological drama that stars the seemingly ubiquitous Filippo Timi as a raging, unemployable man trying to do the best for 11 year-old son Alvaro Caleca and incapacitated former workmate, Elio Germano.

Middle-aged teacher Margherita Buy finds herself changing her priorities after she unexpectedly becomes pregnant and gives birth to a premature baby in sophomore Francesca Comencini's The White Space, while wheelchair-bound Sylvie Testud is forced to rethink her attitude to the virtues of faith, hope and charity when she is taken on a pilgrimage by carers from the Order of Malta in Jessica Hausner's third feature, Lourdes. The mood couldn't be darker in the festival's other Austrian offering, however, as Michael Haneke's monochrome Palme d'or winner, The White Ribbon, ventures back to a bucolic north German village 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.

Class, power, greed and hypocrisy are also the themes of Dutch maverick Alex van Warmerdam's darkly surreal satire, The Last Days of Emma Blank, in which it emerges that demanding employer Marlies Heuer's domestic staff are actually members of her extended family, who simply can't wait for her to die. But is she as sickly as she likes to pretend? Danish actress Paprika Steen also runs the risk of protesting too much in Martin Pieter Zandvliet's debut feature, Applause, as she attempts to reconnect with ex-husband Michael Falch and their sons Otto Leonardo Steen Rieks and Noel Koch-Søfeldt, while striving to rebuild her career in a production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

The ever-excellent Steen dominates this rather overwrought melodrama and Lars Mikkelsen is similarly to the fore as the recruitment specialist drawn into a family feud in Rumle Hammerich's corporate thriller, Headhunter, which also touches upon the theme of parental responsibility. Unprepossessing Swede Olle Sarri plays another father with the odds stacked heavily against him in Jesper Ganslandt's second feature, The Ape, as he slowly begins to recalls the ghastly truth about a domestic incident that occurred the previous night.

Sarri bears a passing resemblance to Roger, the call-centre drone voiced by Vincent Gallo in Swedish debutant Tarik Saleh's dystopian animation, Metropia. With the world's oil supplies now exhausted and Europeans only able to travel on a vast underground rail network, this potentially sinister saga quickly loses its grasp on logic and reality after Roger discovers that the omnipotent Trexx Corporation has devised a way of reading and controlling people's thoughts by lacing a ubiquitous brand of shampoo with microchips that become embedded in their brains.

Bucharest seems like somewhere from another time and place to provincial teenager Andreea Bosneag in Radu Jude's The Happiest Girl in the World, as she travels to the Romanian capital with parents to collect the car she won in a competition sponsored by a soft drink company. As part of her prize, Bosneag has film a commercial that requires her to gush deliriously about how lucky she is before downing half a bottle of fruit juice. However, everyone on set has a very different idea about Bosneag's performance and the shoot soon descends into chaos.

If this knowing satire considers the extent to which Romania's Communist past continues to impact upon its capitalist present, the urban myths in Tales from the Golden Age focus entirely on the dark days of the 1980s. Written and produced by Cristian Mungiu, but with each vignette being directed anonymously, this is a predictably mixed bag. However, `The Legend of the Official Visit' hilariously strands some backwater Party bigwigs on a fairground ride, while `The Legend of the Party Photographers' drolly recalls the airbrushing gaffe that left Nicolae Ceausescu sporting two hats in a newspaper picture.

Elsewhere in Eastern Europe, Srdjan Dragojevic's St George Shoots the Dragon follows the fortunes of two veterans of a skirmish with the Ottoman Turks, as they return to Serbia's border with the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the months before the assassination at Sarajevo plunged the continent into war. Russian provocateur Aleksei Balabanov similarly employs the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution as the backdrop for Morphia, which was adapted by the late Sergei Bodrov, Jr. from Mikhail Bulgakov's autobiographical masterpiece, A Country Doctor's Notebook, while in A Room and a Half, Andrey Khrzhanovskiy imagines what might have happened had exiled Nobel poet Josef Brodsky ever returned to his native Leningrad.

Polish maestro Andrzej Wajda ponders the mysteries of life and death and cinema's habit of reflecting the experiences of those creating it in Sweet Rush, which melds a fictional romance between Krystyna Janda and younger man Pawel Szajda and the actress's reminiscences about her recently deceased cinematographer husband, Edward Klosinki. And Czech Film Miracle alumnus Jan Nemec similarly blurs the line between fact and fiction in The Ferrari Dino Girl, as he reflects on how a girl named Jana helped him smuggle to the West footage of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

An object lesson in how much the continent has changed in the intervening four decades is provided by Marko Skop in Osadné, a delightful documentary about a village on Slovakia's north-eastern border with the Ukraine that has big ideas considering its population numbers just 216. A small Turkish community also shoots for the stars in Kutlug Ataman's Journey to the Moon, which combines dry footage of academics talking to camera about rural customs in the 1950s and monochrome stills depicting a shepherd's bid to blast into space using a mosque minaret for his rocket.

New ideas come to another isolated enclave in Roberto Castón's debut feature, Ander, as set in his ways Basque farmer Josean Bengoetxea breaks a leg and realises he's falling for Cristhian Esquivel, the Peruvian migrant who's been hired to do his chores. Across Spain, a Catalan clan comes to terms with its demons in Mar Coll's first outing, Three Days with the Family, which sees student Nausicaa Bonnin return from Bordeaux for her grandfather's funeral and find herself caught up in the bickering between estranged parents Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu and Eduard Fernández and his self-centred siblings.

If there's much to enjoy in the mainstream European programme, the two highlights come from the usually rarefied Experimenta strand. Eugène Green's The Portuguese Nun is a paean to Lisbon that centres on a deceptively impassive performance by Leonor Baldaque, as a French actress playing a nun in a cerebral 17th-century costume drama who is transformed by her encounters with her married co-star, a lonely aristocrat, an orphaned tweenager and a devout nun.

But while this mischievous picture pays handsome tribute to Lusitanic cinema, Austrian magpie Gustav Deutsch celebrates the silent screen's fast-fading majesty, as he raids archives across the continent for the clips collaged in FILM IST. a girl & a gun, which explores how early film-makers broached the still-contentious topics of sexuality and violence. Drawing on commercial features, science and nature films, documentaries, newsreels and pornography, this is a wondrous achievement that defies easy description. However, by clinging to the DW Griffith maxim that was appropriated by Jean-Luc Godard - `All you need to make a film is a girl and a gun' - Deutsch succeeds in dazzling with his editorial ingenuity and intellectual rigour, while also compelling the viewer to re-assess the moral and artistic responsibilities involved in spectatorship.


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