Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 27/10/2011) (From The Oxford Times)

Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 27/10/2011)

7:40am Thursday 27th October 2011

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Although it provided the impetus for the buena onda or `good vibe' that swept through Latin American culture around the Millennium, Mexican cinema has since been overtaken by its Argentinian counterpart as the region's most consistently innovative and intriguing. However, it is still capable of producing exceptional pictures like Gerardo Naranjo's Miss Bala, which confirms the good impression made with his first three features, Malachance (2004), Drama/Mex (2006) and I'm Gonna Explode (2008). At times matching Michael Mann's genius for explosive set-pieces, while also retaining an uncompromising socio-political realism, this drug war drama is as harrowing as it's compelling and one only worries that it will lead to Naranjo being lured away - like Guillermo del Toro and Alejandro González Iñárritu before him - for projects outside his homeland.

Twenty-three year-old Stephanie Sigman lives on the outskirts of Tijuana with her father Javier Zaragoza and younger brother Juan Carlos Galván. She makes a living selling secondhand clothing, but has ambitions to become a beauty queen, like the glamorous icons whose pictures adorn her bedroom wall.

One morning, Sigman slips into the city with her friend Lakshmi Picazo to enter the Miss Baja California pageant. They are late registering and sniffy organiser Leonor Vitorica is reluctant to allow them to audition. But they are accepted and go to celebrate at the Millennium nightclub with Picazo's boyfriend, Hugo Márques, who is friends with some DEA agents who promise to use their influence to sway the contest judges. Sigman is uncomfortable, however, and is waiting in the restroom while Picazo tells Márques they are leaving when member of the drug-trafficking gang La Estrella burst into the premises and Sigman loses her friend in the ensuing gun battle.

Escaping through a window, Sigman spends the next day calling Picazo's phone and finally asks a traffic policeman for assistance. However, he delivers her into the clutches of Estrella kingpin Noé Hernandez, who promises to help her if she does him a small favour. Realising she has no option, Sigman drives a car out of an underground parking bay and abandons it outside the US Embassy and walks away. Hernandez rewards her with entrance to the pageant and money to buy herself a nice dress. But Sigman is scared when he calls her on the phone he has exchanged for her own and is making her way home when she is apprehended by Jose Yenque, who confiscates the phone and orders her to get lost.

Arriving home in darkness, Sigman sees on the news that the police are after Hernandez for leaving three corpses in the boot of the vehicle she had driven. However, she hardly has time to get scared before Hernandez barges into the building and forces Sigman to dress a leg wound before making her sleep beside him. Next morning, he tapes bundles of banknotes to her abdomen and arranges clearance for her to pass through police checkpoints in order to take a small plane from a nearby airfield and purchase ammunition from his San Diego contact, James Russo.

The transaction goes surprisingly smoothly and Sigman relays the information that Hernandez needs to keep an eye on Yenque. She is caught up in a fierce gun battle on the street on her return and is spirited away in the back of a dumper truck in time to be crowned Miss Baja (to the undisguised disgust of her nearest competitor, Irene Azuela). But her triumph is short lived as another escape bid is thwarted and she is delivered to Hernandez's car for a humiliating sex session that culminates in him instructing her to attend a garden reception at the house of Miguel Couturier, the corrupt general who has masterminded a gangland crackdown, and use her new-found celebrity to seduce him so that Estrella assassins can catch him unawares. All seems to be going to plan until Sigman reads in the paper that Picazo was one of the victims of the Millennium massacre and she decides her only hope of survival is treachery.

Packing several twists into the denouement, Naranjo and co-scenarist Mauricio Katz expose the cynical amorality of a trade that generates $25 billion annually and has cost the lives of 36,000 people in the last five years alone. Even after similarly themed pictures like Joshua Marston's Maria Full of Grace (2004), some may find the final revelation a touch too contrived for a story that has been so firmly rooted in sickening truth. But it is played with such wide-eyed incomprehension by the debuting Sigman that it leaves the viewer with a giddying sense of a country so out of control that anything is likely to happen.

Hungarian cinematographer Mátyás Erdély reinforces this sensation with images that not only suggest the inescapability of Sigman's predicament, but also the all-pervasiveness of crime, corruption and violence at each level of Mexican society. But in denouncing the ruthless brutality of those on both sides of the war, Naranjo also finds room to explore the hideous relationship that develops between Hernandez (who scowls with a malevolence that recalls the great actor director Emilio Fernández in Sam Peckinpah's 1969 Western, The Wild Bunch) and Sigman, a onetime model whose expressive eyes suggest she could become as capable an actress as Catalina Sandino Moreno.

The police procedural is a venerable screen format and few film-makers manage to invest it with much imagination, let alone a novelty that eschews contrivance or gimmicry. However, in adapting German novelist Jan Costin Wagner's bestselling thriller, The Silence, Swiss director Baran Bo Odar not only succeeds in telling his tale with the utmost tension and artless concealment, but he also achieves a psychological depth that makes this one of the most compelling crime dramas of the year.

On 8 July 1986, caretaker Ulrich Thomsen and college student Wotan Wilke Möhring watch a pornographic film before driving off in the former's red Audi. They veer down a country lane in pursuit of 11 year-old cyclist Melina Fabian and Thomsen bludgeons her to death as she struggles after he finishes raping her. Möhring witnesses the entire incident from the passenger seat and is so appalled by what he sees that he leaves town on the first bus.

Twenty-three years later, on exactly the same date, 13 year-old Anna Lena Klenke storms out after an argument with parents Karoline Eichhorn and Roeland Wiesnekker and arranges to meet her friends at a visiting funfair. They fail to show up and she is abducted as she cycles home. Next morning, Klenke's bike is found in a field near the cross marking the spot where Fabian had disappeared (before her decomposed corpse was discovered in a lake many months later).

Fabian's mother, Katrin Sass, is out jogging when the police arrive and she barricades herself into her home, as the press come seeking a comment on the copycat crime. She reluctantly opens the door, however, to Burghart Klaussner, the cop who had handled the case and had retired the night before after a boozy party and a confrontation with his smug successor Oliver Stokowski. He is now in charge of the inquiry and refuses to listen to Klaussner's theories and instructs underlings Sebastian Blomberg and the heavily pregnant Jule Böwe to keep him out of the loop.

Unfortunately, Stokowski also fails to keep Eichhorn and Wiesnekker fully informed and the strain prompts the former to leave the latter after he causes a scene at the police station. Meanwhile, Sass has started a fling with Klaussner to help her cope with the feelings of loss that are shared by Blomberg, whose wife died of cancer just five months before and his need to immerse himself in the case to numb the pain causes him to fall foul of his incompetent superior.

As the TV news coverage intensifies over the weekend, Möhring - now a wealthy architect and the father of two children in a far away town with trusting wife Claudia Michelsen - suspects that Thomsen might be behind the killing and travels to see him. He finds him tending the same apartment complex and is surprised by the warmth of his welcome. However, he feels too uncomfortable to remain in his dingy flat and retreats rapidly to his hotel room, where he is unable to resist watching his favourite child porn film, which Thomsen had given him on DVD.

The remorse at succumbing to urges he had sought to suppress force Möhring to pay a guilty visit to Sass on the pretext of looking for a new house in the area. However, Klaussner has warned her that the killer would make himself known and she hands his business card to Blomberg, who pays Michelsen a visit to make a shocking discover on her husband's computer. This development leads to Böwe being called away from interviewing Thomsen as part of check on local men who had owned a red car back in 1986. But, even though Möhring's lake-plunge suicide convinces Stokowski that he has found his culprit, Blomberg is not convinced.

Adroitly structured and assuredly paced, this represents an impressive sophomore outing by Bo Odar after his 2006 debut with Under the Sun. He maybe overdoes the top shots and helicopter swoops that accompany the captions counting down the days of the investigation, but he and cinematographer Nikolaus Summerer make evocative use of colour to suggest both the seasonal heat and the rising emotional temperature, while sound designer Christoph Ulbich creates a sonic mood that reinforces the growing sense of disconcertion generated by Robert Rzesacz's slick editing.

Moreover, Bo Odar sustains interest in the numerous storylines with unforced ease and draws fine performances out of an estimable ensemble. Möhring is particularly impressive and his excruciating encounters with Thomsen and Sass are matched only by Blomberg's desperate search for clues and solace and Thomsen's icy impassivity, most notably in the flashbacks that reveal how his seedy friendship with Möhring and his terrifying meeting with Böwe that encapsulates the entire film's masterly mix of melancholy and malevolence.

From a Dane in Thuringia the focus shifts to An American in Paris, as Vincente Minnelli's Oscar-winning musical is released by the British Film Institute in a digitally restored print to mark its 60th anniversary.

In 1949, during one of their regular games of pool, MGM producer Arthur Freed secured Ira Gershwin's permission to create a musical from his brother George's 1928 composition, An American in Paris. Twelve years earlier, Samuel Goldwyn had dropped a George Balanchine ballet based on the score from The Goldwyn Follies, because `the miners in Harrisburg won't understand it'. But Gene Kelly and Vincente Minnelli were intent on proving that film was not merely escapist entertainment, but was legitimately the Seventh Art. Thus, in their hands, the story of a GI bent on becoming an artist was fashioned into a cinematic tone poem by the fusion of music, design and performance.

Sally Forrest, Cyd Charisse and Odile Versois were all considered for the role of Lise. But Kelly had seen Leslie Caron dancing on stage as a 15 year-old and was convinced that she had the necessary gamine quality and balletic technique to play the war orphan who steals the heart of Jerry Mulligan, a genial emigré who only comes to terms with himself and his talent through her love. Carl Brisson and Maurice Chevalier were mooted for vaudevillian Henri Baurel. But the part went to Georges Guetary (who was renowned as the French Fred Astaire) after Chevalier refused to lose the girl.

Lyricist Alan Jay Lerner was hired to write a scenario that could accommodate highlights from the Gershwin songbook at key dramatic and psychological points in the narrative. But the music also had the dual responsibility of reinforcing the picture's bid for universal appeal by combining Americans and Europeans, the young and the old, the concert hall and the music-hall, friendship and romance, and the populist and the highbrow.

An American in Paris was, therefore, conceived as a film of set-pieces, each of which flowed from the storyline while remaining entirely individual. Kelly's rendition of `I Got Rhythm' with some street kids, for example, contrasted charmingly with his exhilarating duets with Guetary (``S Wonderful') and Oscar Levant (`By Strauss') and his serenade of Caron with `Our Love Is Here to Stay'. But the showstoppers were even more consciously ingenious, with a grand Folies-Bergère staircase with illuminated steps being created for Guetary's `I'll Build a Stairway to Paradise', while deft process photography was used to enable both the six facets of Lise's personality to appear simultaneously during `Embraceable You' and Levant to play the entire orchestra and audience on the Third Movement of Gershwin's Concerto in F.

But nothing matched the scope, refinement and sheer audacity of the `American in Paris' ballet, which lasted an unprecedented 16 minutes and 37 seconds. Meticulously designed by Irene Sharaff and Preston Ames and photographed by John Alton with a smoky quality that enhanced the pastoral shades, the ballet was a Hollywood tribute to the spirit that inspired both the Impressionists' art and Gershwin's music. Each location evoked the style of a specific painter - Dufy (Place de la Concorde), Renoir (Le Madeleine flower market), Utrillo (a street carnival), Rousseau (Jardin des Plantes), Van Gogh (Place de l'Opéra) and Toulouse-Lautrec (Montmartre) - while Kelly switched brilliantly between classical and modern ballet, Cohanesque hoofing, tap, jitterbugging and athletic exuberance to counterpoint the character of the visuals and create `a synthesis of old forms and new rhythms'.

Taking six weeks to rehearse (during which time Minnelli made Father's Little Dividend, 1951) and a month to shoot, the ballet accounted for $542,000 of the $2,723,903 budget. But while this Technicolor extravaganza grossed in excess of $8 million, some critics complained about its lack of humour and surfeit of calculated sophistication. Yet Minnelli and Kelly had set out to make a serious musical and they certainly impressed their peers, who rewarded them with six Oscars from eight nominations, including Best Picture. Moreover, Kelly received an honorary award `in appreciation of his versatility as an actor, singer, director and dancer, and specifically for his brilliant achievements in the art of choreography on film'.

The idealised world depicted in the MGM musical was disappearing rapidly and the genre itself would soon become moribund as rock`n'roll and soul seized the juvenile imagination. By the middle of the following decade, the United States was in a state of turmoil following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the escalation of the Vietnam War and the rising demand among African-Americans for civil rights. The latter campaign's shift from the passive resistance of Martin Luther King to the more militant solutions of the Black Panther Party is chronicled in Göran Hugo Olsson's The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975, which has been expertly and occasionally poetically assembled by editor Hanna Lejonqvist from reports made for Swedish television and provides a fascinating outsider perspective on a superpower in crisis.

Despite claiming to put a new spin on the documentary by adopting a `mixtape' approach, this is a pretty standard found footage compilation, with evocative musical tracks and hindsightful voice-over opinions accompanying 16mm images that capture both pronouncements by the leading personalities of the Black Power Movement and the events taking place on neighbourhood streets that had long been designated no-go areas by the white authorities. Like most mixtapes, the quality is variable and those unfamiliar with US history in this period may feel the lack of contextualisation. Nevertheless, this is a valuable record of an impassioned attempt to right a societal injustice that remains as pernicious today as it ever was, in spite of the election of a black president.

One of the key sources is Lars Ulvestam's tele-film Harlem: Voices, Faces, which so enraged American conservatives that the listings magazine TV Guide took vocal exception to the way the nation was being presented to Swedish audiences. But much of the footage of such contentious figures as Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leader Stokely Carmichael, Communist intellectual Angela Davis and Black Panthers Eldridge Cleaver, Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton comes from bulletin spots that are footnoted by the likes of singer Harry Belafonte, film-maker Melvin Van Peebles, academic Robin Kelley, poets Sonia Sanchez and Abiodun Oyewole and recording artists John Forté, Erykah Badu, Talib Kweli and Ahmir `Questlove' Thompson, whose views are variously considered and confrontational.

No one speaks more sense than Davis, however, who became only the third woman to appear on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List when she was accused of owning the guns used in the murder of California judge Harold Haley in August 1970. Her contribution to the discussion of how drugs were used to tame the `ghettos' is particularly telling. Yet she was demonised as a firebrand on a par with Malcolm X, Seale, Newton and Nation of Islam spokesman Louis Farrakhan, whose rhetoric still seems highly combustible four decades on.

The radicalism of the Panthers as they trained for possible armed struggle is tempered by their commitment to improving living conditions and educating the next generation and the segment on the low-key communal activities that changed more lives, but made fewer headlines than Black Power salutes on medal rostrums at the Olympic Games provides one of the documentary's more interesting revelations. But other than bringing such long-buried footage to light, it's more difficult to see discern Olsson's wider intention than his admiration for those who fought the good fight. Clips like Stokely Carmichael singing the anthemic `Burn Baby Burn' and interviewing his own mother about her experiences of poverty and racism and a prison conversation with Angela Davis are compelling. But there is little debate about the Black Power legacy outside the production of a few iconic images and slogans and its tangential influence on hip hop. Moreover, no real attempt is made to set the struggle against the other key events of a Nixon presidency that sought to brand militant black consciousness as a threat to the `silent majority' of white Americans comparable to the rising crime rates that saw record numbers of young black men being incarcerated.

Over the past 15 years, youths in the Democratic Republic of Congo have been more likely to perish than be imprisoned, as civil war has claimed over five million lives, while an estimated 300,000 women have been raped. Among the chief means of funding the struggle have been the cassiterite and bauxite ores that are used by multinational companies in the production of electronic gadgets and Danish documentarist Frank Piasecki Poulsen sets out to discover whether his phone contains conflict minerals in Blood in the Mobile.

Every third mobile phone is a Nokia and having failed to persuade the Finnish giants to reveal the source of the minerals used in its merchandise, Poulsen decides to travel to Africa and investigate. He clearly revels in playing a kind of Michael Moore-cum-Morgan Spurlock variation on Marlow heading into Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, but there's no doubting either his courage or his tenacity as he seeks to force mobile phone users into recognising the part that they play in perpetuating one of recent history's bloodiest wars each time they make a call.

On arriving in DR Congo, Poulsen meets with Mr Kampekampe, who not only holds a key post in the Ministry of Mines, but also operates his own company, which just happens to deal in minerals. He suggests Poulsen pays a visit to Walikale, a settlement in Goma in the region of North Kivu, where he can be escorted by members of the United Nations peacekeeping force. However, while he provides the Dane with a lecture on cassiterite and bauxite, Major Rahman is reluctant to discuss their uses or the role of warlords in their extraction and exploitation. The employees he meets from the Mining Processing Company prove equally reticent and advise him to steer clear of the notoriously dangerous terrain around the Bisie mine, as they are contested by both the FRDC unit of the Congolese army and the FDLR, the remnant of a Rwandan Hutu Power rebel group based on the eastern border.

But such warnings merely convince Poulsen that he is on the right track, as do the refusal of press officer Silvy to give him permission to accompany a UN patrol after a massacre in Bisie and the harrowing testimony of Bernard, a press attaché who speaks off the record about the pitiless rape of a woman named Massika on the dismembered body of her murdered husband. Even the preening FRDC commander who proudly shows Poulsen his collection of dress uniforms is wary about allowing him into the interior, as so many comrades are making their fortune from trading minerals But he finds a seat on a Russian cargo plane and befriends Chance, a 16 year-old survivor of the Bisie outrage, who has spent three years working in the mine and now agrees to act as Poulsen's guide on two-day foot trek through forbidding jungle.

The mine is now under the control of the rogue 85th unit of the FRDC and Poulsen has to go through a security check before he is allowed into the shanty settlements where 15-25,000 people live and work. After another series of protracted negotiations, he is taken down a mine shaft that is 100m deep and many complain loudly about his intrusion and demand to be paid for appearing on film. The dark, dingy and dangerous tunnels are difficult to light and the footage Poulsen snatches before leaving is jerkily handheld and indistinct. But it chillingly conveys the appalling conditions in which men and boys risk their lives and the suggestion that this is a glimpse of Hell doesn't feel too wide of the mark.

Poulsen equates the situation with the system of slavery that had enabled King Leopold II of Belgium to establish his African empire and he notes that Nokia started off as a paper and rubber company that had once had dealings with imperialist agencies. Now, having determined that $70m of minerals comes from Bisie each year, Poulsen sets out to test Nokia's insistence that it operates an entirely ethical sourcing policy.

Initially, the Finns seeks to stall Poulsen at the reception desk of their Helsinki headquarters, but he finally makes contact with press officer Saara Tahvanainen, who introduces him to an unnamed man who explains that coltan is a mineral that is converted into tantalum for use in phones. But he swears that it is impossible to follow a source trail and no absolute guarantee can be given that Nokia supplies haven't been tainted. However, Dr Frank Melcher at the Federal Institute of Natural Resources and Geological Sciences in Germany begs to differ in stating that the origin of minerals can be traced before they are smelted in Malaysia.

Armed with this information, Poulsen calls on Annie Dunnebacke at Global Witness, a London-based organisation that is campaigning for businesses to publish their supply chains, before returning to Finland, where Saara sets up an interview with product marketing manager Abby Guha, who tries to be accommodating, but evades the issue by claiming that competition sensitivity precludes full disclosure and becomes a little flustered when Poulsen suggests that the company considers profit protection more important than the lives of the Congolese who mine their minerals.

Dissatisfied with the answers he receives from Nokia, Poulsen flies to Washington, where he learns about the Raise Hope for Congo group striving to persuade Congress into outlawing blood minerals. But their collaborative approach cuts no ice with either former Clinton adviser John Prendergas, who says consumers need to take control by refusing to buy anything but conflict-free products, or Democratic Representative Jim McDermott, who states boldly that people should not reap the benefits of civilisation if they are rooted in exploitation, cruelty and violence.

As Poulsen's odyssey draws to close, he is summoned back to Nokia to meet with Director of Social Regulation Pekka Isosomppi, who admits that sourcing minerals is a complex process and that improvements in verifying origins need to be made. He shirks the charge that this is hardly a reassuring statement bearing in mind that Nokia had known about this problem for over a decade and when Poulsen tries to goad Saara into giving her frank opinion she declines saying she is unwilling to provide him with something juicily quotable for his movie.

Ultimately, like so many docu-provocateurs before him, Poulsen fails to elicit the answers he wants. But his exertions are incalculably worthwhile, as this exposé of the trade in conflict minerals and the moral abnegation of those refusing to take corporate responsibility for their products is timely, necessary and accomplished.