Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 18/4/2013)

Flashing back from GIGN captain Philippe Legorjus (Mathieu Kassovitz) witnessing the pitiless reprisals of 5 May 1988, the story opens with him being woken in the night of 22 April with a phone call summoning him to the gendarmerie barracks in Versailles. Briefed by General Jérôme (Jean-Philippe Puymartin), Legorjus and second-in-command JP Perrot (Malik Zidi) learn that Kanak separatists have killed five and taken 27 hostages during a raid on the Fayaoué Gendarmerie on the Pacific island of Ouvéa. As they fly to New Caledonia, they study maps of the jungle terrain and prepare to enter into negotiations with the Socialist Liberation Front (FLNKS) commander Alphonse Dianou (Iabe Lapacas).

On landing, however, Legorjus is dismayed to see that the French Army has been sent in and that the 11th Shock and Hubert commando units are on standby. Jérôme and Legorjus are met by the uncompromising General Vidal (Philippe de Jacquelin Dulphé), who informs them that he is under orders from Paris to clear up the situation before the election, but that he will allow them time to bring about a peaceful solution. However, when two days of GIGN patrols fails to find anything other than some kids playing in a watering hole, Chirac's overseas minister, Bernard Pons (Daniel Martin), arrives in Gossanah and warns Legorjus that he will not stand for any further delays. 

On the third day of the mission, however, some of the Fayaoué hostages under Lieutenant Colonel de Gendarmerie Benson (Stéfan Godin) are released and indigenous gendarme Samy (Steeve Une) tells Legorjus how the emergency started when three fishermen caused a distraction at the station lodge before the gates were rammed by a car and dozens of FLNKS rebels stormed into the compound. Legorjus travels to the scene with Benson and is appalled to see villagers being intimidated by soldiers and tribal chief Djubelly Wea (Macki Wea) being handcuffed to a tree. He angrily reminds Legorjus that they are guests in Kanaky, but the islands are actually French sovereign territory and Legorjus complains to Vidal that maintaining law and order should be a matter for the gendarmerie not the military.

However, a frustrated Perrot also uses force in trying to get answers from the locals and he is reprimanded by Legorjus before they embark upon another recce to locate the remaining hostages. They are joined by local magistrate Jean Bianconi (Alexandre Steiger) and some elders, who hope to persuade Dianou to surrender because of the strain being placed upon the community. But when Bianconi breaks ranks to speak directly to the rebels, he and Legorjus are captured and he orders six comrades to lay down their arms to prevent a shootout with Dianou and his hot-headed brother Hilaire (Alphonse Djoupa).

Vidal and Pons are livid that Legorjus has allowed himself to be taken. But, in camp that night, he manages to speak to Dianou, who admits that things got out of hand at Fayaoué and that he would readily release the hostages providing that Pons agrees to talks with FLNKS about the laws he plans to pass to outlaw ancient customs and tribal structures. In return, Legorjus promises to have the army move back and he is released to explain his terms to the indignant Vidal and make contact with Nine Wea (François 'Kötrepi' Neudjen), who puts him in touch with FLNKS leader Franck Wahuzue (Pierre Gope). He also calls Elysée Palace insider Christian Prouteau (Philippe Torreton) and pleads with him to convince Mitterand to take control of the situation, as the aggressive tactics being pursued by Chirac and Pons can only result in disaster.

Having completed his shuttle, Legorjus returns to his fellow hostages and convinces Dianou that every effort will be made to protect his men when they surrender, as they are not terrorists. Dianou curses that France is more interested in the nickel in the hills than the future of the Kanaks and Legorjus is ready to concur when he returns to the gendarmerie next day and sees Mitterand and Chirac using the crisis during a TV debate to convince the electorate of their toughness. Consequently, Prouteau informs Legorjus that he stands no chance of influencing the president, while Pons cautions him that his patience is wearing thin and that he is prepared to do whatever it takes to restore `order and morality'.

As the stand-off enters its second week, Legorjus asks a TV crew to interview Dianou to show the public that FLNKS are not savages. However, his options narrow when Jérôme resigns because GIGN is becoming increasingly marginalised and Pons denies permission for the journalists to meet the rebels. Moreover, he bars Legorjus from returning to the sacred cave where the hostages are being held and informs him that a fake crew will be sent in to gauge the lie of the land prior to a dawn raid. In despair, Legorjus calls wife Chantal (Sophie Testud) in Paris and she pleads with him to be careful. However, it is Bianconi who takes the biggest risk, when Dianou sends him to Fayaoué to find out what is going on and he returns with revolvers strapped to his legs so that the GIGN officers can defend themselves when the incursion begins.

As night falls, Legorjus listens over the radio to a message that Dianou has written to Mitterand and he sounds optimistic that things will work out for the best. But Vidal and Colonel Dubut (Patrick Fierry) are already giving the Shock and Hubert commanders their orders and they go in by helicopter the next morning, as the Kanaks are conducting a simple religious ceremony under the trees. Legojus finds himself in the rearguard of the commando party and he is so appalled by the scale of the battle that he dashes back to the base to try and make contact with Wahuzue in the hope he can convince Dianou to surrender. However, as he returns to the scene, Legorjus sees Hilaire being arrested and the mortally wounded Dianou being carried away on a stretcher. 

As Legorjus (who quit GIGN shortly afterwards) stares into the camera and swears in voiceover that he did everything he could to bring about a peaceful settlement, sidebars inform us that 19 Kanaks and two soldiers perished in the raid, while one hostage was wounded by friendly fire. Mitterand was returned as president three days later and new prime minister Michel Rocard signed the Matignon Accord with FLNKS to guarantee an amnesty and open talks about self-determination. However, the press quickly challenged official reports about the conduct of the mission and it was proved that five Kanaks, including Alphonse Dianou, were murdered after they had surrendered. Exactly a year after the massacre, Djubelly Wea assassinated FLNKS leaders Jean-Marie Tjibaou and Yeiwene Yeiwene for organising the misguided coup, while a closing note reveals that New Caledonia remains a French territory pending the result of a plebiscite in 2014.

As is readily evident from the synopsis, this is less a gung-ho reconstruction of an heroic mission than an intricate insight into the political manoeuvrings that made military force as inevitable as it was unnecessary. At times, Kassovitz is too dependent upon captions clarifying times and places, while a surfeit of figures disappear almost as soon as they have been introduced. The characterisation poses something of a problem throughout, as the GIGN and FLNKS members are much more sympathetically presented than the soldiers and politicians. Moreover, the action seems to drift after Legorjus leaves the grotto for the final time, while the decision to present the attack solely from his perspective reinforces its confusion at the expense of generating much tension.

Obviously, Operation Victor and its ramifications will mean more to those familiar with recent French history, but Kassovitz does a decent job in adapting Philippe Legorjus's account, especially given that he had a limited budget and help was hardly forthcoming from either the Kanak community or the armed forces. His own performance is suitably noble, while Iabe Lapacas capably conveys the decency and determination of a committed activist aware that he is out of his depth and dependent upon a stranger he hopes he can trust. Marc Koninckx's atmospheric photography and Klaus Badelt's terse score solidly bolster the no-nonsense approach. But, while this laudably resists the stylistic flourishes and brooding melodramatics of Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty, it often seems as overwhelmed by events as Legorjus must have been himself.

Bernardo Bertolucci was once among Europe's most politically trenchant auteurs. He ruthlessly dissected left-wings ideologies in The Conformist and Italy's Fascist past in The Spider's Stratagem (both 1970). But, while later outings like The Dreamers (2003) flirted with the events of May 1968, Bertolucci seemed more interested in the emotional lives of his young characters than their beliefs and the same is true of Me and You, which sees him return to his native tongue for the first time in 30 years and make a miraculous (and highly courageous) return behind the camera after enduring a decade of back problems following unsuccessful surgery to repair damage incurred during a fall. Given that he was confined to a wheelchair, it is understandable that Bertolucci should limit much of the action to a single location. Yet this never gives the impression of being canned theatre and demonstrates that the 73 year-old is still a consummate film-maker, even if he is no longer the firebrand acolyte of Jean-Luc Godard who first burst on to the scene 51 years ago with The Grim Reaper.

Fourteen year-old Jacopo Olmo Antinori lives with mother Sonia Bergamasco in a Roman apartment that his (seemingly estranged) father bought on the cheap from a recently deceased countess. He is a studious lad, but sufficiently troubled to require regular sessions with wheelchair-bound psychiatrist Pippo Delbono. Indeed, while dining out with Bergamasco, he embarrasses her by asking if she would procreate with him if they were the last people left on Earth and she is, therefore, relieved to grant permission for him to do something normal like go on a school skiing trip.

Antinori has no intention of going on the holiday, however, and uses the money to buy books, provisions and an ant colony in order to enjoy a week's peace by holing himself up in the basement of the apartment block. He pays a dutiful visit to bedridden grandmother Veronica Lazar in her nursing home before hunkering down among the bric-a-brac left behind by the impecunious countess. However, he is not alone for long, as his 25 year-old photographer half-sister, Tea Falco, blunders into the basement intent on going through cold turkey so that she can move to the country with boyfriend Tommaso Ragno. Antinori orders her to leave, but she refuses and threatens to tell Bergamasco where he is hiding, even though she loathes her for luring her father away from her own mother, who is a shoe seller from the southern region of Catania.

Despite his initial fury, Antinori agrees to share his food and even edges his bedding closer to Falco's after they get to know each other better during a series of cosy chats. However, he is disturbed by her groaning in the shower and they get into a fight and smash the formicary when she cries out for sleeping pills. The next morning, Antinori sneaks out of the building and breaks into Lazar's house in order to steal some sleeping powders. On his return, he finds Falco with Ragno, who gives her money for one of her photos from a collection entitled `I Am a Wall' and leaves. That night, as the ants have infested their supplies, the pair creep into the apartment while Bergamasco is asleep in front of the television and raid the fridge. Falco also takes some cigarettes and stands over her stepmother with a scowl and Antinori has to stop her from lashing out.

When Antinori dozes off, Falco calls dealer John Paul Rossi and eagerly shoots up. Having clearly failed to kick her heroin habit, there is a hollow ring to Falco's promise to stop taking drugs when she leaves the next day. However, Antinori's vow to cease hiding away seems equally specious, especially as Bertolucci halts his preparations to return to mundanity with a freeze-frame that recalls the image of Antoine Doinel at the end of François Truffaut's The 400 Blows (1959).

Bertolucci took his tale from a novella by Niccolò Ammaniti, who also provided the source for Gabriele Salvatores's I'm Not Scared (2003), in which a father conspires in the kidnap and underground imprisonment of his son. But there is nothing sinister about Antinori's voluntary incarceration. Indeed, even the hint of incestuous attraction between the half-siblings vanishes almost as soon as it appears. Yet this isn't merely a shaggy dog story, as Bertolucci suggests that Italian youth has been left to sort out the social and economic problems it has inherited from parents born around the time of the postwar Economic Miracle. However, as we are shown so little of the wider milieu, it is difficult to appreciate the gravity of this bequest and, as a consequence, the political critique seems a touch toothless.

The absence of any sense of oppression or enclosure similarly enervates action in which platitude is too often passed off as profundity. Fortunately, Antinori and Falco overcome the sketchiness of their respectively self-contained and self-obsessed characters to spark well together, while Bertolucci and cinematographer Fabio Cianchetti make astute use of the restricted space and the detritus artfully arranged by production designer Jean Rabasse. Franco Piersanti's string score is also effective, although the soundtrack is also packed with numbers by the likes of The Cure, Arcade Fire and Red Hot Chili Peppers. But the most intriguing inclusion is `Ragazzo Solo, Raggaza Sola', an Italian reworking of David Bowie's 1969 hit, `Space Oddity', which boasts lyrics by Mogol and loosely translates as `Lonely Boy, Lonely Girl'. Such blatancy rather sums up this comeback. But, while it may not rank among Bertolucci's more significant works, his return is most welcome and one hopes that he remains fit enough to tackle something more challenging in the not too distant future.

Actor Shiraz Haq will be at the Phoenix on Saturday to take questions on first-time director Tina Gharavi's BAFTA-nominated drama, I Am Nasrine, which offers a much more realistic insight into the problems of being forced out of one's home.

Sixteen year-old Micsha Sadeghi lives in Tehran with her older brother Shiraz Haq and their affluent parents. She resents the Iranian rules that limit women's opportunities and dreams of becoming a journalist so she can campaign for reform. But her independent streak gets her into trouble when she defies convention by riding on a motorbike with a boy. She is arrested and charged with breaching decency laws and is only released when her father bribes the officials handling the case. Keen to get his daughter out of the country and alleviate the family's shame, he arranges for Sadeghai and Haq to relocate to North-East England and, while she is sad to be leaving behind her family and friends, Sadeghi is excited by the prospect of starting a new life in a society that positively encourages freedom.

As Haq struggles to hold down a steady job in a car wash and then a pizza parlour, he also finds it increasingly difficult to impose his fraternal will on his sister, who is blossoming at the local school. Moreover, she has made friends with Nicole Halls, a member of a Traveller community who knows all about prejudice and restriction and she helps Sadeghi come out of herself by teaching her to ride a horse. As the pair grow closer, Sadeghi develops a crush on Halls's brother, Steven Hooper. But, although Haq wants to challenge her romance, he realises he is on shaky ground, as not only has he become involved in some black marketeering, but he has also become enamoured of local scally Christian Coulson.

Sir Ben Kingsley has thrown his weight behind this drama, which its Iranian-American director has revealed owes much to such classic misfit rites of passage as Truffaut's aforementioned The 400 Blows, Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardennes's Rosetta (1999) and Niki Caro's Whale Rider (2002). While not on a par with its inspirations, this is still a thoughtful and well-meaning picture that benefits greatly from David Raedeker's contrasting images of the Iranian capital and Tyneside.

The performances are also laudably committed. But Gharavi overplays her hand in setting the story on the eve of 9/11, as the change in attitude that Sadeghi and Haq experience has already been explored in a number of British dramas like Kenneth Glenaan's Yasmin (2004). Moreover, she risks lapsing into melodrama by forcing Sadeghi to cope with an unexpected tragedy and decide whether she is better off returning to the subjugation that her family will demand in Tehran or spread her wings in the shadow of the Angel of the North.

Middle-aged Danish hairdresser Trine Dyrholm also finds herself with a decision to make in Susanne Bier's Love Is All You Need. A far cry from the intense melodrama of her previous Oscar-winning outing, In a Better World (2010), this is a bold attempt to cast a comic glance over such delicate issues as illness, infidelity, coming out and starting over. But the humour always owes more to Richard Curtis than Billy Wilder, which somewhat confounds expectations because the central romance bears such a marked similarity to the one that develops between Jack Lemmon and Juliet Mills in Avanti! (1972), after they travel to Italy to discover that his father and her mother have been having a longtime affair.

Still feeling fragile after completing chemotherapy to treat her breast cancer, fortysomething Trine Dyrholm is embarrassed by having to wear a wig at the salon where she works with the chirpy Bodil Jorgensen because her hair has yet to grow back. Her confidence takes a further blow when she walks in on husband Kim Bodnia engaging in a little afternoon delight on the sofa with younger accounts clerk Christiane Shaumburg-Müller and she orders him to stay away from her until her daughter Molly Blixt Egelind's forthcoming nuptials, when she agrees to put on a show of sham unity for her and brother Micky Skeel Hansen.

As she drives to the airport to fly to Sorrento for the ceremony, Dyrholm prangs the limousine of wealthy British greengrocer and widowed father of the groom, Pierce Brosnan, to whom she takes an instant dislike. Her mood is scarcely improved on arrival by the news that Egelind is having second thoughts because she is convinced that fiancé Sebastian Jessen is attracted to contractor Ciro Petrone. Throughout their whirlwind three-month courtship, she had harboured suspicions that Jessen might be bisexual, but she was convinced that she could convert him and Dyrholm is at a loss how best to advise her.

Meanwhile, as the guests start arriving for a pre-wedding dinner, Brosnan has to fight off the attentions of sister-in-law Paprika Steen, who has always fancied him and decided that a family get together represents her best chance of bundling him into bed. Much to her surprise, Dyrholm feels sorry for him and is touched by his charming response to discovering her skinny dipping without her wig. By the time the reception starts, therefore, she has come to see what Steen sees in him. But her ardour is cooled when she finds a lump in her neck and the evening is ruined entirely when Bodnia shows up with Shaumburg-Müller and Jessen and Petrone are caught kissing.

The happy couple decide to call it quits at the altar next day and everyone heads home. Bodnia pleads with Dyrholm to give him another chance, while Brosnan invites her to come and live with him in Italy. She rejects them both and has a biopsy done. However, acting on impulse, she flies to Brosnan's villa and asks him to open the letter containing her results. He promises to love her no matter what they say and their relief is evident as they suddenly realise that they have to start planning for a future neither had anticipated.

Something of a cross between Audrey Wells's Under the Tuscan Sun (2003), Phyllida Law's Mamma Mia! (2008) and Lynn Shelton's Your Sister's Sister (2011), this may not be particularly original, amusing or poignant. Yet such is the eagerness of a fine ensemble and the deceptive breeziness of Bier's direction that this not only proves hugely enjoyable, but it also demonstrates that it is possible for characters no longer in their prime to be both engaging and empathetic without having to resort to gross-out antics, slapstick or kitsch.

Regrettably, Bier and co-scenarist Anders Thomas Jensen put little effort into either the verbal wit or into fleshing out the male characters. Cinematographer Morten Søborg likewise settles for too many touristy Amalfi vistas, while the soundtrack is stuffed with slushy melodies by Johan Soderqvist and cornball ditties like Dean Martin's `That's Amore'. But Trine Dyrholm excels as the reluctant victim determined to take control of her life, while Paprika Steen is typically impressive as the catty vamp, who cannot resist belittling sulky teenage daughter Frederikke Thomassen at every opportunity. 

Those who only know Bier from uncompromising dramas like Brothers (2004), After the Wedding (2006) and Things We Lost in the Fire (2007) may not be familiar with her feature bow, The One and Only (1999), which was also a romantic comedy and featured Steen as a cheating wife facing up to parenthood. It was the third most commercially successful Danish film of the decade. So, while she may be a bit out of practice, Bier knows what she is doing and the proof lies in Dyrholm's exceptional performance.

Pole Michal Marczak gets up close and personal with mixed up individuals of a much more radical kind in F*ck for Forest, an eye-opening documentary that questions whether good intentions are enough when it comes to raising awareness and funds for causes in the developing world. Given the situations in which he finds himself, Marczak remains admirably equitable in depicting the bizarre activities of the Berlin-based F*ck for Forest charity, whether its members are preaching a hippie-esque doctrine of sexual liberation in the German capital or discovering the futility of their woefully ill-conceived plan to help a community in the depths of the Amazon rainforest. But, while the climactic expedition puts the entire sordid charade into shockingly stark context, an uncertainty of tone ultimately undermines this valiant, but scrappily unfocused venture.

Despite being a champion show-jumper in his native Norway, 23 year-old Danny Devero has decided to drop out. His mother is so dismayed by this turn of events that she goes away to avoid seeing him during a visit to his home in Bergen and his sister Camilla has no qualms about branding him an embarrassment to the family. Undeterred, Danny travels with his guitar to Berlin, where he hooks up with the unconventional eco-cadre, F*ck for Forest, which seeks to raise money through its porn website to save the planet.

Founders Leona Johansson and Tommy Hol Ellingsen explain how they charge $15 for a monthly subscription to gain unlimited access to the photos and videos uploaded to a site that seeks to encourage freedom of sexual expression while pushing the green agenda. But, while they frequently participate in the often hardcore action, they and loyal acolyte Natty Mandeau spend much of their time recruiting amateurs to give their services for free. Apparently, 10% of those approached express an interest in becoming porn stars and Marczak follows one skinny chap through some woodland as he explains how being photographed with a baby doll can not only boost the FFF coffers, but also help him cope with the effects of a breakdown.

Tommy, Leona, Danny and Natty attend a variety of demonstrations and public celebrations in the hope of finding volunteers. They get a few takers, but not everyone canvassed entirely approves of the campaign's methodology. There are also some dubious expressions at a seedy nightclub demonstration, as Tommy exalts the essence of life, as he licks blood and semen off his fingers after copulating on stage with newcomer Kaajal Shetty.

Whatever one thinks of FFF's tactics, they seem to be working, as the group has €400,000 at its disposal and its principals set off to South America to see how it can best be spent. On landing in Brazil, the small band travels through perilous areas of Colombia and Peru before arriving in the dead of night at a village in the heart of the rainforest. They receive a cordial welcome from the residents, with one middle-aged woman flirting shamelessly with Danny. But the FFFers have no plan of action and even less idea of what to do next. They go on an expedition into the jungle and sample a brew designed to expand their minds and salve their souls. Yet many days go by before anyone suggests having a meeting with the local decision-makers.

Eventually, everyone assembles in a community centre that appears to have no useful facilities and Tommy gives an impassioned speech about what his organisation stands for and how keen he is to help in any way he can. But the revelation that he has been offered 74 acres of tropical woodland for $1 million bemuses the locals, who ask what they are supposed to do with it. When Tommy and Leona extemporise an answer about providing their children with a better future and seizing the right to be naked, the meeting breaks up with the tribesfolk accusing them of wasting their time and branding them typical European exploiters.

Unsurprisingly, Tommy and Leona are crushed by the rejection. But, even though their hearts are in the right place, their naiveté is shocking to behold and one wonders what will happen to their largesse if they don't succeed in devising a more cogent strategy once they return to Berlin. Kaajal has clearly seen enough, however, and returns to India, while Danny trudges back to Bergen, where his bid to alert some homeless Palestinians to the joys of nudism is laughed off by hard-bitten realists who inform him in no uncertain terms that there are much more important things in the world to worry about than free love.

Shooting in a rough`n'ready handheld style that wholly suits the chaotic subject matter, this is a film that is as likely to raise hackles as sympathy. The Berlin segment meanders somewhat once the basic FFF rationale has been outlined and, while it is amusing to speculate why anybody takes Leona and her friends seriously, there is nothing edifying about watching Tommy and Kaajal gyrating before ogling onlookers. But the Peruvian section is even more excruciating, as the villagers realise that their efforts to put on a good show in sharing their culture and traditions with visitors who seem have the wherewithal to help them have been a complete waste of their time and precious resources.

The complete inability of the outsiders to comprehend that their hosts feel patronised and duped is perhaps the saddest part of the picture, as they have invested so much in a cause they still clearly believe to be noble. But Marczak tactfully decides against filming any post mortems, as he (and we) have seen all we need to. One suspects that Marczak finds the entire FFF enterprise ludicrous. But, while a gentle ribaldry informs his coverage of the quintet's sexual antics, he handles their comeuppance with a laudable discretion that just about leaves what remains of their dignity intact.