afair Reviews

Cafe Noir (2009)

In search of the urban sublime

[8/10 · 25 October 2009]

A diptych proclaiming its sources as Goethe and Dostoevsky, two writers, here at least, divided by colour and monochrome respectively. The film opens with a wonderful medium close up of a young woman/girl, eating a double cheeseburger. The shot is held for the entirety of the process, the young girl is sanctified by the neon world in which she is standing. This shot had me, after seeing a lot of very ordinary films that week, in rapture. The clarity of the cinematography and the audacity to engage me in what is a very long film (197 minutes), in fact its length may in fact be its genius. The first half in glorious colour, examining the nature of thwarted desire, the second half in magnificent monochrome dealing with thwarted desire. A film packed with beautiful images and intriguing juxtapositions offers the viewer a re-view of Christian iconography as striking as renaissance painting, the delight as we follow characters both enigmatic and engaging is eventually turned into a duet of spectator and spectacle with a soundtrack dancing around the pas de deux. From the family romance as critique of melodrama (Sirk, anyone?) to the restless journey to the end of the night, the film demands attention.

The Red Shadows (2009)

the big idea lost

[2/10 · 25 October 2009]

A film about big ideas that fails at almost every level. A cornball analysis of bourgeois ambition, a barely achieved critique of neo-liberalism. The jokes fall flat and the leitmotif of a group of actors attempting to revive Hamlet is risible. Worst of all is the final sequence; a group of post-Marxists discussing in the most hackneyed manner the emergence of money culture while Berlusconi, both the man and his ethos, take over. Oh! and the coda... the group of idealists carry on regardless. Oh dear. This is the type of film that pretends to seriousness because its central characters are thinkers. The problem is I can't tell if this is a satire about the pretensions of the metropolitan chattering classes or if it really finds these people interesting.

The Road (I) (2009)

a road poorly travelled

[5/10 · 25 October 2009]

First, in the words of the old joke, when asked the way to the hospital the old man replies, "don't start from here." McCarthy's undoubted masterpiece, Blood Meridian' is still waiting to be made, given that ol' Sam Peckinpah has left us may I plead for the great American director at work today, P.T. Anderson, to give it a go. Anyone tackling such difficult source material has my sympathy. McCarthy's work is what R. Barthes called writerly as opposed to readerly. That is, his work makes demands on the reader, a reader's pleasure is derived from the sheer chutzpah of McCarthy's prose. Reading his novels is a sheer joy but also a task gargantuan, for example 'Blood Meridian' seems to demand that we should read 'Moby Dick' as a kind of parallel text. Well,I sympathise with anyone taking on 'The Road', this novel is a winding ribbon of words that seems visual but on refection is in fact a discourse on the condition of humans more suited to philosophical rumination than Hollywood animation. I was, subsequently disappointed with the film but feel unable to really criticise either the actors or the people behind the camera. My only specific carp would be the inability of the film makers to produce an adequate sound-scape. If the sense of destiny was to be articulated it was in what people hear not what they see which would have enhanced the cinematic quality of the film, the howling indifference of isolation might have been made concrete by a Michael Mann, let's say. I never really got the sense of desolation that is invoked by McCarthy's prose.The two central characters, admirably played by the central actors, work hard to carry the idea of a futile travelling forward but the film, which begins with a flashback,doesn't seem to have the courage to explain the existential dilemma of being alone in a threatening environment.The film fails to enhance the broken poetics of the novel's vision, at times falling into cliché. The one moment that is dramatically forceful is the encounter between the two travellers and the nearly blind man, here we get close to the mournful sense of loss and the certainty of death, here we see the iceberg tip of what is the profundity of the adults sense of time and the child's innocence.I realise a film is not a novel but even so one might look toward the ethos of the source work. I am sure that all who care about cinema will go and see this film, but be prepared to feel let down.

Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974)

opening has the mark of a real artist

[8/10 · 12 September 2009]

Music, diegetic and otherwise. The generic music that allows an audience to prejudge the images, the swirling cadenzas of (?)at the beginning of 'Written On the Wind', the brooding strings of 'DOA', the hokey western sounds that accompany 'The Searchers'' faux wooden ranch titles. Scorsese, maybe taking his cue from Anger, changes these assumptions…The Sonic rhetoric of diegetic music, he listens, she says "turn it down", this becomes the narrative model for the film, the Technicolor dream of a past that exists only in the cinema. Marty lives his young life, he never tires of telling us, between the pulpit of the catholic church and the altar of Hollywood. Sirkian silk nudges us toward a three handkerchief melodrama, a window on the world of women. From the repressed desire of bourgeois marriage to the menstrual phantasies of 'Wizard Of Oz', 'Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore' excessively locates the male vision of the female entirely within the cinematic mythos. That Scorsese chooses his trompe aural through the medium of a young boy's relationship to his mother can be no accidental opening. So we have the entirely 'staged' overture, Alice wanders through a deserted Minnelli soundstage, the little house on the prairie set for nostalgic effect gives way to the quintessential Hitchcock opening, a high crane (?) shot glides effortlessly through a suburban landscape, setting a milieu, implying a social setting that is thwarted by the innocent movement becoming voyeuristic. Every second of this opening is an homage to classical cinema, not the obvious self reflexivity of 'The Bad and The Beautiful' but self reflexive nevertheless. "Look at this" it says, "take part in this world of truth and illusion" . It is Scorsese's singular message that the illusion of truth is not the same as the truth of illusion, like Godard in 'Le Mepris' there has to be the recognition of cinema's artifice before we can read its truthful inquisition.

Elegy (I) (2008)

elegiac in tone and execution,

[9/10 · 18 August 2009]

What Coixet achieves here, with the aid of some fine individual and ensemble performances, is a mood piece that fully lives up to its title. An elegy for youth, for love, for the vibrancy of a life lived? By posing these questions but not deliberately answering them Ms. Coixet manages to explore the poetry of the quotidian, returning home to a dark flat after work, and the everyday of poetry, "beautiful women are invisible". One might argue that the setting, the academic elite of Manhattan in their tight little world, is a little too irksome but Kingsley's ability to be both everyman (late middle-aged everyman)and intellectual rings true in terms of the film's concern to discover why one might feel this sense of loss even when one still seems to have it all. Coixet's use of light and space, sometimes claustrophobic sometimes decidedly panoramic expresses the various moods of character and situation in a subtle and affective manner. That elegy implies loss, and there is this in the film, it is the relationship to loss that these fine actors are able to draw out that opens up the emotional core of this film. While so many contemporary movies treat trauma as nothing more than plot point 'Elegy' is able to suffuse its mise en scene with the elegiac mood. Let's hope the director gets more work.

Shirin (2008)

a cinema, an audience, a poem.

[7/10 · 19 September 2008]

Kiarostami has proved here that one can reach the truth of cinema by the most direct route, to examine the faces of the women members of a film audience while they watch, an unseen to us, film of the great 12th century Persian epic poem, 'Khosrow and Shirin' Kiorstami's slow tracking camera traces the faces of 114 famous Iranian actresses and one famous French actress. Despite the potential for a forensic piece, the work is in fact a poetic study of the feminine face that recognises the emotional as well as intellectual process involved in watching a film. We are caught in a kind of mise en abyme of spectatorship and although we are never given the opportunity to see the film these faces respond to we are, nevertheless, caught in the narrative of the romantic epic, the faces themselves display the richness and complexity of a reading; tears, smiles, quizzical glances, the turning away through lowered lids, all of these responses combine to form a group portrait as symphonic construction. It may sound like watching paint dry but in fact the film is a welcome relief from the kind of action cinema that has become a numbing experience in contemporary cinema. The chance to see beauty is rare in cinema today, here we are allowed time to relish the female face. We might see this film as returning us to the early cinema of Hollywood that rejoiced in the first truly cinematic rhetorical trope, the close-up. In this sense 'Shirin' is a triumphant celebration of cinema itself.