robertbroadie Reviews

One Night... a Train (1968)

Disorientating and gripping

[8/10 · 6 October 2009]

I found out about this film because I'd heard it was an inspiration for Fabrice Du Weltz's gut-wrenching horror film Calvaire. The parallels to anyone who's seen both are obvious, and perhaps the strange situation the lead character ends up in here was tinged with an exaggerated anticipation of fear for me because of Calvaire.

I'm sure it's a deliberate device of Delavaux to make Anne (Anouk Aimee) a passive and totally unengaging support character - in fact, her face remains unchanged in death. The dream, if it is a dream, is far more real.

I also suspect that like a real dream, this film is totally open-ended and defies any one-dimensional explanation. The scene with the uncomprehending hillbillies in the restaurant, including Moira's hypnotic dance, is sheer brilliance - tense, strange, disorientating and very funny.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005)

simply not funny

[3/10 · 3 June 2005]

I found this film disappointing. A few good bits, but by and large just boring and silly.

Basically, there's no point to the film if it doesn't get laughs. If it's not funny, it's nothing. And most of it simply wasn't funny - in the cinema I was in at least, people hardly laughed at all. To use one example of the film's crap humour - the "goodbye and thanks for all the fish" line is quite amusing when it's said, but the long "thanks for all the fish" song which follows wears the joke out, and becomes just gratuitous and pointless. And this is representative of the film's general unfunniness.

Koktebel (2003)

Visually breathtaking

[10/10 · 1 June 2005]

Koktabel follows the progress of a penniless father and son from some undefined point in Russia to a Black-Sea resort in the Crimea. From my point of view, the story and its characters are primarily vehicles for the stunning images, which ultimately steal the show. But that's not to take anything away from a well-acted story with some very tense and some very funny moments.

Here are a few of the most memorable pictures which stayed with me long after watching the film: 1) A red and white parasol on an empty pebble beach at night, twitching like a living thing, waves breaking, perfectly black water; 2) A close-up of a girl's hair roots, a cash register and a cashier's voice audible from beyond; 3) A solitary wooden toilet shack outside a wood with a cheap stereo hanging from a neighbouring tree branch, little red lights on the speakers flashing like eyes – as the camera approaches, the music gets louder; 4) Objects flashing into view for split seconds between stretches of darkness, as seen through the lens of an old camera.

Between the geometric shapes of the opening and closing shots (a tunnel in a hill and a bird's-eye view of a landing pier respectively), almost every scene provides an earthy, harmonious, visual gem, each worthy of admiration in its own right.

The clearest recurring theme in the film is flying. One of the first lines is the father's weary joke "we'll go by plane" (wrongly subtitled as "we'll fly") – he's a former plane engineer. Fed on his talk of butterflies and birds and hang-gliders, his son has his own dreams of flight, which recur as an albatross in an illustrated book, as rusty sheets of metal gliding from a roof, as sheets of paper being launched from a hilltop (the motionless camera leaves us to wonder how far the last one does actually fly), with the boy's gift of being able to visualise a landscape from a great height (filmmakers can have poetic licence too), and with the film's closing bird's-eye shot. To me this flying metaphor can be extended beyond it's obvious application to the boy (living in poverty but abounding in curiosity, imagination, and daydreams), to the lowly cast of the film, left behind by the new Russia (and Ukraine), and to the economic backwaters they live in. Whether or not the characters themselves dream of flying, the filmmaker, dwelling lovingly on the things that surround them (apple trees, a storm, a washing line) elevates them to a work of art, and does their dreaming for them.

I couldn't fail to deeply admire this film, but I don't expect anyone to share my very personal take on it – in its measured, pensive, quiet voice, Koktabel shows us the former USSR from an angle which brings out those same qualities that impressed me in my first experiences of the place. Not the glitz and kitsch and squalour of its largest cities, but its vast expanses (expressed in the film through fields, roads, and rail tracks), the uniqueness of Russian minutiae (a soviet-manufactured metal tub, an old-fashioned box of cigarettes, standard cheap wallpaper and clock in a house, the bustle in a tourist market), and above all, vibrancy amidst decay.

Spanish Fly (1998)

A poorly scripted, unrealistic, and totally un-engaging film.

[2/10 · 9 June 2004]

The author (Kastner), director (Kastner), and starring actor (also Kastner), and her character in the film, all show an equal dearth of imagination, depth, feel for dialogue, and understanding of people.

Basically the idea is this: an unattractive frumpish American girl goes to Madrid with an advance from some publishing company to write a book about "macho" Spanish men. However, she knows no Spanish, nothing about men, and her attempts to organise a few half-baked ideas about her subject come to nothing, as does the half-baked premise of the film. The protagonist is totally unegaging to the point of being irritating, all the male characters are one-dimensional props to support the film's fragile premise, and the caricature of Madrid as a steamy hothouse of hormone-filled men clutching submissive women in every nook and cranny is at best blinkered and at worst insulting.

An embarrassingly ill-conceived film which becomes more and more banal as it goes on. How Ms Kastner ever got to make the thing is beyond me.