lacqueredmouse Reviews

Metamorphoses (I) (2014)

Explicit, thrilling and even a little titillating.

[7/10 · 30 June 2015]

Liberally taking stories from Ovid's epic poem that bears its name, Metamorphoses is a rich and variegated sequence of interconnecting stories, telling of Gods and men, the women they seduce, and their impact in the heavens and on earth.

And it's a pretty fine spectacle. We see Europa (Amira Akili) stolen from the human world by Jupiter (Sébastien Hirel) while Bacchus (Damien Chapelle) cavorts with women and men and animals. There's the unknowable purposes of the Gods at play, we see, juxtaposed against the very real human traits of desire and lust.

It is a fairly explicit film. I feel like a good proportion of screen time has one character or another (and often many) naked or in some state of undress, and there are numerous rather lascivious close ups of genitalia in particular. It all adds to the salacious tone of the film, of course, and further promulgates the films intentions.

As a result, there is indeed something thrillingly exciting and a little titillating about the film even as one is searching for its artistic merit. It's not pornographic by any means, but it does seek to illustrate desire in a way that speaks to the audience kinetically.

In this way, it's actually rather successful, even if it does stand to be a little perplexing. I think if I were to see this film in complete isolation, I'd likely be more harsh on it, but at a film festival, it was a fine piece of programming, and a good entry in a rich selection of films.

Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq (2014)

A comedy of boredom

[3/10 · 15 June 2014]

The premise of this film sounded so interesting: author Michel Houellebecq plays himself, and attempts to explain a period in 2011 when he went missing for several days, by creating a fictionalised kidnapping. The premise is amusingly twisted, and I was intrigued to see what they'd do with it.

Unfortunately, what they do with it is incredibly banal. Houellebecq gets kidnapped, is rather tame and pleasant to his captors, who are tame and pleasant in return, and then it's over.

It's meant to be a comedy, I suppose. There's something very surreal about the whole thing, quite apart from the conceit of the film. Every scene is so humdrum that it clashes against the situation the author is in. Houellebecq is calm to the point of boredom, as though it's every day he gets held to ransom. We follow pointless conversations about H. P. Lovecraft's saliva-soaked pillow and whether or not the author can have a lighter for his cigarettes please. One slightly interesting sequence involves his captors teaching Houellebecq some MMA techniques to stave off their own boredom, but it's only a pale glow in an otherwise grey fog.

Boredom is the watchword of this film, and as much as it tries to extract humour from just how mundane it is, it just ends up being incredibly tedious to watch. In addition, at a level above merely watching it, there's something superficially narcissistic about Houellebecq's portrayal of himself—I know that as an author he's supposed to be controversial, but I didn't really care enough about the film to really get engaged—at an academic level I thought it was incredibly shallow.

So this ended up one of those films that I hated through boredom rather than through the type of active hatred that can often be the result of something truly provocative. It was most of all a pointless film, and one that I'm afraid to say I wish I'd not bothered seeing.

Fell (I) (2014)

A stunning debut for Kasimir Burgess

[9/10 · 15 June 2014]

I saw this film recently at the Sydney Film Festival, and admittedly had fairly neutral expectations for it beforehand. But this is a really wonderful film that must presage a bright future ahead for Australian cinema.

Fell is the debut feature from director Kasimir Burgess, and he shows a wonderful craft in his first film. The story is simple enough. Thomas (Matt Nable) is camping with his young daughter when she is tragically killed in a hit-and-run accident with a logging truck. The driver, Luke (Daniel Henshall), is sent to prison for it. Fast-forward five years and a shattered Thomas has left his city life to settle in the town where the accident took place, and begins working as a logger. It appears he's waiting for the moment when Luke is released from prison, and returns.

It's a really quite stunning film in many ways. The cinematography is truly excellent, and captures the depth and beauty of the Australian bush. The performances are restrained but extremely powerful, in particular Matt Nable as Thomas, whose pain is palpable even through such a taciturn character.

So many of the pieces of the production add to the atmosphere. The sound design is wonderful, with the score evoking the calls of birds in the bush against the hum of chainsaws. Editing is done to allow long, languid shots of the environment while we the audience muse on some piece of emotional turmoil in the story.

It really was a truly wonderful film, especially when taken as a complete package. I was incredibly moved by it by the end, and the journey it took me on was sublime. I await Burgess's next feature with anticipation.

The Rover (2014)

A truly remarkable and wonderful piece of cinema

[9/10 · 15 June 2014]

I'll admit I don't watch a lot of Australian cinema. I'll also admit that I didn't really care a whole lot for Michôd's previous film Animal Kingdom—certainly not as much as the rest of the world seemed to. So it was with some amount of skepticism that I went to see The Rover. But I am really, truly glad that I did.

This is an astonishingly good film, built around a wonderfully nuanced and rich, but extremely sparsely specified post-apocalyptic Australian outback setting. We follow Eric (Guy Pearce), a taciturn but brutal loner, who goes on some kind of personal rampage after his car is stolen on a remote road. Along the way, he finds Rey (Robert Pattinson), who he forces to assist him.

The world-building in this film is astonishingly good. Michôd creates a very bleak environment for his very bleak characters, and hints at the disaster that left the world in this way—people only accept US currency, for example, but the reasons are left tantalisingly absent. The dusky red cinematography of the outback creates a beautiful backdrop for the sense of desolation.

Moreover, the performances throughout are superb. Pearce is dangerous but distant, creating a character who seems to have lost the same vestige of humanity as has the society in which he now lives. But I was even more blown away by Robert Pattinson's co-dependent Reynolds, whose violent actions belie his heart-rending naïveté and fragility—one scene towards the end of the film where Rey and Eric seem to open up to each other a little more around a campfire is truly affecting. I'm really pleased to see Pattinson taking on these sort of roles—he's a truly great actor, and I'm so pleased that the Twilight franchise didn't ruin him for the rest of us.

Overall, this film was a truly remarkable and wonderful piece of cinema. Even though I doubted Michôd after Animal Kingdom, this film assures me that I will continue seeing his films going forward. This was an absolute highlight for me, and I hope more broadly marks a resurgence for Australian cinema on the world stage.

Fish & Cat (2013)

Extraordinary, cutting edge, compelling and technically brilliant.

[9/10 · 15 June 2014]

A truly exceptional and extraordinary film that was both compelling and technically brilliant. Much like Alexander Sokurov's 2002 film Russian Ark, this film is shot in one single, continuous take that lasts, in this case, over two hours in length. That's enough to make it a technical marvel, but better is that Shahram Mokri manages to make a tantalising tale in the process.

The film starts by relating the urban legend of restaurants in the north of Iran which were shut down due to serving human flesh. Then the single shot begins and we follow two men from a suitably ominous restaurant attempting to coax some lost travellers to dine there. It's a fairly obvious beginning, and the insidious tension is high from the start.

However from there, the tale (and the shot) meanders much more than we might expect. We branch off to follow different characters for a while, then we catch up with old ones. Then, we start to see scenes which are oddly familiar—we end up in cycles, in loops of time that all seem to flow so naturally from one to the other. And there's always that underlying sinister element— we know something bad is going to happen from that first moment of the film, but we don't quite know when.

This is all the hook it needed for me to keep me captivated through this tale. And I was captivated throughout—this was riveting stuff, even as we watch the most mundane conversations between two characters, and then repeat them again from a slightly different angle some time later.

In the discussion after the showing of the film, the director stated fairly unequivocally that he wasn't influenced by any Iranian directors in particular, but as far as I'm concerned there are huge similarities to two of Jafar Panahi's films—the meandering storytelling of Dayereh, which also follows a sequence of different characters, and Closed Curtain (an excellent film I saw at the festival in 2013), which has that same sense of understated mystery and foreboding.

This really was an excellent film—it was ground-breaking and avant-garde in all the best ways possible, and used its uniqueness as a brilliant hook to enhance its appeal.

Snowpiercer (2013)

Bong's Folly

[4/10 · 15 June 2014]

Where does one start on this piece of work? Bong Joon-ho's first film in English comes on the back of a wildly divergent back catalogue, including the sublime Madeo (Mother), the tedious crime/procedural Memories of Murder and blockbuster monster-film The Host. But I think this film may be his most divisive yet.

There is so much, seemingly, to like in this film. It's a warped experiment in genre-production, with (very thinly veiled) political overtones—and it has the platform for a very good piece of social commentary. The production and art design are exquisite, and Bong stretches his art department in every shot, sometimes verging into the overt whimsy of Jeunet or Gilliam. And there are some really strong, extremely unusual performances, especially from Tilda Swinton, Octavia Spencer and a wonderful scene-stealer from Alison Pill.

But despite all of these things, I felt the film as a whole was an abject failure—and worse, it verged on the horrific. I feel perhaps the film should come to be known known as Bong's Folly. For a while it manages to contain its misguided lunacy, but time after time the direction of the film flips in such frantically perverse ways that it started to sicken me.

Bong has juxtaposed three very distinct elements in the film: the politically-laced themes of oppression, the bizarre use of surreal humour and a shockingly graphic portrayal of violence. And he often places these elements so close together that the results are horrifying. A scene in which the main character admits to having eaten babies "because they taste the best" is portrayed with the same sense of conflicted amusement as is a truly comic scene involving the indoctrination of a school class. There's an anarchy and unpleasantness to the film that permeates everything.

This isn't even to mention some of the genuinely ridiculous plot-holes, or the extremely outré, implausible premise of the film itself. Despite the unpredictable changes in tone, the plot itself is remarkably pedestrian, and the twists in the storyline are tired and overused in many such genre pieces. The political commentary was clumsy as well, meaning that even if we were engaged with the style of the film, its message was slammed in our faces with the subtlety of a concrete fish.

It's the exaggeration, the violence and the lack of restraint to this film that is its ultimate demise. This was a meretricious film that tried to engage you with its stylistic charm while it brutalised your soul with its unpleasantness. I genuinely hope I'm not the only one that feels this way.