Film Festival
(Read Reviews)
You Are on Edge’ – Comedy and Thrillers: A Festival of Films
Focusing on two film genres that often overlap and intersect, the festival presents the early work of leading world filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Henri-Georges Clouzot;, Fritz Lang, Quentin Tarantino, and others whose films set the bar for other filmmakers to follow. Some of these films have a distinct blue-print in narrative styles, treatment and look, leading to a series in the same genre.
One of the earliest forms adopted by cinema, Comedy unlike other film genres, puts much more focus on individual stars, particularly in the early years with many former stand-up comics transitioning to the film industry due to their popularity. While many comedic films are lighthearted stories with no intent other than to amuse, others contain political or social commentary. Beginning with the visual humour of the silent films which relied on slapstick and burlesque as in the films of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd; the talkies made possible dramatic new film styles and the use of verbal humour. “Ealing comedies” such as Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), and The Ladykillers (1955) achieved popular success and critical acclaim. As cinema developed it adopted different types of comedy including the broad, star-packed comedies such as in The Great Race (1965); the bumbling character of Inspector Closeau in The Pink Panther; and the emergence around this time of darker humour and more serious themes, including satire and social commentary as in Dr. Strangelove (1964), The Apartment (1960) and The Graduate (1967). Anarchic comedy films which used nonsensical, stream-of-consciousness humour to lampoon some form of authority as in Time of the Gypsies (1988); to black comedy films that dealt with normally taboo subjects including death, murder, suicide and war in a satirical vein as in Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro (Kundan Shah; 1983), Reservoir Dogs (1992).
In cinema, thrillers often overlap with comedy (Reservoir Dogs) and is broadly characterized by fast pacing, frequent action, and resourceful heroes who must thwart the plans of more-powerful and better-equipped villains. Literary devices such as suspense, red herrings and cliffhangers are used extensively (Strangers on a Train; The Man who Knew too Much). Often set in exotic settings such as foreign cities, deserts (Death on the Nile), thrillers often overlap with mystery stories, but are distinguished by the structure of their plots and by their approach to the subject. Thrillers can be defined by the primary mood they exhibit: excitement. In short, if it ‘thrills’, it is a thriller!
(82 min; 1949; dvd; b/w; English)
Director: Alexander Mackendrick
Whiskey
Galore!
When a
Scottish island falls prey to a whisky shortage, the islanders are
desolate. But when by chance a ship is sunk with a cargo of 50,000 cases
of whisky, they see their salvation. But first they must outwit the
English Home Guard commander who is determined to protect the cargo at
all costs.
The novel, and Mackendrick's film, relocates the story to the fictional island of Todday, and is not only a celebration of the islanders' single-mindedness, but a homage to the restorative powers of Scotch, which magically restores a community in deep depression for want of a 'wee dram'. Despite a difficult production beset by often appalling weather, and a slow start at the English box-office, it became a worldwide hit and Ealing's most profitable film. It is also one of its most fondly remembered, particularly in Scotland. Its success owes much to its remarkable feeling of authenticity: with the exception of Basil Radford and Joan Greenwood most of the cast were Scots, with the extras coming from among the islanders of Barra where much of it was filmed. The constant attentions of the islanders helped the cast to perfect their accents.
Whisky Galore!'s humour has cruel bite, most of it at the expense of the pompous English Home Guard commander, Waggett (Radford), whose efforts to frustrate the islanders' pursuit of whisky result only in his own undoing.
Whisky Galore! was the second of three films released in 1949 - the others were Passport to Pimlico (d. Henry Cornelius) and Kind Hearts and Coronets (d. Robert Hamer) - which forever linked 'Ealing' and 'comedy' in the public imagination. It also marked the directorial debut of Alexander Mackendrick, previously a screenwriter and storyboard artist on several Ealing films.
Film Festival: ‘You are on Edge’ – Comedy and Thrillers
M (Germany)
(108 min; 1931; dvd; b/w; English subtitles)
A film by Fritz Lang
M
M
is a
1931
German
drama-thriller
directed by
Fritz Lang and written by Lang and his wife
Thea von Harbou. It was Lang's first
sound film, although he had directed over a
dozen films previously, including
Metropolis.
Dark and uncompromising, Fritz Lang's M disturbs even today, and serves
as a highly effective benchmark against which other serial killer films
should be judged.
M is the sign of recognition of a child's murderer who is sought by the police and an underworld organtization. It is the story of the world-known murderer, Peter Kuerten of Dusseldorf. Amazing thing about this is that von Harbou wrote this manuscript [based on a newspaper report by Egon Jacobson] before Peter Kuerten was ever arrested. .
Peter Lorre does unusually well as the murderer, changing from human despair to bestial lust. It is most gripping when he pleads for human treatment and understanding for his pathological tendencies.
Lang himself maintained that this film was his finest work.The lead, Peter Lorre, was typecast for years after the film's release as a villain for his portrayal of a child murderer. M also pioneered the use of leitmotif to give the film score a more intense feel.
(91 min; 1955; dvd; English)
Director: Alexander Mackendrick
With Alec Guinness, Cecil Parker, Peter Sellers
Recipient of the BAFTA Film Award for Best British Actress & Best British Screenplay, BAFTA Film Awards 1956
The Ladykillers
The last of the great Ealing Comedies, The Ladykillers is a wonderfully macabre black comedy that really does improve with age.
Ealing stalwart Alec Guinness delivers a typically mesmerising performance as Professor Marcus, a criminal mastermind whose brain should have been displaying an Out of Order sign for some time. His latest plan is to dupe a sweet old lady, Mrs Wilberforce (Johnson), into picking up the loot for him and his mismatched gang after they rob a security van.The gang consists of a genial bruiser (Green); Jack-the-lad rogue (Sellers); doddery old army type (Parker); and cold-hearted assassin (Lom). Under the guise of playing string quintets, all five meet at her house to plan the robbery.
It's easy to see "The Ladykillers" as a series of metaphors for the state of post-war Britain (it's set in a dilapidated house which lists precariously due to heavy war damage, for example).
Luckily, it's also easy to see it as a deliciously black comedy - a sister picture to ‘Kind Hearts and Coronets’ - in which five supposedly hardened criminals go weak at the knees at the thought of doing in a little old lady.
While Guinness' teeth could have won a best supporting actor award in their own right, every performance shines through in smog-filled London.
If you've seen The Ladykillers before, make sure you see it on the big screen to appreciate Alexander Mackendrick's gothic approach. And if you've never seen it before, you owe it to yourself to see how great the British film industry used to be.
It's little wonder Hollywood has spent the best part of a decade trying to remake The Ladykillers - pray to God they never succeed!
(101 min; 1951;dvd; b/w; English)
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Strangers on a
Train
Ever wondered what's going through the minds of major tennis stars when they're in competition? For Guy Haines (Farley Granger), it's knowing that he's expected to kill the father of a man who's already proven himself capable of carrying out murderous threats. How did Guy get himself into such an incredible situation? How else but courtesy of Alfred Hitchcock, as he up-ends and twists the world of one man for the thrills of the watching audience.
A chance encounter on a train provides the entry point for Guy into the realm of psychotic charm that is fellow passenger Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker). Within an hour of them meeting, Bruno exclaims, "I'm your friend remember, I like you. I'd do anything for you." It's a promise that should chill Guy to the bone, especially when Bruno proposes that he'll dispose of Guy's harridan wife if, in return, Guy murders Bruno's meddling old father. Guy dismisses the idea, until he realises just how serious Bruno is about his half of the agreement. Hitchcock's favourite device of an ordinary man caught in an ever-tightening web of fear plunges Guy into one of the director's most fiendishly effective movies. Ordinary Washington locations become sinister hunting grounds that mirror perfectly the creeping terror that slowly consumes Guy, as the lethally smooth Bruno relentlessly pursues him to a frenzied climax. Fast, exciting, and woven with wicked style, this is one of Hitchcock's most efficient and ruthlessly delicious thrillers.
Passport to Pimlico (UK; 84 min; 1949; dvd; b/w; English)
Director: Henry Cornelius
Passport to Pimlico
The inhabitants of a London street discover buried treasure and documents proving they are really citizens of Burgundy. When the government tries to claim the treasure for the Crown, the Burgundians declare their independence.
By general consent the best of writer T.E.B. Clarke's six Ealing comedies, Passport to Pimlico (d. Henry Cornelius, 1949) arguably best exemplifies studio head Michael Balcon's description of Ealing's postwar films as "our mild revolution".
But as with most of the studio's output, the accent is on the 'mild', while the 'revolutionary' element is little more than play. Like Clarke's The Lavender Hill Mob (d. Charles Crichton, 1951), which imagines a mild-mannered bank clerk turned master criminal (in the nicest possible way), Passport's story allows its contemporary audience to play out a fantasy of escape - from the unending burden of rationing and postwar 'austerity', from government, from Britain - before delivering them safely back to the status quo. The events of the story are more like a holiday - as suggested by the very un-British heat wave, which comes to an immediate end once the Burgundians rejoin Britain.
Running through the film is a yearning nostalgia for the social unity of the war years, remembered fondly as Britain's 'finest hour'. This is most explicit in two sequences late in the film: the first a newsreel praising the fortitude of "plucky little Burgundy" in the face of adversity - exactly the terms in which Britain saw itself in the early part of the war - and the second an extended montage in which the people of London come to the aid of the stricken Burgundians, throwing parcels of food from passing cars and trains - directly evoking the celebrated 'Dunkirk spirit'.
This exploration of the British (or specifically English) character is at the heart of Passport to Pimlico. For all their dogged resistance, the Burgundians never lose sight of their true national identity, as the film's most memorable line wittily makes clear: "We always were English and we always will be English, and it's just because we are English that we're sticking up for our right to be Burgundian!"
Witness for the Prosecution (UK)
(114 min; 1957; dvd; b/w; English)
Director: Billy Wilder
With Tyrone Power, Marlene Dietrich, Charles Laughton
Recipient of the Golden Globes for Best Supporting Actress, Golden Globes 1958; Second Place Golden Laurel for Top Female Dramatic Performance, Laurel Awards 1958
Witness for the Prosecution
A courtroom meller played engagingly and building evenly to a surprising and arousing, albeit tricked-up, climax, Witness for the Prosecution has been transferred to the screen (from the Agatha Christie story and then a play) with competence (adaptation by Larry Marcus).
Under Billy Wilder's direction, Prosecution unfolds realistically, generating a quiet and steady excitement.
Cleverly worked out is the story line which has defense attorney Charles Laughton, along with the audience, wholly convinced that the likeable chap played by Tyrone Power is innocent, that he couldn't have murdered the rich widow who had taken a fancy to him. A disturbing note, however, is the unexpected attitude taken by Power's wife (Marlene Dietrich) who, as it turns out, is not legally married to him and thus is not restrained from testifying against him.
As the jury would expect a wife to defend her husband, he decides not to call her as a witness. He is surprised however when she is called as a witness for the prosecution. As luck would have it, he comes into possession of letters that seriously discredits her testimony. There is, however, a far more devious plot being hatched, one that even the great Robarts cannot
(106 min; 1949; dvd; b/w; English)
Director: Robert Hamer
Recipient of the NBR Award for Best Actor, National Board of Review, USA 1950
Kind Hearts and Coronets
Louis Mazzini (Dennis Price) should be heir to a dukedom but his family, the snobbish D'Ascoynes, have cut Louis off because his mother married badly. Vengeful and hate-filled, he sets out to regain his rightful place by killing everyone in the way.
Everyone in the way is played by Alec Guinness. All of them. He's every member of the D'Ascoyne family and while each role is quite small, Guinness makes them all memorable. He's helped by Dennis Price's Louis devising increasingly wild ways with each of Guinness' deaths being a fresh and horribly funny thrill.
It's a treat to have a comedy as involving as a drama. You care about Louis and his cause even though it's a tale of class differences that was dated even on release (made in 1949, it's set around 1900). Louis should be hateful: he's one of the cinema's first serial killers. But as would not happen for another 50 years until "The Talented Mr Ripley", Kind Hearts and Coronets is a film where you want the murderer to escape.
(114 min; 1955; 35 mm; b/w; English subtitles)
Director: Henri-Georges Clouzot
Recipient of the Special Edgar for Best Foreign Film, Edgar Allan Poe Awards 1956; NYFCC Award for Best Foreign Language Film, New York Film Critics Circle Award 1955; Prix Louis Delluc 1954
The Devils (Les Diaboliques)
Henri-Georges Clouzot (‘The Wages of Fear’) directs this suspenseful psychological thriller set in the festering confines of a seedy provincial boarding school for boys run by a cruel, unpleasant, womanizing headmaster, Michel Delasalle (Paul Meurisse). Considered to be one of the darkest thrillers ever in Grand Guignol, it's famous for its "shock" ending. It is based on the novel Celle Qui N'etait Pas by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac.
Clouzot casts his own wife Vera as Christina, a gentle, demure, long-suffering invalid, with a bad ticker, who is driven to scheme the murder of her headmaster spouse along with hubby's latest mistress, the ice cold headstrong teacher, Nicole Horner (Simone Signoret).
They drown the headmaster in the bathtub and unload the corpse in the school's filthy swimming pool... but when the pool is drained, the body has mysteriously vanished. With the murder plot gone wrong, there are recurring reports of his reappearance which become more conclusive as the film builds in suspense to its absolutely astonishing conclusion.
The camera acts as judge, watching and recording the events with a steely precision as the characters get more embroiled in their own irrationalities. This is a strong acrimonious film, tinged with irony and bitterness, showing everyone to be a victim in the decaying world they have become ensnared in by their own unholy actions. It makes for an outstanding film noir piece about misanthropy.
Time of the Gypsies (Dom Za Vesanje; Yugoslavia/UK/Italy)
(136 min; 1998; dvd; English subtitles)
Director: Emir Kusturica
Recipient of the Award for Best Director, Cannes Film Festival 1989; Guldbagge Award for Best Foreign Film, Guldbagge Awards 1991
Time of the Gypsies (Dom za Vesanje)
Emir Kusturica's Time of the Gypsies is a curious, visually hypnotic film: a lyrical glimpse into an exotic, obscure culture, a tragedy of lost innocence, a reaffirmation of love and family. At the center of the story is a young man named Perhan (Davor Dujmovic) who lives in a Gypsy ghetto with his grandmother (Ljubica Adzovic), uncle (Husnija Hasimovic), and his crippled sister Danira (Elvira Sali). Their means of income revolve around his grandmother's faith healing abilities and the occasional sale of limestone to the villagers. Perhan also possesses a divine power, telekinesis, a talent that has proven to have little application in his austere life. His one source of comfort is his beloved Azra (Sinolicka Trpkova), but his repeated marriage proposals are invariably rejected by her mother, who believes that his poverty makes him an unsuitable husband.
One day, his grandmother saves the life of a little boy, the son of a charismatic criminal named Ahmed (Bora Todorovic). In gratitude, Ahmed agrees to take Danira to a hospital in Ljubljana during an upcoming 'business' trip to Italy with his brothers, and to pay for all her incurred medical expenses. Perhan decides to accompany the apprehensive Danira to the hospital, leaving his grandmother and Azra behind. Along the way, indications of Ahmed's illicit activities begin to surface, as children and young women, sold into servitude by their families (or sometimes, kidnapped), crowd into the van to join them on the trip. Unable to stay with Danira at the hospital, Perhan is forced to leave her behind and travels with Ahmed to Italy. Smuggled alongside Ahmed's syndicate "family", Perhan is seduced into a life of crime.
This film is an eccentric fusion of comedy and tragedy, realism and fantasy; in essence, an inextinguishable celebration of life in the direst of circumstances. Time of the Gypsies is a privileged glimpse into the soul of a discarded race - of joy and mourning, of transgression and human decency - a compassionate portrait of marginalized people, not unlike ourselves.
(99 min; 1992; dvd; English)
Director: Quentin Tarantino
With Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Michael Madson, Chris Penn, Steve Buscemi
Multiple award winner including Prix Tournage, Avignon Film Festival 1992; ALFS Award for Newcomer of the Year, London Critics Circle Film Awards 1994; International Critics Award (FIPRESCI), Toronto International Film Festival 1992; among others
Reservoir Dogs
Reservoir Dogs is a supremely confident debut feature by writer and director Quentin Tarantino. And just like his follow up ‘Pulp Fiction’, it generated the type of hype that it should struggle to justify. But it remains as shocking, perversely funny, and stylish as upon original release.
The movie has earned itself a reputation as a violent picture and provided a convenient platform for some hysterical media reaction. As is often the case, viewing reveals a different truth. And the classic and sadly underused technique of implied action suggests a more powerful horror than you can actually see.
Many modern directors are too weak and feeble to explore suggested violence. Instead they employ effects-loaded frames of brutality to make their point. Tarantino exploits audience savvy, preferring to build anticipation, mesmerise, and then cut away at the climax, as in the infamous ear-severing scene. Somehow it's horribly effective and lingers far longer than the usual point blank bloodshed that seems compulsory in other movies.
The film essentially revolves around a robbery that has gone wrong. Abandoning the conventional format of natural chronological storytelling, Tarantino creates a tapestry of flashbacks that cleverly build to a conclusion. This allows separate scenes to be showcased as individual vignettes that the cast exploit to the full.
The film shows a clever balance of humour and tension.
Divorce-Italian Style (Divorzio All’Italiana; Italy)
(105 min; 1962; dvd; b/w; English subtitles)
Director: Pietro Germi
Multiple award winner including Oscar for Best Writing, Story and Screenplay-Written Directly for the Screen, Academy Awards 1963; BAFTA Film Award for Best Foreign Actor, BAFTA Awards 1964; Award for Best Comedy, Cannes Film Festival 1962; among others
Divorce – Italian Style
Writer-director Pietro Germi's (‘Sedotta e Abbandonata’) wickedly funny black comedy satirizes Italy's antiquated institutions and its unfair patriarchal society. It's cowritten by Ennio De Concini, whose story it's based on. It's in the same light as Kind Hearts and Coronets.
Marcello Mastroianni stars as Baron Don Ferdinando Cefalù, who is suffering from loss of family wealth due to his squandering alcoholic father (Odoardo Spadaro) and undergoing a midlife crisis. The Baron feels put upon by his unattractive (she's mustached) nagging wife Rosalia (Daniela Rocca, suicidal girlfriend of the director), who craves constant attention, sex and love. Since he still considers himself a desirable catch, he schemes to dump his wife in favor of his beautiful pure teenage cousin, Angela (Stefania Sandrelli). The problem is you can't divorce in Sicily, but there's a loophole in the law that says you can murder your wife and get away with it if you catch her in the act with another man.
The Baron brings painter Carmelo Patanè (Leopoldo Trieste), the former boyfriend of his wife who is now married with three children, into his palace home to restore a fresco. Their renewal sparks a passion, and the gleeful Baron contrives to leave them alone while he tape records their conversations from another room. On a night the Baron expects to catch them in bed, they fool him by running off together. This brings great shame on the Baron and his family, and through a local gangster he tracks down his wife and lover. But before he can shoot his wife, Carmelo's abandoned wife murders her husband to avenge her disgrace. The judge gives him a light sentence and when released the Baron marries Angela, whose old-fashioned father died of a heart attack when he read by mistake a love letter she wrote the Baron. While on a yacht for their honeymoon, the vain Baron is unaware his wife is playing footsies with the handsome young sailor at the helm.
The film was a box office smash and received much critical acclaim.
Mastroianni got an Oscar nomination for Best Actor, which was the first time in Academy Award history that the lead in a foreign language film received such an honor.
The Apartment (USA)
Monday, 20th October- 10:30 am
(125 min; 1960; dvd; b/w; English)
Director: Billy Wilder
With Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine
Multiple award winner including multiple Oscars for Best Art Direction – Set Decoration, Black and White; Best Director; Best Film Editing; Best Picture; & Best Writing, Story and Screenplay –Written Directly for the Screen, Academy Awards 1961; BAFTA Film Award for Best Film From Any Source; Best Foreign Actor; Best Foreign Actress, BAFTA Film Awards 1961; Volpi Cup for Best Actress, Venice Film Festival 1960; among others
The Apartment
A common thread in Billy Wilder's best films is that it is the women who are the catalysts. Think of Stanwyck's Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity, or Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, Monroe in The Seven Year Itch and Some Like It Hot. Even, for that matter, in Ninotchka it is the women who are driving the plot. In this masterly social comedy the self-deluding hero CC Baxter (Jack Lemmon) thinks he has some control over the events in his life. In reality Baxter is put upon nastily by the oily executives who like to use his handily located Manhattan apartment for extra-marital trysts, and nicely by the elevator girl Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine) who sees him as the one decent male in a pool of piranhas.
Baxter wants advancement in the huge insurance company where he works, and Sheldrake, a slimy boss (Fred MacMurray), dangles promotion before him in exchange for the apartment key. Disastrously he discovers that Fran is Sheldrake's mistreated side attraction, placing him in an intolerable dilemma. Should he ditch his upward mobility for the girl he loves?
Yojimbo (The Bodyguard; Japan)
(110 min; 1961; dvd; b/w; English subtitles)
A film by Akira Kurosawa
Volpi Cup for Best Actor, Venice Film Festival 1961; Blue Ribbon Awards 1962 for Best Actor; Kinema Junpo Awards 1962 for Best Actor
Yojimbo
Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo, which translates into English as bodyguard, was the great filmmaker's most financially successful film. Its magnificent black-and-white photography by Kazuo Miyagawa and snappy action sequences are much like a Hollywood Western, but this dark fable also has an edgy sardonic wit that inspired the spaghetti western. Sergio Leone lifted the Yojimbo theme for his 1964 hit starring Clint Eastwood, A Fistful of Dollars. The violence is graphic but well-executed in the tradition of the samurai film, and the unheroic performance by Toshiro Mifune as the film's true hero is peerless.
It's set in 1860 in Japan at the close of the Tokugawa dynasty and the rise of the middle-classes. An unemployed, lazy, gruff but masterful samurai, Sanjuro Kuwabatake (Toshiro Mifune), wanders into a sleepy village that is terrorized by two rival factions fighting over the turf and finds out from the embittered innkeeper Gonji (Eijiro Tono) that there's a gang war raging over a rift between former partners. On one side is a greedy and ruthless silk merchant and brothel keeper, Seibei (Seizaburo Kawazu), on the other side a greedy and ruthless sake merchant Ushi-Tora (Kyu Sazanka). The mysterious samurai offers his services to the highest bidder; by staying with the neutral innkeeper and not committing to either side he secretly schemes to have both sides try to outbid each other for his services and that they will eventually destroy each other. He believes neither side is worth defending. The samurai cunningly starts a series of fights, performs a few killings and arranges dual kidnappings, as each side believes the other is responsible till a full scale war rages. In an act of unselfishness the bodyguard kills six of Ushi-Tora's guards with his sword and frees a stupid weakling farmer's pretty wife from being the property of a brewer, as the hubby lost her to a gambling debt. But Unosuke (Tatsuya Nakadai), the sly and vicious pistol brandishing younger brother of Ushi-Tora, who has the only gun in town, figures out his older blood-thirsty but incompetent brother Ino (Daisuke Kato) was duped by the bodyguard into thinking she was released by a raid from Seibei's men and takes the bodyguard prisoner. After being subject to torture and a beating, the bodyguard escapes and is nursed back to health by the innkeeper and the cooper in a hut on the outskirts of town. When the bodyguard learns that Gonji has been captured by Ushi-Tora's men, after they wiped out all of their rival's men, he comes to town and using a borrowed sword from a dead man eliminates the rival gang single-handed and leaves town with only the innkeeper and cooper around for him to say goodbye to.
A great mixture of technical skill, action and comedy, while showing how contemptuous humans can be in their ill behavior that ranges from being merely obsequious to unsympathetic killers.
(91 min; 2006; 35 mm; English subtitles)
Director: Bruno Dumont
Recipient of the Grand Prize of the Jury, Cannes Film Festival 2006; Jury Special Diploma for Best Film, Yerevan International Film Festival 2007
Flanders
Following on from his nightmarish American road movie 29 Palms, writer/director Bruno Dumont returns to his native Northern French soil for Flanders, a spare, challenging and ultimately moving account of war's brutalising impact upon combatants and civilians alike. Powerfully acted by a non-professional cast, this impressively shot film tells the story of Demester (Samuel Boidin), a brooding young farmer, who's conscripted to fight in an unnamed war, leaving behind his lover Barbe (Adelaide Leroux).
“So where are you off to for your war?”, asks a neighbour of Demester, who simply replies "I don't know". It's hard for the viewer not to think of real-life events in Iraq, when confronted with the scenes of French soldiers, shaved heads rendering them indistinguishable from one another, carrying out atrocities, before the insurgents counter with their own grisly reprisals. Yet long before the recruits have entered the combat zone, Dumont has established his vision of humans being driven by primitive emotions: evidenced by Demester and Barbe rough carnal liasions.
Enduring a spell in a psychiatric institution, Barbe is an acutely sensitive woman who mysteriously experiences the suffering of others, in a manner reminiscent of the police inspector in Dumont's earlier L'Humanite. And it's precisely because Demester is such a taciturn, inarticulate character that his final reaching out to Barbe is such a memorably compassionate gesture on the part of the film-maker.
Bad Habits (Malos Hábitos; Mexico)
(103 min; 2007; dvd; English subtitles)
Director: Simón Bross
Multiple award winner including the Golden Precolumbian Award for Best First Work of a Director, Bogota Film festival 2007; Silver Zenith for Best First Feature Film, Montréal World Film Festival 2007; Mayahuel Award for Best Film-National Jury & Best Mexican Film, Guadalajara Mexican Film Festival 2007; among others
Bad Habits (Malo Hábitos)
Simón Bross’ first feature film, Bad Habits skewers a Mexican family and its buffet of eating disorders. A delicious tale of faith, love, vanity and leaky pipes, this engaging debut was inspired by the true story of a
17th century Mexican nun. A family with a diverse range of eating disorders, whose relationships, self-image and values are put to the test at the dinner table. Matilde is a nun convinced that faith can turn wine into water. Secretly, she begins fasting to prevent what she considers to be the second great flood. Elena is a thin, stylish woman, ashamed of her daughter’s excessive weight. She is willing to do anything to make her daughter lose the weight necessary to resemble a princess on the day of her first communion. At the same time, Elena’s architect husband, Gustavo, unable to cope with his wife’s gaunt body – particularly during their ‘intimate moments’ together – looks for a way out, which he seems to find in the arms of a buxom female student
Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro (Who Plays the Piper; India)
(143 min; 1983; 35 mm; English subtitles)
Director; Kundan Shah
With Naseeruddin Shah, Ravi Baswani, Satish Shah, Om Puri
Recipient of the Indira Gandhi Award for Best First Film of A Director, National Film Awards 1984; Filmfare Award 1983 for Best Comedian
Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro
Definitely the funniest Hindi movie I've seen, this is the story of two friends, (Vinod - Naseeruddin Shah and Sudhir - Ravi Baswani) attempting to start-up their own photo studio. Business is very slow, but prospects look good when they are approached by Shobha (Barve) editor of ‘Khabardaar’ newspaper. Shobha, feeding the simple-minded duo a spiel about righteousness and honesty, assigns them the job of spying/photographing the shady dealings between Police commisioner D'Mello (Satish Shah) and property builder Tarneja (Pankaj Kapoor). The two, on assignment come across corruption and bribery to win the tender for building a flyover. The main players in this are D'Mello, Tarneja and his rival Ahuja (Om Puri).
While spying on the nefarious three, Sudhir and Vinod get a whiff of a murder, but do not know who the killer is. They manage to retrieve the corpse as proof, but subsequently lose it. What follows, and is pretty much the rest of the movie, is a long, extended chase (and what a chase - meanders into the oddest of places) with the bad guys (Tarneja, and Co.) and the good guys (Vinod and Sudhir) chasing the corpse.
This is a short, slickly directed film, and has a cast of excellent
actors. Baswani and Shah with their comic timing and bumbling escapades
make this a riot. Pankaj Kapoor, Satish shah and Om Puri adequately
represent the bad guys, with Kapoor and Puri responsible for some great
comic scenes. Bhakti Barve turns in a sharp performance as the shrewd
Shobaji. And Neena Gupta (as Priya) and Satish Kaushik (as Ashok) as
Tarneja's sidekicks are very good. The movie doesn't have songs, except
for maybe the hummable "Hum honge kaamyaab". No heroine either, for that
matter.
This film was made in 1983, and to-date there is no better Hindi comedy
than this. Kundan Shah's later efforts are no match for this classic
film.
My Sweet Little Village (Vesnicko ma Stredís-Ková; Czechoslovakia)
(98 min; 1985; dvd; English subtitles)
Director: Jiri Menzel
Recipient of the prize of the Ecumenical Jury & Special Prize of the Jury, Montréal World Film Festival 1986; Best Actor Award, Paris Film Festival 1987
My Sweet Little Village
This colorful, warm-hearted, and endearing Czech film offers a wryly tender portrait of life in a small Czech village.
The movie's main storyline follows the life of Otík, a mentally retarded young man, in a tight-knit village community. The sweet-tempered Otík works as an assistant truck driver with Mr. Pávek, his older colleague and practical-minded neighbor. Pávek's family takes care of Otík, whose parents are dead. However, the two coworkers become at odds over Otík's inability to perform even the simplest tasks. Pávek demands that Otík be transferred to assist another driver, who happens to be a choleric and suspicious man named Turek (Turk in Czech). Rather than work with Turek, Otík decides to accept an offer of employment in Prague, but finds he does not fit in to the city life. After discovering that the transfer of Otík to Prague was a trick by a crooked politician to get a deal on Otík's large inherited house, Pávek agrees to give Otík a second chance and retrieves him from the city to resume their work together.
The film also follows several subplots, such as the secret romance of Turek's wife with a young vet, the tribulations of an accident-prone but respected doctor who has almost as much trouble with his pessimistic patients as he does with his car, and the desperate deeds of Pávek's teenage son, who has ardent feelings for an attractive local teacher.
My Sweet Little Village is funny, sad, and thoroughly entertaining from start to finish.
Pan’s Labyrinth (El Laberinto del Fauno; Mexico/Spain)
(120 min; 2006; dvd; English subtitles)
Director: Guillermo del Toro
Multiple award winner including Oscar for Best Achievement in Art Direction; Best Achievement in Cinematography; & Best Achievement in Makeup, Academy Awards 2007; BAFTA Film Award for Best Film Not in the English Language; Best Costume Design, BAFTA Film Awards 2007; Multiple Goyas including for Best Cinematography, Best New Actress, Best Editing, Best Screenplay-Original, Goya Awards 2007; among others
Pan’s Labyrinth
Dark, dreamlike and dangerous, Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth is a fairytale every bit as scary and moving as they were always meant to be. In both the real world - civil war-driven Spain - and the fantasy underworld she discovers, our heroine Ofelia must battle against the most twisted, nightmarish evils to survive. Transcendent, passionate, full of beauty and endlessly affecting, this is without question the movie of the year.
Ofelia is journeying to meet her fascist stepfather, a ruthless captain chasing leftists in the hills of Northern Spain, with her painfully pregnant mother in tow. Unknown to Ofelia's stepfather, the leftists have secretly infiltrated his household. This electric intrigue elegantly ties into Ofelia's other, mythic, journey in which she follows an insect into a labyrinth and then receives quests and promises from Pan the mysterious faun. Ofelia's retreat offers no respite from the real-world danger and fear. Drenched in mud, blood, rain and tears, and met on all sides by skin-crawling creatures, she must rely on her wits and her heart to prevail.
Del Toro's trademark visual flair gets its finest ever chance to shine, rendering the tale onscreen so perfectly that the subtitles are barely needed. Every actor - most notably, Ivana Baquero's wide-eyed Ofelia and Sergi López's vicious, glittering Captain – excels. Compelling from first frame to last, Pan's Labyrinth never misses a chance to wrench, quell or quicken your heart: this visionary project propels Del Toro into the highest league of filmmakers. There can be no excuses. See this film.
(120 min; 1959; dvd; b/w; English)
Director: Billy Wilder
With Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon
Multiple award winner including BAFTA Film Award for Best Foreign Actor, BAFTA Film Awards 1960; Oscar for Best Costume Design, Black-and-White, Academy Awards 1960; Golden Globes for Best Motion Picture-Comedy; Best Motion Picture Actor; Best Motion Picture Actress, Golden Globes, USA 1960; among others
Some Like it Hot
Because we've grown used to seeing almost every possible subversion and set-up on screen, it's almost impossible to think back to 1959 and realise that, in mixing an affectionate view of transvestism with a light-hearted look at the mob, Billy Wilder was being daring in the extreme. And it was because he laced his own script with continuous charm and big fun that he was able to express those ideas in the mainstream.
For those who haven't seen it, Some Like It Hot is one of the greatest comedies ever. In a story of increasingly wild absurdity, it follows the antics of two idiot musicians (Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon) who, after witnessing the St Valentine's Day Massacre, struggle to escape the gangsters (including a severely unsmiling George Raft) by dressing up in drag and joining an all-girl band. Comic complications aplenty ensue when Tony Curtis - now a pouting girlie - strives to express his lust for Marilyn, while Jack Lemmon - equally high-voiced and simpering - is being pursued by an amorous Joe E Brown, who has one of the funniest - and most radical - final punch-lines in screen comedy.
Some Like It Hot is one of those rare movies where all the elements gel all the time. Both Curtis and Lemmon display a real feeling for sexual ambiguity and full-blown silliness, while Marilyn provides a suitably contrasting innocence to the antics of the two rogues. Wilder presents all three with great comic scenes which soar on the back of originality and great timing and embrace both slapstick and super-sharp wit. The desert-island comedy bar none.
Read my Lips (Sur mes Lèvres; France)
(115 min; 2001; 35 mm; English subtitles)
Director: Jacques Audiard
Multiple award winner including César for Best Actress; Best Sound; & Best Writing – Original or Adaptation, César Awards 2002; Golden Trailer Awards 2003 for Best Foreign Film & Best Independent Film; Jury Award for Best Actress & Best Director, Newport International Film Festival 2002; among others
Read my Lips
Deaf secretary Carla (Devos) is tired of being treated as a dogsbody at the property development company, where her office colleagues invariably take the credit for her hard work. Socially too she's cast in a Cinderella role, babysitting for her friend Annie (Bonamy), whilst the latter hits the town.
Salvation, or at least the chance of revenge, arrives in the form of Carla's new work assistant, the greasy-haired, tattooed, ex-con Paul (Cassel). Utilizing her lip-reading skills, the duo hatch a scheme to rob violent nightclub-owner Marchand (Gourmet), who has already had Paul beaten up for defaulting on a debt.
"A love story in which the characters never make love", is how writer-director Jacques Audiard (A Self-Made Hero, See How They Fall) has described this inventive, genre-hopping thriller. From the outset Audiard manipulates the soundtrack to immerse us into Carla's fragile world, by switching her hearing-aids on and off. Nor is she a stereotypically saintly disabled character - embittered and jealous, she relishes the settling of old scores.
Stylishly composed by director of photography Mathieu Vadepied, Read My Lips is substantially more than a mere hommage to Hitchcock's Rear Window or Louis Malle's Lift to the Scaffold, two films to which it bears certain narrative echoes.
Day of the Wacko (Dzien Swira; Poland)
(93 min; 2002; dvd; English subtitles)
Director: Marek Koterski
Recipient of the Eagle Award for Best Actor; Best Screenplay, Polish Film Awards 2003; Awards for Best Actor; Best Sound & Golden Lion, Polish Film Festival 2002
Day of the Wacko
Marek
Kondrat is hysterical from the first few frames of this dark comedy.
His character is at once mean-spirited and sympathetic, hilarious and
dramatic, a total fool and a smart-thinking observer of the
ridiculousness of the world around him. Director Marek Koterski adds
to the insanity by bringing in a surreal element to Adas' world,
demonstrated with great hilarity when his lead flicks through the
channels on his TV. Alongside mind-numbing commercials for a
penis-extract cologne and a fart-nullifying body spray Adas finds
sanctity in a soccer game. That is until a goal is scored and the goal
scorer is kissed by one of his teammates, as another starts licking
his neck... then another drops his trousers, slides in behind the
scorer and gives new meaning to the position of 'stopper'.
Using extensive internal monologue instead of external dialogue, a
tactic normally despised by cinema purists, Koterski can be forgiven
in this case because the main character is such a loner that he seldom
talks to anyone - and even if he did, his opinion is the only one that
matters. Added to that, the monologues are bitingly funny, so to hell
with the rules.
That in itself would be enough to recommend the film, but the
performance of Marek Kondrat in the lead role is brave, polished and
perfect. This entire film hinges as much on his talent as on the
director's flair, and both parties prove themselves to be consummate
professionals as well as artists. A wrong step anywhere along the
course of this film by either of the two could have seen the entire
affair go an entire different way, but there isn't a bad note hit in
the entire 95 minutes.