Beautiful Kate, a film by Rachel Ward

 A review

The marketing blurb for this film states that “[it] cannot fail to get under your skin”, and, for once, the PR is right.

Ned, a writer in his forties, gets back to his father farmhouse in the remote Australian outback, where he, and his girlfriend, Toni, are greeted by his younger sister, Sally. She asked him to return home as Bruce, their father, is gravely ill, we know that he will not live for much longer. The ghosts of two missing siblings haunt their first meal together, yet the subject is carefully avoided.

The story is developed in a series of shots of the farm life in the present intermingled with flashbacks, the device used being places within the compound that metamorphose into that bygone past, highlighting the decay suffered not only by Bruce’s face and body, but also by the face of the farm itself. Thus, the pond where one of the key moments in that past happened is now dry, with rusting cars and farm machinery littering it. Beautiful Kate, splendidly played by newcomer Sophie Lowe (she reminds me of a young Sissy Spacek), Ned’s sister, plays and flirts with her brothers. However, do not be fooled by that nostalgic view of the past, perhaps the times of childhood and early adulthood were better when seen through the lens of time past: there is a sting under that nostalgia, and its hurts.

This is an intense film not only about incest and sexuality, but also about the power of memory not only to guide us, but also to lead us to emotional dead ends. Memories are, by definition, always selective and narrow in focus, and this is evident when Ned’s recollection of his relationship and death of his sister, the Beautiful Kate of the title, is confronted by a revelation by Sally, an involuntary witness one night a long time ago on that now dry pond. The past is no longer seen on the same way, and Ned’s attitude to his dying father warms. The ghosts have been put to rest.

This closed and incestuous story is told over the magnificent and tough backdrop of the landscape, those long winding and dusty roads, the cinematography making an excellent use of the wide format and colour palette.

A self confident, sensitive and powerful exploration of incest and awakening sexuality on a desolate farm in the Australian outback. Rachel Ward is in full command of her material in this debut feature. She has no fear in tackling a subject that most of us would prefer to be silent about, and she does it with sensibility and love for her subjects.

Beautiful Kate got under my skin, particularly when facing its shattering, and, yet, cathartic, end. I feel that it will remain there for a long time.

Director: Rachel Ward
Starring: Ben Mendelsohn, Bryan Brown, Rachel Griffiths, Maeve Dermody, Sophie Lowe
Running time: 101 mins

For trailer please visit:
http://cinema-architecture.blogspot.com/2010/07/gainsbourg-beautiful-kate-frontier.html

Stills  © Matchbox Films

Ruben Östlund’s INVOLUNTARY

A review

Ruben Östlund’s Involuntary joins the list of recent Swedish films that have made to the world stage, such as Daniel Alfredson’s Millennium Trilogy (based on Stieg Larsson’s books), Tomas Alfredson’s Let The Right One In (based on John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel), and Roy Andersson’s You The Living, between others.

Five interlaced stories run throughout the film, structured in clearly delineated cinematic tableaux, like paintings with moving figures: long takes with the camera left to roll in fixed positions, the actors moving in and our –sometimes just out as we only hear their voices, or moving towards the lens until becoming blurred. It is almost as if Involuntary were an exercise in mass observation, although the development of the stories in the timeline of the tableaux have been carefully constructed and orchestrated.

The link between these stories can be defined with just two words: peer pressure. How spontaneous and individual are our decisions? How much are they influenced by our desire, our need, conscious or not, to fit into a social group, into patterns of established and accepted behaviours within that group, or to fit into a intellectual or ideological construct? Key is the tale of the little girl who finally gives the response that was expected from her in the classroom, although she knew it was the wrong answer.

The recurrent feel of mass observation pervades the film, as the actors (all of them novices with the exception of Maria Lundqvist) play their fictitious lives as if they were their only lives, this is the degree of naturalism present in the acting. I noticed that the actors’ names are also the names of the characters they play, so Maria Lundqvist is Maria Lundqvist. I understand that most scenes were rehearsed several times, and took several takes before (50 or 60) making into the finished film (with the exception of the striptease scene with the two teenage girls, Linnea and Sara), a technique that streamline the understanding and absorption of the parts being played. This documentary feel to Involuntary is reinforced by the almost complete absence of a music track, the sounds being those of background conversations and noises, passing traffic, birdsong, children playing, all choreographed to punctuate specific moments in the film.

The tone of the camera is neutral and non-judgemental, almost tender at times in its outlook of the follies of us, human creatures; while, at other times, that coldness makes difficult to engage with the characters as we do not see them with the warmth present in, let say, Andersson’s You The Living. It prompted a desire to walk into the film to talk and argue with the characters and their transgressions, before realizing that the desire is actually to engage ourselves, as if we were the other. Have no doubt, the characters up there on the screen are no more than proxies, the camera is actually filming us, the audience. There is not a single one scene in the film that most people would have experienced in their lives, I dare to say. I was glad to see that Sweden also suffers a problem with drifting teenagers, drinking to stupor and falling into vandalism and what is called antisocial and reckless behaviour, the camera lens bearing witness to their antics.

The tale of Henrik, the coach driver, is, perhaps, the clearest of all: a social situation that becomes a trap, enslaving all those who are involved in it, feelings of unspoken embarrassment and guilt hiding just below the surface, as the camera pointed at the reflections on the coach windows hints.

Involuntary, with is dry, hilarious and, sometimes, dark humour, does not produce a immediate reward: the secret is in the details of each tableau, we miss them, and the film becomes meaningless and, even, tedious. We, the audience, have to work to reap the rewards.Yet, the prize for your efforts is a cinematic gem: this is a tender film that will haunt you for days to come.

Some films are like good wines: they get better and better as they mature. Involuntary is one of those, several days after having seen it, the smile is still on my face.

Do I need to say any more?

Director: Ruben Östlund | Sweden | 98 mins 

CAST

THE PARTY
Villmar Björkman, Lola Ewerlund, Mia Ericsson, Hanna Lekander, Simeon Henry Nordius, Maricel Amance, Rikard Borg, Leif Ericsson, Margret Andersson, Staffan Mau, Eva Mau, Thomas Petéus, Guje Palm

THE BUS TRIP
Maria Lundqvist, Henrik Vikman, Ida Linnertorp, Birgitta Sundberg, Tommy Bech, Filip Nilsson, Edvin Daal, Lars Melin, Mikael Bundsen, Wille Lindelöw, Niklas Månsson, Emil Olsson, Jonny Jänsby, Malin Rosenqvist, Anna Karlsson

THE GIRLS
Linnea Cart-Lamy, Sara Eriksson, Moa Mathiesen, Malin Segerblad, Kenneth Bodin, Fanny Askerfors, Jonas Harström, Ludwig Palmell, Daniel Brandt, Lars G Svensson Elisabeth Cart-Lamy

THE SCHOOL
Cecilia Milocco, Alicia Gustavsson, Ulf Lundstedt, Axel Hurtig, Gunilla Johansson, Biggan Hjelt, Ylva Nilsson, Josef Säterhagen, Per Johansson, Birte Niederhaus, Pupils From Lyrfågelskolan

THE REUNION
Leif Edlund Johansson, Olle Liljas, P-A Emanuelsson, Pär Berg, Jonas Pärlbäck, Johan Bylund, Krister Bården, Vera Vitali


UK DISTRIBUTION: TRINITY

Stills and trailer © Trinity

Desire, a film by Gareth Jones.

I happened to be re-reading some of the classics of English literature, in this particular case, Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities”, when I watched Desire:

“A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!”

Desire drives the heart of those breasts, the creative impulses of not only artists, but of all of us, is what  I read from Gareth Jones' film.

The apparently innocuous façade of a London suburban house hides a universe of emotions, passions, human fragility, untold secrets and longings. We never see the exterior of the house, or indeed the outside world apart from glimpses through windows until the very end of the film, a cathartic scene.

We first see Ralph (Oscar Pearce, from Roegs’s Puffball and Paul Anderson’s Resident Evil), a writer holed on the top floor of the house, on a series of close-ups of his hands typing on a computer keyboard, like the hands of a musician on a piano keys; and his intense gaze, a kind of leitmotif running throughout the film, the gaze of an intellectual and emotional vampire lusting for the inner lives and bodies of those surrounding him to feed his writing and, thus, allowing him to survive as a human being. The proposition that desire, longing, sexuality, sensuality and survival are inextricable linked seems to be the subtext of this film “of ideas”.

Phoebe (Daisy Smith), his wife, is a soap opera star whose career is rapidly running downhill, her acting skills and career being wasted by increasingly banal plot lines and dialogues. She knows it, although she is outwardly in denial until this fact is slapped on her face in a brutal scene later on in the film. Ralph’s script for a film called Desire is vital to salvage her career, and the small universe that this family has constructed (a device that allows blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction). After all, Phoebe pays the mortgage. As she says in the film, if Ralph fails to produce the screenplay for Christmas, then there will be no more house, no more Chinese and African antiques, and no more Néné.

So, Néné (wonderfully played by Tella Kpomahou in a part that grows as the film progresses, her face and body expressing a myriad of emotions) enters the picture as the au pair in a morning scene repeated uncountable times in millions of homes on this planet: breakfast, and getting the kids ready for school.

So, who is Néné? Phoebe, and us, ask. We know that she is African, we know that she speaks French, we know that she was living in Paris, we know that she is learning English. We also know that she is one of those creatures that Dickens referred a couple of centuries ago: a face whose contours hides a deep unknown, and unknowable, world; we are only able to catch glimpses of it, a song by Malian singer Oumou Sangare here and there, like peeping into a room we think is full of marvels through a half open door. Language itself becomes both a barrier and a bridge, particularly when she rewrites her part that Ralph had concocted from hearsay and assumptions in his script (and to hell with “authorial rights”, life has taken over), in a powerfully acted scene, where Tella Kpomahou as Néné exerts her seductive powers on Ralph (and on us, the audience). Do we know what is driving her heart? We never do, although we can glimpse it, as her gaze teases Ralph and Phoebe, or when we glimpse (this word, again) a photograph of a child.



This stranger, whom Phoebe strongly distrusted that first morning in the kitchen, has become an inextricable part of this family, yet she remains a mystery, still a stranger in their hearts, unspoken desires driving them apart, yet gluing them together with a different structure of relationships, particularly when Phoebe brings her new co-star, Darren (Adam Slynn), a contributor to this redrawing of boundaries. I can read here parallels with Pasolini’s “Teorema”, where the inner fragility of a family hidden by its apparent bourgeois solidity is disrupted and reassembled by the catalytic visit of a stranger, like an angel (of Death, of Life?).

Néné’s capacity to reassemble the inner structure of this world is as much due to its fragile foundations as the emotional strength driving her. Ralph, Phoebe, Néné, Darren, they all circle around each other, all desiring the others, to suck their blood, to take over their bodies and their minds, to take them inside, to make them part of their selves. Underneath this dance, the intellectual, emotional and financial need for Ralph to finish the script.

Perhaps one of the reasons behind the popularity of vampire films, and books, is the need to exteriorize this inner desire to make the other part of our selves, this lust for their bodies, their lives, their entrails.

I do not know if by setting the film within the confined walls of a house was intentional or not in the sense defined by Dickens’ lines; or if it was a dramatic device to explore the simmering of emotions, exposed raw by unspoken desires, driving not only the creative processes of a writer, but their capacity to fundamentally alter the human relationships within what is, basically, a pressure cooker, a creative process in itself, where boundaries are redrawn.

Gareth Jones and Fiona Howe (who also composed the music for this film) states that “Desire explores the link between sex and creativity through the story of a screenwriter struggling with a character who threatens to take over not just his creative life but his sanity.” However, my reading makes it a far more complex film. It is not only Ralph who evolves and gains within these relationships, but Néné also gains, her rewriting of her own life within the script is a clear act of defiance and reasserting her own self as a woman who happens to be African, but who is, firstly, a woman. Intellectual colonialism is, thus, exposed.

Perhaps the strength of this film is also its weakness: the clinical coldness of the camera work, which, whilst allowing us, the viewers, to keep a critical distance from this emotional nest of vipers and, therefore, safeguard our own sanity, it makes very difficult for us to feel sympathy for any of the characters, with the possible exception of Néné, Tella Kpomahou’s injection of inner warm winning us over. Phoebe is played by Daisy Smith, revealing the essential shallowness of the character, not much different from that of the character of the soap opera within the film; while the vampiric intensity of Ralph is developed by Oscar Pearce, and the greed of upcoming boy Darren by Adam Slynn.

However, the complexity of this film, and the several possible readings of it, conspires against Desire, as, somehow, Gareth Jones seems to have lost control. There are just too many strands and ideas floating around, and the device to deliver this cinema of ideas, the voice over, is, at times, clumsy.

Alex Ryle’s intelligent use of a subdued and chiaroscuro palette, and his controlled camerawork, deserves special mention: without this restraint (and that of Gareth Jones), this film in less capable hands could have well ended up as an over emotional soap opera. Fiona Howe’s score also is commendable for its beauty and restraint. The voice over, whilst being essential for Gareth Jones’ aspiration to develop a cinema of ideas (and Desire certainly succeeds as such, setting it apart from much of the recent crop of British cinema) and being beautifully written, words that cut through the calm of my living room, is at times drowning the visual imagery.

Director/Screenwriter: Gareth Jones
Producer/Composer/Designer: Fiona Howe
Cast: Oscar Pearce (Puffball; Resident Evil), Tella Kpomahou (Les oiseaux du ciel - Birds of the Sky; Il va pleuvoir sur Conakry - Rain over Conakry), Daisy Smith, Adam Slynn

Desire will be released in the UK later in the year.

Links:
http://www.desirethefilm.com/
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/DESIRE/114499413645

Stills and trailers © Scenario Films Ltd.

Post revised on October 19th, 2010

Hitchcock's REAR WINDOW

What was the camera model that James Stewart was using in Hitchcock's iconic film Rear Window?

I AM LOVE reviewed

I Am Love, nearly two hours of pure cinematic bliss, a film that manages to be both visually voluptuous in a manner that only the Italians can do, and measured in its intelligence, a real treat to the senses and to the mind, shot with masterly camera work and with a magnificent musical score by John Adams. I came out of my viewing session with an intense desire for good food (Iam afradi that you will have to see this film to fully understand this last sentence). The portrayal of each of the characters is powerful. Watching Tilda Swinton act is a stunning experience of artistry that only a handful of actors can achieve in its range, depth and breadth.



I Am Love is certainly one of the best films I have seen so far this year, a work that manages to nod at the cinema of Luchino Visconti (the digitally re-mastered copy of Il Gatopardo – The Leopard – has recently been released in the UK), as its director, Luca Guadagnino, acknowledges in the excellent interview contained in the extra features of the disc, and to be truly original.

The film follows the slow but inexorable destruction of the Recchis, an old Milanese family whose fortune is based in the production of textiles, a part of the haute bourgeoisie, a relic of the 19th century entrepreneurial era of construction of industry, trhough the liberation of Emma, a Russian woman (Tilda Swinton), who is married to Tancredi, the heir to the fortune of the Recchis. The sensuality of food, specifically oucha, a soup that Emma learnt as a little girl from her grandmother back in Russia, plays a central part in the development of the story. It is, in fact, another character, onto which Emma relies every time she feels homesick.

The film is a rich tapestry weaving seamlessly the stories of Emma and the individuals who are part of the family into a magnificent cinematic tableau, layer upon layer of meaning being built by an exquisite attention to detail, essential for the comprehension of the film (even during a one second blink some essential detail may be lost).

One of the factors that distances I Am Love to the films of Visconti is the fact that the story is centred around a female character, Emma, the Russian who was acquired as a young woman by Tancredi and brought back to Milan as a living addition to his growing art collection, “a woman who is more beautiful than you”, as he said to his mother, and not as “a woman whom I love”, as the final scene makes painfully clear. Once in Milan, that northern Italian city that I could describe as being quietly exuberant (why do I put hs where there isn’t one?), a city where the shops were plentiful, she is expected to behave appropriately as the mistress of the household of one of the Recchis, a world of codified manners, behaviours, attitudes. The film portrays this world beautifully, with a slight tint of nostalgia, a world where everyone follows a distinct and predefined path, a world that starts to crumble when Edoardo, the grandson of the founder of the dynasty, fails for the first time in the history and tradition of the family to win a race, loosing it to a chef (who becomes a central character in the story), a world where Betta, Edoardo’s sister, presents her grandfather for his birthday a framed photograph rather than the painting – proper art - he was expecting, a world where the undercurrents of desire start to break through the masks and the etiquette, demonstrated when Betta breaks with Gregorio, whom she was expected to marry, to conduct a love affair with her female tutor in London. It is a world where the younger generation is slowly drifting apart from the expected behaviours, from the expected career paths they are supposed to take. When Emma realizes this, her liberation begins, the sensuality of food been its catalyst.

Emma, which is not her real name, as she does not remember her real name any longer, finds strong and sensual love outside the claustrophobic confines of the family and their social milieu, and begins through this love a process of rediscovery of her own self, of her own identity, erased behind those prescriptive roles and behaviours she had to take as one of the Recchis – a family to which she felt as an outside, a feeling she kept to herself. She existed not as a woman, as we learn by the end of I Am Love, but as an empty vessel collected by Tancredi, onto which behaviours and codes were fed for her to perform her duties and to be shown as another addition to the art collection – there is here a nod from me to Tilda Swinton’s description of the character in her interview in the very instructive Extra Features of the disc. Through this love affair not only she becomes a woman in her fullness, but also, like a mirror, we watch the slow vanishing of a social class, anachronistic in the global dimensions that capitalism has taken in the 21st century. Yet, here, there is a further nod to the Visconti of The Leopard and, particularly, to Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s description of the need for everything to change for everything to remain the same.

However, as the curtain closes on the final act, shot like an mise en scene of a Greek tclassic ragedy, another curtain is raised half way up as Eva’s hand touches her baby through her belly as she calls in succession .to the family members, only Betta responding with compassion, adding to the sense of her exclusion in the hospital Is there darker implications to this hand, to the fortunes of this family?

I have to pay special mention to the cinematography of this film, particularly to the intelligent camera work which is able to capture both the voluptuousness and sensuality of this world, and that of Milan, and simultaneously to convey the uneasiness that underlines it. Absolutely brilliant!

 I Am Love, a truly glorious, intelligent and mesmerizing cinematic jewel, with the feeling of a contemporary opera, that puts to shame many recent British productions. Judging by this film, Italian cinema is indeed in robust health.




Writer-Director: Luca Guadagnino
Producer-Star: Tilda Swinton
Cast: Alba Rohrwacher, Diane Fleri, Edoardo Gabbriellini, Flavio Parenti, Marisa Berenson, Pippo Delbono, Tilda Swinton
Italy 2009 120 mins Cert 15

DVD UK Release date: 6th September 2010


EXTRA FEATURES

• Audio Commentary by Writer-Director Luca Guadagnino and Producer-Star Tilda Swinton
• Interviews with Cast & Crew: Exploring the film’s inception, development, funding and casting
• Moments on Set: Detailing the trials, tribulations and tender moments of the production process
• Official UK Theatrical Trailer

Stills and trailer © Metrodome Distribution