Leos Carax directs Juliette Binoche, Denis Lavant and Julie Delpy in this crime fantasy where a pickpocket must help steal a cure for a love disease.
God! Carax is pretentious. His stories get lost in an aimless haphazardness. There are one or two wonderful set-pieces; a parachute jump, a night time run to David Bowie. But there just ain’t any focus. I’m starting to think either The Lovers On The Bridge was a fluke or I shouldn’t try and revisit that either.
5
Perfect Double Bill: The Lovers On The Bridge (1991)
Alan Clarke directs Siobhan Finneran, Michelle Holmes and George Costigan in this British drama where two schoolmates from a council estate in Bradford start an affair with a married man.
From the director of Scum. This always used to be on too late to get away with watching when I was a kid. Told with a pleasingly unjudgmental tone. Rita and Sue aren’t stunners or seductresses – they just want to have whatever slither of fun is due to them before marriage, babies, domestic abuse and unskilled work shut off even the opportunity to have that. George Costigan’s Bob is equally presented as a more decent bloke than you’d expect… he shows a surprising amount of spine when he isn’t being led by his cock. The stand out performance though is by Lesley Sharp as the hard-as-nails wife. The scene where she takes her less glamorous, less mature competition up to her bedroom to watch her change is something to behold. You are glad everyone who debuted here went on to have rich, varied careers. The film itself isn’t as funny or as sexy as its reputation suggests but it is quite brave in its dealings with marriage, race and growing up poor and female. Strangely admirable for a film about gangbangs with babysitters.
Christian Petzold directs Nina Hoss, Ronald Zehrfeld and Rainer Bock in this German drama where a doctor in the Eighties plans to escape the GDR and is demoted to a rural hospital by the ever watchful Stasi.
As expected Nina Hoss delivers an icy but captivating central turn in this character study. Petzold again explores life and love on the run, his raison d‘être. While this probably won’t blow anyone’s socks off, it is quietly powerful and confident.
Jean Rollin directs Françoise Pascal, Hugues Quester and Nathalie Perrey in this nudie French horror where a young couple get trapped in an eerie cemetery overnight.
Very dull. Nothing happens to the point of incredulity. Françoise Pascal looks lovely clothed, starkers or any state of dishevelled in betwixt. That does not a movie make though. There are one or two atmospheric shots that exploit the dank but sublime locations.
Shane Meadows directs Bob Hoskins, Danny Nussbaum and Johann Myers in this sports movie where a dreamer tries to open a boxing club to keep the young men in his area out of trouble.
At times this can feel like a cavalcade of short films edited together to make a feature narrative. It is very independent, somewhat flawed (especially some of the acting) yet it is brimming with ideas, has a Britpop soundtrack to rival any release of the Cool Britannia revival and orbits a superb lead performance by the legendary Bob Hoskins. A lot of love has gone into this little film – a pean to hope and community that can be enjoyed as a simple rough around the edges boxing comedy or so much more. It can even survive a young James Corden guffing around its edges. No other DVD in my collection could. Shane Meadows has proven himself to be one of the most fascinating British storytelling voices to emerge in my lifetime. His proper feature debut can hold its own against his very best work.
9
Perfect Double Bill: A Room For Romeo Brass (1999)
Michael Showalter directs Jessica Chastain, Andrew Garfield and Cherry Jones in this biopic of the corrupt but glamorous televangelist.
Exists solely as a Best Actress trophy winning salvo. Ultimately a successful one but the rest of the film has an iffyness to it that no amount of cheeky energy can cover up. Made within the settings of a spoof, slathered in an often uncritical jelly when it comes to its titular grifter. How much did she know about the dodgy dealing? How much of an ally was she really to those her religion and beliefs demonised? Was her downfall tragedy… or just good old gaudy excess run its inevitable course? The movie wants to present an unwilling victim and an unlikely hero. Jessica Chastain as an out-and-out rhinestone scumbag won’t bring in the gold. So manipulative sympathy for the devil is the order of the day, just so we know when her mascara runs on camera it ain’t crocodile tears. Andrew Garfield has the more fertile character in the slimy but sexually ambiguous husband… it would be his movie but the edit tries everything to position him back down to a support. Never reaching the heights of The Wolf Of Wall Street (where an embezzling bastard is given zero commiseration) or I, Tonya, this does what it came to do with a colourful blankness. Yet you can’t help feel a little exploited by all the music, glitz, camp and emoting knowing that they never quite get to the heart of the matter.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder directs Brad Davis, Franco Nero and Jeanne Moreau in this arty farty adaptation of Jean Genet’s novel where everybody in a big gay port wants to fuck a butch sailor… but he prefers stabbing folk.
A hyper queer fever dream, the theatrical lighting and set design are thrustingly OTT. Shame the plot is so aimless. You’ll be shocked how unengaging all this murder and cottaging is. The deadpan performance style is particularly alienating.
Steven Spielberg directs Jeremy Irvine, Emily Watson and Peter Mullan in this WWI drama following a handsome horse’s exploitation throughout the ‘Great War’.
What if Forrest Gump was a horse? I avoided this as animal cruelty, even if only simulated, really seems to effect me. I shouldn’t have worried as essentially this is a family film. Spielberg does a big visual love letter to the cinema of John Ford and the character credits of “French Horse Auctioneer” followed by “French Butcher” turn out not to be the doomed spoilers I thought they’d be. Well constructed, quite beautiful at times.
Rob Cohen directs Jason Scott Lee, Lauren Holly and Nancy Kwan in this action and romance tweaked biopic of the martial arts legend.
A quite entertaining decision has been made to crowbar a Fist Of Fury style fight sequence into the narrative every 15 minutes. So a game Jason Scott Lee has to take on his co-workers and literally his demons in stunt heavy battles. The more grounded stuff is pretty cheesy, very much the “official” and “authorised” version of a star’s life and loves. If you can get past the surviving family’s whitewash, Dragon still passes an evening nicely in a trashy sorta way.
Hiroshi Teshigahara directs Eiji Okada, Kyoko Kishida and Hiroko Ito in this Japanese arthouse drama where a holidaying school teacher finds himself trapped in a desert pit with a ready-made wife and ever encroaching avalanches of sand to deal with.
Is it the worst prison in the world? Nothing to do but fuck and dig sand? Obvious parallels to Kafka and the myth of Sisyphus and also clearly influencing future works as diverse as Paul Auster’s The Music of Chance and The Truman Show. There’s definitely an element of the leering ‘Pink Film’ here too. One stunningly horrific sequence sees our protagonist offered a chance at freedom and all he has to do is abandon his last trace of humanity, obliterate the relationship he has built with his inmate, in full view of everyone else who still knows he exists. It is a nasty, disturbing, lingering set piece of psychological horror. Eija Okada excels as an amateur entomologist, his hobby the perfect metaphor for the brutal vivarium he himself is tricked into entering. He slowly sheds his manners and civilisation, becoming as brute and uncaring as a pinned insect. An even more fascinating performance is Kyoko Kishida’s enigmatic widow. Sexually needy, she appears to be a coy domestic honeytrap at first, but just as imprisoned as him, maybe only a bit further along in mindset and understanding of her unofficial sentence. Are we in hell? Or a cynical reduction of the institution of marriage? However you interpret this clearly potent and daring work it has lost little of its power to shock over the many decades since its release. A bleak strangeness buries you.
8
Perfect Double Bill: In The Realm Of The Senses (1976)
Bobby Carroll's Movie Diary 