Zona

Silk Stalkings

Zona
By Geoff Dyer
Canongate Publishing
ISBN: 9780857861672

Um… I have no idea who Geoff Dyer is… other than that he’s the writer of this novel, Zona, unofficially subtitled on this paperback edition as A Book about a Film about a Journey to a Room, plus a fair few other novels which I may or may not have the time/opportunity to read in whatever duration is left to me in this lifetime. Since I have no idea who this chap is you may, or quite possibly may not, be wondering how I came by this literary treasure. Well…

I was in the BFI shop on the South Bank to take the opportunity to catch their two for £25 “UK Criterion” sale (plus my x% off BFI membership discount) to upgrade a few of my more ‘upgradeable’ US Criterion DVD classics. So I picked Sword Of Doom, even though I remember the ending being a little too abrupt for comfort (which is about the only thing I do remember about it, to be honest) and another of one of my favourites by my second favourite director Andrei Tarkovsky (running a close second to movie God Akira Kurosawa, of course), namely Stalker. And then something caught my eye while I was half shuffling to the vicinity of the cash register and scanning the list of extras on the back of the Tarkovsky film… I noticed it had a commentary track by somebody called Geoff Dyer, author of Zona. Since this novel sounded like something very much to do with Stalker, a film I have been championing and heralding to my friends since I first saw it sometime in the early 1980s (or possibly late 1970s, my mind is not what it used to be), I thought I’d best make enquiries.

So I did that annoying customer thing and asked the cashier if he had this book, I pointed passionately at the listing on the extras and asked if he knew anything about said potentially cine-literate masterpiece and, much to my surprise (I freely admit) he took me to a displeasingly un-dusty bookshelf and pulled said tome from its ‘way too clean and far from the romantic vision of a dusty bookshop’ housing and there you have it. A book which, on its back cover, had me reeled in straight away as it not only mentioned it was a journey through Tarkovsky’s classic but also, at some point in this volume, mentioned three way sex. So it was bound to get, not only my attention but the attention of my trusty credit card, buckling under the weight of years of film related purchases.

So I took it on holiday with me and in I plunged into what is, in some ways, the print based equivalent of a highly personalised and highly irreverent commentary track for the film in question. It’s a curious piece because, although the writer is clearly a devotee of the movie (quite understandable, it’s a great work of cinematic art) it’s done with the kind of fashionable irreverence that horror hostess with the mostest Elvira might bring to one of her well written routines about various horror and sci-fi B movies over the years.

Now, I’m going to state here for the record that, despite being hugely entertained and fascinated by Zona, I don’t 100% agree with some of this stuff Dyer says in this sideways summary of a novel. That being said, he pretty much had me from the start in that I was very pleased to see that the author, like me, much prefers Antonioni's Red Desert over what he describes as "the pure cinematic agony" of L’Avventura. So straight away we had some common ground there. And then he said of watching this great director that…

"At first there can be a friction between our expectations of time and Tarkovsky-time and this friction is increasing in the twenty-first century as we move further and further away from Tarkovsky-time towards moron-time in which nothing can last - and no one can concentrate on anything - for longer than about two seconds."

… well, this did at the very least show that the writer and I did share similarities (in some ways… not so much on others).

It is however, an entertaining read and covers any number of, sometimes quite tangential topics such as the wisdom of Milan Kundera, the words of Albert Einstein, The Italian Job and even knowledge gleaned from Enter The Dragon. The references and comments do get quite autobiographical and personal at some points but it’s always handled in a light and witty manner.

There were some moments, however, when I did heartily disagree with Dyer’s asides…

Such as when he dismisses Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist… a film I can’t remember that well which is actually dedicated to Andrew Tarkovsky and which I was perhaps a little disappointed with on it's release due to much hyped expectations of the final product… as a nonsense and diminution of cinema, citing it as a film which doesn’t really have much to say and which doesn’t go anywhere. I mean, I completely respect that this is the author’s personal response to this movie but it seems, at best, a mildly contradictory view to someone who had, in an earlier stage of the book, highlighted  Flaubert's ambition to write a novel which is free from story content and instead exists as its own phenomenom resting primarily on the style of its words as something which he can relate to, especially as filtered by Tarkovsky’s way of shooting a movie.

I also don’t agree with Dyer’s assertion that it’s extremely unlikely you can discover your favourite film or expand your cinematic horizons after a certain age, although I can certainly appreciate the logic that lead him to that conclusion.

All this being said, though, the book is full of some wonderful observations and pondering of no small value during pub gatherings.

For instance when he talks about the age of the dial phone being some kind of golden era when the index finger was afforded a dominant position in society. A dominance which has been completely superseded by the age of the thumb as the most important digit for modern day living, being as we are in the age of the mobile phone and the new dawn of social media. Although, I have to admit that the scene which prompts this observation is the moment which I personally find to be the most powerful in Tarkovsky’s movie… when the three main protagonists are cut off in ‘The Zone’ and you realise the telephone has, impossibly, been ringing for a while. For Dyer, this sequence appears to be more of a comic interlude than the powerful and somehow terrifyingly potent signifier of a strange, alien presence within The Zone, it seemed to me.

However, any suspicions I began to harbour at this point that Dyer was less of sound mind than I at first perceived, was instantly made right again when he identified that the most common regret for most middle aged or older men is that they’ve never had a threesome with two women. This seems about spot on to me and so, with this common sense conclusion, the writer’s intelligence was firmly re-established for this particular reader.

Geoff Dyer’s Zona is an absolute ‘must read’ for cinephiles and, in particular, those who have a passion for the cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky. I might add that a knowledge of the film in question, the wonderful Stalker, is… while not an absolute necessity, certainly going to give you a much richer reading experience than if you go into this blind. That being said, I’m sure those of you who don’t know the movie as well as the rest of us will still enjoy the witty observations that the writer makes available to his audience. A definite, unmissable book shelf item for me, at any rate.

Sleeping Beauty

Beauty’s Leap

Sleeping Beauty

Australia 2011

Directed by Julia Leigh

Revolver Entertainment Region 2

Julia Leigh’s debut feature Sleeping Beauty is, frankly, an absolutely delightful gem of a film and, quite possibly, a bit of a masterpiece too... though I probably misuse that word too much in the context of movies I really like and so am somewhat reticent about committing to that last conclusion.

The film tells the story of Lucy, played by the excellent Emily Browning (who was brilliant in both things I’d previously seen her in... as the little girl in Lemony Snicket’s A Series Of Unfortunate Events and as Baby Doll in Sucker Punch), who is a bit of an enigma of a character. She is both passive and assertive in equal measure... studying a course at university while struggling to pay the rent by simultaneously: waitressing at a cafe, working in an office, prostituting herself out to various men and woman, volunteering on a regular basis to have a camera shoved down her throat to take pictures from (I think that’s what was going on in those sequences) and then, as the film progresses, getting involved with an almost sinister form of organised sexual services.

As the film starts, she is seen having a tube put down her throat, which is kinda hard to watch, and all I can say is... if this is purely acting then Emily Browning is an acting genius (but I already kinda knew that) and if it’s not acting and she actually is enduring this stuff for her art... then she’s a pretty brave actress (and I already kinda knew that too... just the subject matter of this movie is enough to demonstrate her unflinching bravery to take on a certain kind of role). This, and another reminder sequence later in the picture, is intended to do two things and I have to give the writer/director absolute respect here that she managed to set up something about the character without me even realising it. One thing it does is to highlight that this girl needs money and will do absolutely anything to obtain it and the other thing, which was the covert one for me, is that she is used to holding tubing down her throat and can, therefore, hide things of a similar constituency there if the need arises.

After a while, Lucy joins an organisation, headed up by actress Rachael Blake, to take part in highly sexualised “parties” which, in the least invasive role in these beautifully decadent arrangements (which brought to my mind scenes involving Mr. Reindeer in David Lynch’s Wild At Heart), she has to very correctly serve drinks at a dinner party in her lingerie. There are some great little moments in the way she is prepared by the organisation to look exactly right for the, presumably strict, requirements of the aged male and female clientele of these sexual parties... such as having to have the shade of her lipstick exactly match the shade of her labia (which, of course, is what lipstick is all about anyway, when you go back to it’s original intention in ancient Egyptian applications and pretty much what it’s all about nowadays, in fact).

The job is extremely well payed, as is the next series of jobs she gets involved in for the organisation, where she is basically given a sleeping draft and is a sleeping, living sex doll (although the organisation allows no vaginal penetration or any marks from the clients) for pretty much the same ageing entourage from the sex parties (for want of a better description) we see earlier. The money is extremely welcome and needed (we see her celebration of the huge amount she is given for her first job when she burns a hundred dollar bill with a lighted match) but after she is marked by a cigarette burn, which I think she notices subconsciously in the back of her mind rather than by finding it implicitly, she begins to get a nagging curiosity as to what is happening to her when she... well... sleeps on company time.

I think that’s all I’m prepared to say about the story in this review because it’s the kind of film you absolutely have to discover and watch unfold for yourselves... but I will say that the direction it takes as it works its way towards the end of the film is very much set up by the lack of Lucy’s emotional reaction to the world going on around her. Not to say that she’s unemotional... her attachment to a character known only as the Birdman is established, I suspect, to show her emotional side so the audience can see her vulnerability as much as the strength of character she wears so eloquently on her sleeve. She is very much a character who suppresses these emotions, I believe, and reacts very calmly to the world around her as things which might pull the rug out from many are just seen by her as things she needs to quickly overcome.

The film is an absolute joy to behold, I have to say. Long, slow takes which are... well, they’re certainly not static, there is still a lot of camera movement in there but it’s very unassuming and all about following the characters movements or slow zooming in on them. There’s not very much in the way of projecting ahead with the camera to set up a specific establishing shot (most shots start in a cut to the main content of a scene without pre-amble) apart from in one great reveal shot (again starting off from shadowing the central character) in which there is a long slow pan to what she is witnessing, as a groggy and possibly damaged girl is helped into a car as she leaves the house where our main protagonist is about to enter... this works very effectively, I have to say, as it puts out danger signals to both Lucy and us, her audience, as it were.

The camerawork is almost, actually, voyeuristic in its window into slow digestion of the events as they happen, which of course really effectively pulls you in to an emotional investment in some of the characters and it’s coupled with a really passive lighting style, it seems to me. There’s no bright contrast in the colouration for a lot of the movie and... it’s difficult to put my finger on it here but there’s something about it which is not quite pastel tones and not quite neutral either. It would be wrong to say that it’s not in any way stylised, because it clearly is, but the whole thing is perhaps, after all, just a little more subtle than my primitive mind is able to digest in one sitting. One thing’s for sure though... if you like the visual aesthetics of directors like Andrei Tarkovsky and Wim Wenders, you’ll probably find it very easy to get into the beautifully laid back pacing of the movie and the clean compositions are just another reason to go seek out this film.

I should probably try to find some kind of fault in this film so I have something to actually criticise but, truth be told, I couldn’t find a single one. Even the ending, which reminded me almost of primal scream therapy for an emotionally repressed person, is absolutely perfect and the very last shot of the movie has implications for the main players which will resonate in your mind for a tiny while after you’ve finished watching. An absolutely hands down recommendation for me on this one. It’s hard to imagine anyone really having much of a problem with a film which, I’ve now decided having reached the end of this review... is definitely a bit of a masterpiece after all.

Mission Statement/Coming Soon

Missionary Position

“Restate my assumptions”

Maximillian Cohen, Darren Aronofsky’s PI.

I think I need to make a slight adjustment to my own, and possibly other people’s, expectations about this blog review thing I’ve got going on here. But, just to make it a little more fun (hopefully), this’ll also take the form of a “coming soon” kinda thing for future entries on these pages... as much as it will an apology of sorts.

My faith in film blogging has been shaken a little recently. That is to say, my selection process as to whether I write about a movie has had to undergo a very minimal rethink... here’s what happened...

On Halloween weekend I, and a few friends, went to a special screening at my local “art complex” although, to be fair, complex is a bit overblown for the kind of building it is. Anyway, we were there for a double bill screening of Universal’s 1931 film Frankenstein and their 1935 sequel Bride Of Frankenstein. It was also meant to, not just celebrate the spirit of Halloween, but also to honour the memory of a famous local celebrity of days gone by who used to attend my school, namely... Boris Karloff.

All was well until the first film screened... they’d squashed (or stretched, depending on your point of view) the original 4:3 aspect ratio of the movies into a 1.85:1 aspect ratio to fit the size of their screen (this film was made before the traditional widescreen process as we know it today had been invented, don’t forget). This resulted in a load of fat, bloated actors looking like they were walking around the set of a crazy fun house... ushered in, not by the traditional Universal globe but by a Universal rugby ball... or so it seemed from its shape.

Now I went out to complain about the films being improperly framed but was fobbed off and told, in more or less these words, that they had decided to show them in an aspect ratio distorted to fill their screen... rather than actually show the film properly. Nothing was changed and people were forced to watch this painful mockery or leave.

Now I sent a lengthy letter of complaint to a couple of my local newspapers and was happy to see that they’d both published my angry and, it must be said, sizeable rant against the “cinema-nazis” and their “crimes against filmanity”. Hopefully the people responsible will take heed of some of the points I raised in my letter.

However, this left me with a dilemma because I wanted to review the two films for this blog... but hadn’t actually seen them (this time around) in their best light. Now I’ve seen both films a fair number of times (at least into double figures) and I could probably write a fairly accurate and honest appraisal of both these films in my sleep without even bothering to watch them again I suspect (and please, no comments about the blogs coming out more comprehensible if I stuck to writing them in my sleep :-7 ) but the point was... should I?

I thought about my original intentions with this blog and how I wanted to ensure that every film and TV show I watched would be reviewed here (along with the majority of the books I was reading and a smattering of music reviews when I felt brave enough) but I then thought, rather than write about these films right now... I would save these two for a future year (maybe next year, maybe the one after) and watch them again properly... but this time in context as an occasional running series on all the classic Universal Horror movies of the 30s, 40s and 50s in chronological order of their release... so readers new to the material could get a sense of the progression (or possibly digression and regression, depending on whether you love these movies as much as me or not) and context with the series of films. So that’s what I’m going to do...

So there you have it... my apologies for not reviewing two films I’ve seen recently... but they will go back on the list and be done properly, rather than write a review based on the hideous screening I saw at the end of last month.

Actually, series’ of reviews are something I want to get into more in the coming months/years so, here’s a little preview of some of the things I hope to achieve on the blog sooner or later...

For one thing I want to continue to watch and promote small independent films which have no or little mainstream commercial appeal... they’re definitely not in it for the money... they’re in it purely for the art (for once). So films by writer/directors like Rouzbeh Rashidi and actor/writer/directors like @eJamesDevereaux are something I’m going to continue to promote here on my blog... and hopefully Leilani Holmes will make some more of her excellent movies and I’ll be able to watch and review them here. In fact, I’m hoping to get an interview with Devereaux on my blog sometime in the very near future and also, if she’ll still consent, an interview with gothic horror photographer and jewellery designer Amanda Norman at some point either late this year or, more likely, sometime in the New Year.

I’d also, as I said, like to get into some reviews which review a large body of work over a period of time... so in addition to the aforementioned Universal Horror classics... I’d like to do something like a serialised review for the complete feature films of Akira Kurosawa, another series on Andrei Tarkovsky (including The Killers and The Steamroller & The Violin) and another on a man who I personally believe to be the greatest “living” writer/director, Mr. Hal Hartley .

And don’t worry... I’ve still got the cinematic trash and exploitation covered... gialli, b-movies, blaxploitation, westerns, sci-fi shockers... it’s all in a pile on the floor waiting to be watched. So don’t be surprised if you find... along with all the reviews of what I’m seeing currently at the cinema... and alongside of the Bergmans and the Kieslowski’s... stuff like Invasion Of The Crab Monsters, Galaxina, Blood Sabbath (on the recommendation of Hypnogoria... so blame him) and Four Flies On Grey Velvet (of which I seem to have now acquired four different prints of... not bad for a film which has only had a commercial DVD release in the last few years).

So there you have it... I’m going to keep on blogging with some interesting titles to review to suit, hopefully, lots of different tastes (I’m nothing if not eclectically post-modern)... so as long as you brilliant readers continue to pop by every now and again and check out the odd review or two (and some will no doubt be odder than others)... I’ll keep churning them out for your entertainment and, perhaps once in a while, enlightenment.

Thanks for reading... a new review coming soon!

Russian Around Sweden

The Sacrifice 1986 Sweden

Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky

Artificial Eye Region 2

You know... I have hundreds, maybe thousands, of favourite movies and a fair few favourite directors. I look at all kinds of movies which run the gamut of styles of what some people might like to consider “high art” films right down to what some people might say is the trashiest of trash movies. And there’s certainly no argument that all those different kinds of films exist and emit a certain aesthetic sensibility which allow for such mind-numbingly obvious categorising to take place.

As for me though... I don’t discriminate. Any movie from Fellini to the lowliest porn movie is an artistic experience. Any movie where even the most basic artistic decisions like “where do I put the camera?”, “which direction do I point the camera?”, “do I turn some lighting on?” etc are demonstrating at least a very basic artistic sensibility in their creation and therefore, to this raggedy old viewer anyway, they are a piece of art.

You may argue, if you like, that some demonstrate the difference between good and bad art - and I wouldn’t necessarily argue with that as long as you will also be as good as to remember that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and we all respond to things differently. But I don’t negotiate with terrorists who insist that any one kind of movie is inherently better than another. They can try to argue that stuff with me if they like but I’ll firmly stand my ground, restate my argument and happily leave them to play those games with more gullible viewers than I.

I’m happy to play favourites, however. And so I can unhesitatingly say that there are two directors, both sadly no longer with us, whose work I prize more than any others and if I was somehow forced to stick my neck out on the subject then I’d happily argue that these two have probably produced only what could be described as the greatest cinematic art of our time. The two film-makers who pretty much make a “masterpiece” with every film they turned their hand to. Those two directors are Akira Kurosawa and Andrei Tarkovsky and, again, if I was in the neck-sticking game then I’d really have to say that Kurosawa is my personal favourite... but Andrei Tarkovsky, the poet of the cinema, is certainly a very close second on my list of the greatest celluloid artists.

Now Tarkovsky had a troubled life. He struggled to make films in the Soviet Union with many films taking him ages to complete because of the oppressive system of making movies in Russia at that time. In fact, in his lifetime he made only seven feature length films (8 if you count his final major student film The Steamroller and the Violin which is really worth a look) and there was a lot of artistic struggle and turmoil going on pretty much for all of those as far as I can make out. His last two movies were not made in Russia. The excellent Nostalgia was shot in Italy and completed with money from Italy after Mosfilm withdrew from the project. By the time he had finished preparing his last film ready to begin shooting in Sweden, he had decided he was defecting and he never went back to Russia again. His son was not allowed to join him but he was released from the country to visit him in hospital in Paris after his father was diagnosed with terminal cancer... his son also had to pick up some of the many awards which this last film won. Tarkovsky shot The Sacrifice in 1985 but died at the age of 54 on December 29th 1986... the same year The Sacrifice was released in the cinema.

Now it’s been a couple of decades since I last/first saw The Sacrifice. It was never my favourite Tarkovsky film... which is my roundabout way of saying that it’s my least favourite Tarkovsky film and certainly the one which I’d never rewatched at least a few times, unlike all his other “masterpieces”. I think I may have just been OD’d on Tarkovsky at the time because I remember seeing this and at least two others, Mirror and Nostalgia, within the same week. Mirror and Nostalgia both left an impression on me at the time but The Sacrifice left the wrong kind of impression in gentle comparison with those two.

Due to the wonderful modern English phenomenon known as “the HMV sale” I decided that the price was finally right... err... I mean I decided the time had finally come to give The Sacrifice another chance and I’m so glad I did.

It’s a long film, most of Tarkovsky’s are, and nothing much really happens (as only Tarkovsky, Ingmar Bergman and Wim Wenders do best) but, like most of his films, it’s a reflective and meditative piece of visual poetry that poses questions and inundates the viewer with little truths (not facts, truths... see Raiders of the Lost Ark for a more forceful stated distinction between the two) and allows you to gradually feel the burden and consequences of the characters as they meet the quiet challenges which permeate the depths of their being.

In The Sacrifice, a retired actor who has become a writer is celebrating his birthday. Some of his family are there for his celebration and so too is the local postman who is a good friend and who turns out to be the shrewdest and most intelligent character of the movie... like a Shakespearean jester, you know he’s the one who really has his finger on the pulse of life. During the Birthday announcements a TV newsflash announces World War Three. It’s likely that everyone will be bombed to bits very soon and that the safest thing anyone can do is just stay at home. The TV then goes dead and the reality of the situation is forcefully punctuated by the sound of jets as they fly overhead and shake the house in their wake.

The writer prays to God, for the first time in his life to reverse this war and in return he will renounce his life and never talk to his family again, his sacrifice to avert disaster (the concept of a gift always being a sacrifice is referenced earlier by the postman character). Meanwhile, the postman tells the man he can divert disaster by sleeping with one of his cleaners... who also happens to be the local witch (in one of those wonderful and astonishing Tarkovsky magical moments, you see the writer and the witch sleeping together, levitating in the air above the bed). And that’s as much as I’m going to tell you about what happens to this one because if movies like this float your boat... you won’t want to know what the writer does the next morning.

What I will say is that all of Tarkovsky’s work is visually astonishing and, on this one, he has Sven Nykvist, Bergmans cinematographer on the movie. So you can be sure the movie looks stunning.He also has a couple of Bergman’s regular actors... but in some ways that’s neither here nor there as Tarkovsky was never a slouch for getting the absolute best out of his raw materials on set. And you’d have to be a pretty amazing actor or crew member anyway to keep up with Tarkovsky’s style of shooting and editing. Like his other films the movie is put together mostly with takes/shots lasting between 5 and 15 minutes long. You have to be very rehearsed and very skilled to be able to pull this kind of stuff off I would imagine, especially when you are following characters who start off in one location at the beginning of a shot and end up somewhere completely different by the end of the shot.

There’s no Criterion edition of this one available as yet so I went for the excellent Artificial Eye DVD which is a two disc edition. I haven’t watched the second disc yet but it’s a movie about the making of the movie and of the harrowing rebuild and reshoot of the final sequence (which I shall not spoil here and leave you to discover for yourselves). I would also heartily recommend Artifical Eye’s excellent two disc edition - The Andrei Tarkovsky Companion.

Like all of Tarkovsky’s films, I wouldn’t flinch at recommending his final movie to most serious film enthusiasts. I would say, however, that if you’re not used to Tarkovsky’s directorial style, you may want to start off your journey into the poetry of celluloid with one of his more accessible films like Solaris, Stalker or Mirror. Whatever you decide to do... don’t miss out on Tarkovsky... he’s one of the greats.

Tarkovsky’s War

Ivan’s Childhood 1962 USSR

Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky

Artificial Eye DVD Region 2

Please note: I am reviewing Tarkovsky’s movie from the Region 2 DVD here because I saw it cheap in a sale and jumped at the chance to upgrade from my old VHS copy because I’d unfortunately forgotten that Criterion had released a version of it in the US. I can say, without having viewed it, that the Criterion edition is almost certainly the best option to go with and that I would have abstained from parting with my £7 and gone with the US version if I’d remembered its existence. The Artificial Eye version seems to suffer from the same problem that a number of foreign language films seem to suffer from over here in the UK - which is that you cannot remove the subtitles if you want to study the power and beauty of a shot without the typography getting in the way... a big setback for these kinds of films, especially on films like this which are shot in a 1.33:1 aspect ratio and therefore intrude fully over the shot.

Andrei Tarkovsky is one of my favourite directors (second only to Akira Kurosawa in my book) and richly deserved his reputation as the great poet of cinema. Ivan’s Childhood was his first feature length film and also one of his most commercially successful. It is based on a short story by Vladimir Bogomolov and tells the rather grim tale of Ivan, a 12 year old boy orphaned by the conflict of war who is used, guiltily, as a child spy against the nazis in World War 2.

Tarkovsky is one of those rare directors who’s mise-en-scene is so compelling that the subject matter really doesn’t matter. Each and every shot composition in his films look like an utterly beautiful still photograph... and Ivan’s Childhood with it’s sometimes dreamy, sometimes stark black and white photography is no exception. The opening shot of Ivan in a forest looking through a spider’s web is just for starters in the beauty stakes... it just is such an amazing movie to look at. Like all Tarkovsky’s films. This is the kind of movie that the home viewing medium of DVD was made for.

The sound design was a little alienating at times, not sure if this was deliberate or not but everything seemed quite uncomplicated and simple... there are two sound options on this disc... Dolby Digital or original mono... I obviously opted for the original mono. C’mon DVD companies! It wasn’t going to sound like Dolby Digital when it was released into cinemas in ‘62 so I’m damn well not going to watch it like that now. Next you’ll be trying to sell me heavily doctored Blu-Ray prints which lose the grain of the film and make everything look like a larger than life cartoon-like, piece of fluff, bad CGI experiment gone wrong instead of the original movie! Oh, wait...

Anyway, another slightly off kilter thing about this movie is the overscoring of certain scenes with music which is quite a bit overly dramatic and romanticised for both the subject matter and, indeed, for the way that subject matter is represented visually. I don’t remember how much control Tarkovsky had over the way his movies were presented but I’m guessing not very much apart from the two films he made abroad. Most of the film plays with no musical score but the only time it is really effective and appropriately chilling is when two characters ride a boat back from behind enemy lines.

But the weight and power of the visuals, the excellent performances and the fine script easily outweigh the film's musical and sound distractions. There are a few flashbacks and dream sequences which would normally be in stark contrast to the way the rest of the footage is presented, but everything is presented so beautifully that you will be into these sequences before you even realise you have broken off from the main narrative for a while... and maybe that’s the point. One such sequence where Ivan rides a cart full of apples with his sister uses back projection for the forest background, but no attempt is made to hide this as the back projection is printed as a negative image and contrasts surreally with the foreground footage. A neat little trick that I can’t, off the top of my head, remember being done in other movies (I’m sure that five other examples will suddenly present themselves to my memory five minutes after this review goes live).

Ivan’s Childhood is quite a simple little film for Tarkovsky... the texture and density of the narrative structure is nowhere near his later films. It’s all there in the shot, though. Texture and depth like you don’t see in many director’s works on such a consistent level (maybe Mario Bava). If you like the sheer poetry and beauty of the visual image presented to you in crisp and stunning black and white photography then Ivan’s Childhood should definitely be on your movie hit list.

Three Colours: Blood Red

Let The Right One In 2008 Sweden

Directed by Tomas Alfredson

Momentum DVD Region 2

Let The Right One In

Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

By Johan Söderqvist Moviescoremedia MM508022

Glad I finally caught up to the DVD release of this movie. Been a while since I saw it at the cinema and at that time I hadn’t had the benefit of having read the source novel by John Alvide Lindqvist, who also wrote the screenplay. Actually I read the novel last summer and I have to say that I’m glad I went into the movie blind. The novel was okay and the movie adaptation is not unlike the best of movie adaptations considering there were whole characters and subplots left out of the film version.

I actually prefer the movie in many respects and I think the writer and director were very wise in choosing to leave out the amount they did because, although I’m sure a lot of the excised material could have easily been accommodated in a two hour feature... you wouldn’t have been able to ramble along at the same pace that this movie has and that would have been very much to it’s detriment.

There are also things that are ever so slightly alluded to in the movie which you won’t necessarily pick up on unless you know the characters from the book and I’m pretty sure that this has been done to raise the commercial profile of the film and lessen risk at the box office more than anything else. Like the fact that as the burgeoning love affair between the twelve year old Oskar and Eli, the vampire “girl” who has been twelve years old for a great many years now, grows throughout the running time... it is not made clear that Eli is in fact a permanently young, castrated “boy” vampire who chooses to pass himself off as a girl. When Eli in the movie twice alludes that she’s “not a girl”, the general interpretation of that... with myself and the other people who I know have seen this film, is to think... no you’re not a girl, you’re a vampire. The sexual identity of the vampire is never really called into question but once you’ve read the novel these little passing references take on a more significant meaning.

It’s all pretty meaningless anyway because the film is an absolute treat for the senses. The film starts with a shot of snow so it had me right from the opening. I’m a sucker for good snow shots. But the framing and lighting and subdued colours and sheer elegance of the shot designs are nothing short of visually stunning... shot after shot after shot. They feel like they’ve been ripped ruthlessly from the lense of a Krzysztof Kieslowski movie like The Double Life of Veronique or one of his Three Colours trilogy and then delicately spliced into this little masterpiece. Alfredson is a director who’s not afraid to use long takes and to use medium and long shots as opposed to close ups to tell the story. Good for him. Characters can walk off frame or be out of focus or be seen as a reflection and the director never once flinches at going for the jugular when it comes to camera placement. The shots are deceptively simple and are just genuinely blinding. For example, there’s one where a dark green pastel room is framed by a red wall on the left and by a red chair and wall on the right... it sounds like something out of an Argento movie... but it’s closer in subtlety to something Andrei Tarkovsky or Hal Hartley or the aforementioned Krzysztof Kieslowski would have shot.

The score too, by Johan Söderqvist (which I’m listening to as I type) is a great achievement. At times subdued and spare but not afraid to swell up into a passage of orchestral beauty when the mood is called for. One of the most genuinely beautiful and intelligent scores of the last ten years. Definitely a treat for the ears and if moviescoremedia have any of their 500 limited edition CDs left, it’s worth checking out. Or you could always purchase it as a download from itunes if you are so inclined. Seriously worth a listen.

In many ways the score for this movie seems to perform the same kind of function that Zbigniew Preisner’s score used to produce for Kieslowski. And yeah, sorry to push the metaphor again but I think I’m going to have to go on record now as saying... to all fans of the genius of Polish cinema...seriously... if Krzysztof Kieslowski had ever deigned to address the subject matter of blood drinking vampires in one of his films... Let The Right One In is what it would have looked and felt like.

The UK DVD has a commentary track by both the director and the writer (who also wrote the novel). I haven’t the time to listen to this right now but you can bet that it’s worth listening to.

For anyone who is truly a fan of the art of cinema... this film will help you to remember why you fell in love with film in the first place.