High Life

Semen Meringue

High Life
2018 UK/France/Germany/Poland/USA
Directed by Claire Denis
UK cinema release print.

If I’d had seen High Life when I was ten to twelve years old, it would have been an absolutely classic movie to me.

However, I’m not ten and... it’s not.

I’ll explain that comment by the time I get to the end of this little review, I’m sure but, I think in all honesty I’d have to call this as being a fairly interesting failure of a film. I’ve wanted to watch a film directed by Claire Denis for quite some time now and... I just wish it hadn’t been this one.

Certainly part... but only a small part... of the problem, for me, is lead actor Robert Pattinson. I just can’t get the hang of him and while he, kind of, holds his own in this one... it really is centred around his character and, apart from a toddler, it’s only him on his own for the first twenty minutes or so. Then, once he starts flashing backwards (and other ways) to moments in the story, what there is of it, we get to meet some of the other characters. Two of them are played by actresses I really like too... the always brilliant Juliette Binoche and the, relatively, new to the scene but already very interesting actress Mia Goth. However, Pattinson is kinda okay in this but, even with some great co-stars for some of the scenes, the wonderfully sombre and memory driven tone of the movie is kinda wrecked by a lack of follow through on the part of the story, I felt.

Also, it does feel like a bizarrely, over eclectic, post modern pop video in terms of it seeming like an empty knock off of other great films which the director maybe admired along the way.

Okay, so the story set up is quite good. Death row convicts are given the opportunity to instead go into space to try and create life in the wombs of the females and get that life to survive... via sperm donations from the male crew. Bearing in mind the preciousness of their fluid since the ship’s doctor, played by Binoche, is not having very good results at keeping the fetuses and sometimes their mothers alive, one wonders why the crew also have a recreational “fuck box” which is, pretty much, this film’s version of the ‘orgasmatron’ in Woody Allen’s Sleeper. Or maybe it was just another way of harvesting fluid... I’m not sure. And, of course, it’s a ship full of convicts... including the authority figure played by Binoche... so what could possibly go wrong then?

The film is slowly paced, which is fine... I prefer that to the fast paced, cause and effect headlong rush of a lot of American movies but... I dunno, it feels like there’s a lot of work going on for so little reward. There’s a nice point, to be fair, where the identity of one of the characters is revealed and you realise the structure of the film was a little more convoluted than perhaps one first realised. There’s also an extraordinarily nice visual moment, also included in the trailer and as the title card goes up, of corpses floating in space but perhaps this sequence and the general structure of the film is one of the reasons I was less engaged than I should be with the movie. Since you already know the majority of the crew die, seeing their back story, including Mia Goth’s bizarrely crazy character, didn’t let me invest any time or let me empathise with the cast. Not that I was going to root for a bunch of characters who are at the extreme criminal end of the spectrum anyway. So maybe that’s why I just wasn’t that into it.

Also, this is a film that really wears its influences on its sleeve and becomes almost like a humourless echo of Carpenter’s Dark Star mixed with Silent Running and re-filtered through Tarkovsky’s humbling adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris. It seems obvious that the creative team here are more than just a little fond of these movies and, certainly, the way Pattinson keeps remembering flashes of his childhood as his crimes become revealed seem like they were lifted straight from the cinema of Tarkovsky. Alas, it also feels like a cheap facsimile and even the corridor sets seem a bit more do-it-yourself and less ‘space worthy’ than you might want. At least, that’s the way it seemed to me. And this is why I suspect very young audiences will respond to this film a lot more enthusiastically than people out of their early teens... because they probably haven’t got around to watching the key inspirational source movies to know that this is almost a second hand experience as portrayed in this film.

The one saving grace is maybe the music, which I really liked and which is, thankfully, available from Milan as a CD. Although, to be honest, I really didn’t need to hear Pattinson singing on the end credits song. The score seems pretty good and appropriate to the pacing of the film though and I will definitely be picking this one up at some point.

Other than that, though... not really impressed with High Life, to be honest, although, as I said, I reckon the kids will love it. Worth going for the music and some of the key performances but not something I could get attached to at either an emotional or technical level, it has to be said. What is on the screen is good and, mostly, competently executed but... it feels less rewarding than the films it seems artistically descended from. I still want to see some of this director’s other work though which, judging from the word of mouth on this one, are possibly more original than High Life.

Ghost In The Shell

Carry On Up The Cyber

Ghost In The Shell
USA 2017 Directed by Rupert Sanders 
UK cinema release print.

Wow. Where to start with Ghost In The Shell, I wonder.

Well, I can start by confirming it was a 1989 Manga which was later turned into a Japanese anime... first as a movie and then as a series of TV shows. What I can conclude from that is that it must have been very popular and, in fact, it was certainly popular enough that even I knew of it, though, as it happens, I’ve never read the manga or seen any of those particular anime myself. So, you know, in terms of whether it’s a good adaptation of the original manga or not, I have no way of saying.

I do know, however, that while I am okay with enjoying various manga such as Lone Wolf and Cub and Lady Snowblood, I don’t seem to really get on with anime, truth be told. That being said, I’ve only seen about three of them... the first being Akira, not long after it was first released. Akira, it has to be said, left me cold and my relationship to anime didn’t improve when I saw Wicked City... which was when I realised that, although anime were filled with good ideas, they rarely made for a good, all round coherent and contained story and seemed content, probably by choice, to just be a jumble of half formed ideas with a bit of sex and violence thrown in.

That being said, I liked the anime Metropolis (again based on a Manga inspired but, as it happens, having nothing to do with Fritz Lang’s silent masterpiece) and liked the way the music and story on that one fitted together in a much more satisfying whole. Still anime are not my number one go to entertainment and that’s just the way I am with them. So it would seem unlikely that I’d want to go see an American,  live action adaptation of one but... you know what... I’m so glad I saw this one. Based on the strength of starring Scarlett Johannson who I like a lot (yeah, I know, I’ll address the casting issue a little later but some of you won’t like what I have to say about that, I suspect), I found myself getting hooked in by the trailer and trekked out to see this one on the second day of release, which was a Friday evening. I was quite shocked to find the cinema two thirds empty, even on the 3D showing but... well, we’ll see what box office this takes.

As I said, I don’t know much about the original manga or the anime but judging from the film they both wear their influences prominently displayed on their sleeve because, honestly, I don’t think you would be able to get to the gorgeous visual style of this movie without being a big fan of Ridley Scott’s greatest masterpiece Blade Runner (which I reviewed here). Itself influenced, one supposes, by the emerging cyberpunk movement in science fiction at the time (which was basically still fifties science fiction but dressed up in new technology and having, seemingly, more freedom with the evolution of modern abstractions of technology, from what I can deduce) as much as Philip K. Dick's source novel, the visual style of the 1982 classic can be seen in this new version of Ghost In The Shell quite prominently. The world inhabited by Scarlett Johansson’s character, Major, being a direct descendent of that visual style in the sense of piling on more of the same and making it a bit more holographic in the way in which advertising embeds itself into the architectural structure of the environment.

I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if various crew members were huge fans of Blade Runner because, if you’ve seen the movie enough times (I must have seen it near to treble figures by this point in my life), you will notice little samples of sound coupled with the odd, stray musical note which will set off a little rush of Pavlovian joy, triggered by certain similar moments in this movie and... I’m pretty sure that’s deliberate. So what we have here is a film which feels like an ever so slightly less emotional, hopped up on acid, actionised version of Blade Runner, only told from the replicant’s viewpoint... in this case the robot (the shell of the title) which houses the ghost or spirit of the human character who has had her brain put inside the titular casing.

And that is absolutely fine.

I had a real blast with this movie, which envelops and surprises the viewer at every turn. I particularly liked that in a typically post-humanistic culture in which people are using cybernetic implants of all kinds, the movie was able to reveal sides of the various characters which we didn’t realise existed until, say, somebody takes the front of their eyes off, revealing the prosthetic enhancement within. It’s nicely paced and, although the last twenty minutes seem a little flat and less like an action packed denouement, overall the tone and spirit of the movie seduce the viewer into an experience which, frankly, I would like to see more of by the way of sequels.

The editing is fine and the scoring credited to Clint Mansell and Lorne Balfe, both composers I like, seemed pretty spot on and interesting to me. Hope this gets some kind of CD release soon because I really want to grab this one.

The acting cast is great as well.

Pilou Asbæk as Batou is amazing, Danusia Samal is a shiny, brightness who doesn’t quite get enough of a chance to glitter as much as she could, as is Chin Han and, of course, we have two acting giants in this movie too. First up is the great Juliette Binoche as Dr. Ouelet, who really brings weight to the movie, as you’d suspect. The other giant being Zatoichi himself, the legendary director and actor 'Beat' Takeshi Kitano, who brings some baggage with him in some ways because, if I was the lead villain in this piece, I’d know enough not to try and mess with this guy and take him out so easily with a bunch of machine guns. Kitano is always going to win.

And then we have Scarlett Johansson herself... an actress I’ve admired for years since first seeing her in the absolutely astonishing Ghost World and whose career I’ve followed in films such as her Marvel movies as the Black Widow and, of course, her absolutely stand out role in the Scottish movie Under The Skin (reviewed here). Here she does an absolutely first class job as Major, with lovely, stilted movements at times betraying her ‘shell’ while at the same time giving us a solid presence of the humanity of her ‘ghost’ throughout the picture... it’s a nice piece of work. And I know what you probably want me to address at this point so... let’s get to it.

Whitewashing, as it’s known at the moment, is the accusation that male and female caucasian actors should not be portraying people of other origins in movies. I used to have that view sometimes, when it somehow suited me too but, honestly, it’s a bad standpoint to take. I’ll show you why I believe this using myself as an example.

When I was a kid I used to love the Charlie Chan movies and anyone who follows my blog and reads my semi-regular Chan reviews will know I still do. Of all the actors to portray Charlie Chan in US cinematic history, none of them were Chinese. Warner Oland was Swedish, Sidney Toler was from Missouri, Roland Winters was from Boston and Peter Ustinov was born in Swiss Cottage in London. However, the first two of these, at the very least, were absolutely excellent Charlie Chans but... okay... lets get in to the “I’m not a racist but...” game.

When I first saw the Daredevil movie with Ben Affleck, I couldn’t understand why the heck the Kingpin was suddenly a black guy. Same thing with Nick Fury in the other Marvel movies... how was the always brilliant Samuel L. Jackson playing the white guy who, as Sergeant Fury, headed the Howling Commandos in the Second Word War? It made no sense. But you know what? It didn’t exactly spoil my enjoyment of the movies or of the characters these actors were skillfully portraying. I got similarly outraged when Jennifer Garner, of Texas, was chosen to play the Greek Marvel character Elektra but... guess what? She did a great job.

And to even put another spin on this whole racial thing going on at the moment, there’s this new ‘outrage’ about Black British actors like the amazing John Boyega taking ‘American’ roles in films like the new Star Wars trilogy. Seriously? What is going on here? What happened to the tolerant and united society I thought we all lived in.

The thing about actors is.. they do acting.

Let’s boil that down to what it really is... they are professional liars in that they pretend to be someone they’re not to give you an interesting, enlightening or entertaining experience (and when it all comes together, preferably all three of those things). If you’re going to say they suddenly shouldn’t be pretending to be certain other kinds of people based on the colour of their skin then the issue is more to do with you than them, I suspect.

And lets also look at it in economic terms. I would have maybe picked someone like Rinko Kikuchi to play Major in this. She’s pretty good and I’m pretty sure she’d have done a great job. But I bet they wouldn’t have been able to raise half the budget for the movie without having a major star name like Scarlett Johansson involved and, so, you have to take a step back and think... if someone like Johansson didn’t get involved in this thing, there’s a strong possibility that a movie like Ghost In The Shell wouldn’t even have gotten financed at all. So, you know, have a think about this kind of thing. Also, it's strongly implied, if not spelled out, in this movie that Major's shell looks nothing like her original human body so... who says it has to be looking Japanese? Scarlett certainly doesn't.

And I wonder, just as a little last thought on the subject, how many people who have been calling for a female or black James Bond have been accusing Hollywood of whitewashing? I’m pretty sure that Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, would start spinning at dazzling speeds in his grave if such a thing happened, judging by the tone of the writing he did on these books in the 1950s... which were ‘of a time’ so leave them alone. And, you know, I’m not above feeling strongly about this stuff myself. If Hollywood tried to make a white Shaft, I would be fairly cross about it, for sure. The thing is, though, creative projects have a lot of things which the general public don’t even see and casting the wonderful Ms Johansson as Major in this is... well it’s not a major problem and, frankly, a lot of the people making a fuss about this kind of thing are coming off as either hypocritical or naive about the history of this phenomenon, it seems to me.

So anyway, there you go. I don’t want to start a debate on this stuff but I think it’s important that people who are throwing out accusations like this shouldn’t endanger box office on what turns out to be a really great little movie. Some of them, if they saw the film for themselves, might really have a good time with it... truth be told. Of course, that’s easy to say for someone like me to say, who will be turning 50 next year so, you know, hopefully some of these people will start to develop into well rounded human beings and be less stressed about all this stuff happening in the world. Because if you are going to let something like the casting of an actress get you so enraged then you will probably have a lot worse coping skills for struggling with a lot of the other, much more terrible and unfair stuff which life throws your way in your future. The world is a really terrible place at the moment... so you need to learn to swim above this kind of stuff and learn what that old saying means... “live and let live”.

And that’s me done on this one. Ghost In The Shell is a superb, almost masterpiece movie which will give you a fully immersive experience into the cyberpunk world popularised by authors such as William Gibson. My one possible complaint being that it wasn’t maybe as hard edged in the goriness department as the subject matter maybe called for... I think it could have stood going for a slightly higher rating. Other than that, though... if you like big budget special effects movies done, mostly, right then you won’t want to miss out on this one at the cinema. Great stuff.

Elles

Elles A’ Poppin’

Elles
France/Poland/Germany 2011
Directed by Malgorzata Szumowska
Artificial Eye Blu Ray Zone B

Elles is another movie I acquired as a blind buy because a) it was very cheap on Blu Ray in Fopp and b) it had a striking image of Juliette Binoche on the front cover. Binoche is an actress whose cinematic presence I first became acquainted with on an “after college trip” to the ODEON cinema in Shaftsbury Avenue, London, back in 1988 to see Philip Kaufman’s marvellous adaptation of Milan Kundera’s great novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. It was in that screening that I fell in love with both the young Binoche and her female co-star in the movie, Lena Olin. I’ve been following her work, casually, on and off over the intervening years but, for me, she is one of the all-time great French actresses and so a quick read of the back cover convinced me to pick this one up off the shelf and bring it back home with me.

In the film, Juliette plays Anne, a working wife and mother, who is writing an article for ELLE magazine on the subject of student prostitution. She is aided in this by a series of interviews with two specific, young prostitutes - Charlotte, played by Anaïs Demoustier and Alicja, played by Joanna Kulig - and the movie is a collection of scenes from a regular day or two of Anna coping with juggling work, a dinner party for her husband’s boss and her problematic relationship with her two sons, while at the same time interspersing the incidents that make up her days with both extracts from the interviews with the two girls in various locations and, more so, flashbacks to the actual encounters and lives the girls lead... all presented cross cut in a, slightly, non-linear fashion, although all the three types of footage being cross cut are sliced into segments which run linearly in their own chronology, if that makes sense. So you have five different timelines - Anna, Anna interviewing Charlotte, Charlotte’s life as a working girl, Alicja and Alicja’s life as a working girl - all crosscut with each other but still running in order in terms of their footage in relation to themselves.

It must have been an absolute nightmare to edit but... at no time are you ever really confused in the ‘narrative structure’ (and I use that term very loosely) of the piece and it all makes sense and fits together beautifully well. Which is amazing considering that the way in which various shots are taken are also quite different. For instance, a well staged shot following a smooth and fluid pan will be pitched straight against a more naturalistic, hand held style of camera work within the same segment. Furthermore... some of those long, smooth camera shots will get to a point in a scene, to reach a particularly beautiful composition, and then suddenly there will then be camera movement on a small reaction to something a character has done, like Anna taking a pace or two backward within a master shot and the camera will just be rearranged slightly to bring her back into the centre of the frame. Which is marvellous and, I would have thought, incredibly difficult to make work with all the different styles of shot being sewn together in the editing to make something so completely understandable... but it does it so well.

Scenes are quite confidently mixed and matched: flashbacks to Binoche and her subjects in the past while simultaneously seeing the story line of each of the girls as it progresses on a parallel to Binoche and independent of her, creating an ambience of mood which, again despite the shuffling around, doesn’t lose the emotional veracity of the piece or dilute its rendition due to the bouncing back and forth between shot content. The director magnificently coaxes the audience into accepting the overall flow of the piece, independent to the format of the content, without imposing any judgement on, or desire for, a more linear narrative flow.

Another thing the director seems to be doing quite often in this, and it’s quite possibly not a conscious thing but just an accidental occurrence, is to contrast scenes comprising of long shots with others in extreme close up... it’s quite refreshing that the director is not afraid to get right in the face of her actresses and actors in this film. Again, despite the two very different levels of intimacy achieved by the distance of the camera to her subjects, she seems to make it all work pretty well.

In terms of content, I’m pleased to say that the writer and director of this presents the two prostitutes as intelligent and emotional beings. It doesn’t make any judgement on their chosen profession and this is a good thing. As the narrative goes on it becomes clear that Anna’s original, cynical stance on the pitfalls and rewards of the girl’s chosen routes becomes more accepting and she begins to see them as friends and feels something of a void in her own life in comparison... at least that’s the way I saw things and, like many films, it’s open and resilient enough to handle a certain amount of interpretation. The two girl’s lifestyles are seen as not without danger but certainly as something which entails more freedom and ownership than Anna’s current home situation... which is a good view to take. It also has some telling details of the truth of the working practicalities of the girl’s lives. For instance, having two phones - one for clients and one for personal calls. I used to know a sex worker... not a prostitute actually but, in most ways, she did a job that certainly qualifies as sex work... and she apparently used the same kind of arrangement with her phones... so that struck me as a nice truism.

While the film is showing both the pros and cons of being a pro, and not making any real judgements from the audience in terms of pitching the content of the girls at any rate (the trajectory of Juliet Binoche’s character is, as I mentioned earlier, a little different in emotional tone) it doesn’t shy away from showing the graphic sexual content one might associate with the chosen profession of Charlotte and Alicja... which can only be a good thing and is a gutsy move on part of the writer and director not to veer away from what might be, to some, fairly challenging imagery in certain sequences. I was a little bemused at one point because the film, fairly early on in the narrative, shows one of the girls receiving a golden shower... and that’s something I believe is deemed uncertifiable by the BBFC in UK releases of movies, be it at the cinema or on home viewing. However, it’s definitely in here and so I’m wondering how this release got away with it, frankly. Certainly not complaining, but wondering how on earth Artificial Eye were allowed to include that content in their release with no intervention by our horrible censors. A neat trick, no doubt.

And so we have a film where the boldness of the content is not let down by either the acting - everybody, including Binoche of course, is absolutely awesome - and nor does the mise en scene and the editing let it down either. In fact, it gets quite dazzling on both fronts.

At one point, for instance, there’s a brilliant sequence where the director upends our perceptions of what we are seeing by the way the tone of two scenes involving one character’s interactions are presented in the edit. We think one of the girls is with her regular boyfriend, because the relationship between the two is so respectful and loving... and later we find that he is just another paying customer. In contrast, we are immediately given a scene of her with her 'real' boyfriend, which is the less easy going of the two relationships by far. It soon becomes clear that he doesn't know how she earns her money... which strikes me as another truism for a certain portion of sex workers, I suspect.

Another great piece of cinematic revelation comes in the form of a transformation scene around a dining table near the end of the movie and the culmination of both the dinner party Anna has had to prepare for and the current fragility of her emotional state. Here, the slow pan round of the camera circling the table allows the director to progressively and surreptitiously replace the people at the table with the actors who played the various girl's clients. Also, as we refamiliarise ourselves with the faces of the actors once they have transformed back to the real guests, it becomes clear that one of the guests is, indeed, one of the girl’s real life clients. Juliette Binoche, in her mind, is joining in with the music provided by one of the “clients” nakedly strumming a guitar and singing, until a cut takes us back into a view of Binoche as she really is... looking ghastly deadpan and without any of the joy of what has been going in her head showing externally. It’s a brilliant scene and a striking piece of performance from Binoche... but, of course, I’ve come to expect nothing less from this remarkable actress. The scene makes an obvious metaphor, perhaps, by using the art of the reveal to bring home the basic truths to an audience about the commonality of both the clientele and the girls they go to see, by holding up a mirror and showing us that neither is out of the ordinary and it could be any one of us or our close circle of friends in a similar situation. Again, though, it’s done without any form of judgmental tone from behind the camera... here the conclusions of the revelation are judged only by Anna herself and her reaction to her lapsed state of reality at this point. Which is just as it should be.

Elles is, I have to say, one of my better blind buys. If you can’t tell by the above coverage, I really enjoyed this one and am looking forward to revisiting it again at some point in the future, not to mention seeking out other movies directed by Malgorzata Szumowska somewhere down the line. A truly remarkable experience in modern cinema and something no cinephile should miss out on. I fully recommend this one to anyone into the beauty of the art... don’t let this one get away from you.

Cosmopolis

Cos n’ Effect


Cosmopolis 2012
France/Canada/Portugal/Italy  
Directed by David Cronenberg
Playing at UK cinemas now

Warning: In reading this review you will be sitting 
in a metaphorical traffic jam with a load of spoilers
glancing at you from other lanes. Beware.

I should probably start off this little review with a warning that I haven’t actually read Don DeLillo’s novel, the one that Cronenberg took as his starting point for this work. So I don’t know if this movie version is actually a literal adaptation of the work or if Cronenberg has taken the spirit of it and done his own thing with it (like Naked Lunch, for example). What I can say, though, is that Cronenberg probably wouldn’t have touched this if the source material wasn’t already something which he responds to on an artistic level and it would be true to say that it fits nicely into his oeuvre and is especially in tune with his earlier works, although actual bodily decay/mutation is not an issue for the characters in this one.

Set in a world where the rich can rise or fall in a day due to the instability of the economy, a rich power player called Erik Packer, who looks a bit of a thug actually (Who the heck is Robert Pattinson? He looks like Tarantino and you just want to punch him.), embarks on a quest to be driven in his deluxe limo downtown to get his haircut... a journey which will take him all day and into the night and see his fortunes fall due to, and I paraphrase the words of one character, his inability to predict the random elements of nature within the patterns of the stock market figures, as represented metaphorically by the discovery of his asymmetrical prostate. During his day he plays host to numerous visitors both in his limousine and in various interior spaces, while worrying about a “credible death threat” and getting the pretty-boy veneer stripped from him as he shows his true thuggish nature by the end of the piece.

For a road movie, it’s a pretty claustrophobic one with the majority or the film (if not all of it, actually) shot in sets rather than locations (as far as I could tell). The visitors with whom he talks money or philosophy or poetry or has sex with include some fairly famous names giving fine performances (Juliette Binoche and Samantha Morton, to name two) and for the most part the script is quite dense and I’d normally find this pretty interesting but, I have to say, I spent a lot of my time in front of this movie feeling kinda bored. The attitude of the main character didn’t help this lethal malaise that infected me as I started watching his movie but, at the same time, I got the impression I was watching a future classic in that it so neatly dovetails into that “easy-to-decode” early Cronenberg phase. Well, I say early but I saw traces of eXistenZ in it too... in addition to some of his earlier works like Videodrome and the remarkable Crash.

Talking of which, I think the choice of lead actor, or at least his style of acting, is a definite shift for Cronenberg in that he used to use some pretty inspired and charismatic actors to portray the kind of cooled down, emotionally vacant characters he often populates his films with... James Woods, James Spader, Debbie Harry and Jeff Goldblum spring instantly to mind. Pattinson seems to throw less fire into his role but I don’t think that makes him any worse an actor than those other guys because of it. Contrarily, and possibly even serendipitously, Pattinson’s lack of presence may be the exact kind of stripped down perspective that both he and Cronenberg are going for in this one... and if that’s the case then it might be because the last scene in this movie which the narrative leads to is such an intense, suspenseful one.

Following the eye stabbing of a VIP live on television, as seen in Erik Packer’s limousine, the director further re-enforces the unexpected and damaging properties of violence with a brutal, point blank slaying of an important regular character towards the end of the film. You will see it coming... but still you feel the injustice of the decision made, just as the person responsible will have to embrace the consequences of this act later on, towards the end of the film. This wariness around tools of violence is the way that Cronenberg sets the scene for the final act of the movie, which is a double header between Robert Pattinson and the remarkable actor Paul Giametti as the target and the assassin come face to face with each other in a run down apartment. Steven Spielberg used a similar emotional device in the opening of Jurassic Park, when the power of the dinosaurs is demonstrated with deadly results to ramp up and heighten audience expectation and anxiety when we see these beasties again, for instance. As did David Lynch when he introduced his audience to Sailor Ripley in Wild At Heart with that notorious, literally head-banging, opening. What this does for Cronenberg’s movie is it gives it a very intense edge that one minute either actor could  shoot the other at any time during their long and twisty-turny conversation. This gets almost unbearable at times and makes me wonder if Pattinson isn’t such a bad actor after all, if he can credibly hold screen time against Giametti.

As I said earlier, Cronenberg’s obsession with physical decay and mutation is not mirrored in this movie but the story does concern itself with the gradual decline of the human mind after a day doesn’t quite go just as you’d expect it too. This is reflected in both protagonist and antagonist in the final scene and, frankly, if by that point you can still work out which one actually is protagonist and which is antagonist, then you’re doing well. This is also mirrored in the journey of the physical media the film is made up of, at least that’s what I thought, since the early shots of the terrain outside of the limousine look much like the fake, projected backdrop the director used deliberately in certain scenes of eXistenZ whereas, as Packer presumably gets poorer, everything starts to look a little more grimy and real... to the point where an incident leaves Packer messy and angry on the streets. The ramshackle set design of the place where Giametti’s character lives seems very much, to me at least, as an external projection of that “slow, body-horror mutation” that marked this director’s early works (or his early funny ones, if you will).

Another great thing which also harkens back to the early Cronenberg is the ending. I’ve been suckered in before with Cronenberg’s endings stopping a few seconds short of where you’d like them to end and he’s done exactly the same to me with this one. He puts you in a place where you are trying to figure out which of the two or three possible endings that Cronenberg has deftly lead you too will be the final, end game of the movie and... as the seconds drag on... your choices are suddenly taken away from you and I’ve definitely seen a few of his movies end in exactly the same way as this one did. It’s nice that there’s a certain symetry at work here... maybe Cronenberg’s prostate is less skewed than his main protagonist’s. Either way, it’s a nice way to finish and I certainly didn’t share the groan that the majority of the other six members of the audience, in the cinema that I saw it in, let out as a collective response to the commencement of the final credits.

If Cronenberg is your thing and you like his early work, especially Videodrome and eXistenZ, then you might like to give Cosmopolis a chance, although it has to be understood that my comparisons to these two works are not to be found in the surface details of the movie and if you look for them there then you will see no similarity, other than the very fluid, slow and steady camerawork that Cronenberg likes to view his ideas from. On the other hand, if you struggle with the emotional aspects of Cronenberg’s work usually, then you might be quite lost in this one since very few of the characters express themselves as being anything other than voyeurs to the events that are actually happening to them... and often don’t seem that present in the moment, getting drawn along in the wake of the cause and effect and ultimate downward spiral of... well... of following the flow of the money.

Personally I’m glad I saw this one but I have no idea if I could sit through it again... although I can see how his kind of movie could be best seen as a personal, individual experience with just the lone viewer and a DVD, as opposed to the normally preferred venue of the cinema. That is to say, Cosmopolis is a dish best served cold, perhaps?

Bleu Movie

Trois Couleurs: Bleu 1993

Poland/France/Switzerland

Directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski

Artificial Eye DVD Region 2

I remember going to see this at a late night performance at, what was then, the Lumiere cinema in London back when this movie was first released. A couple of mates and I had driven into London late one night to specifically see this movie and we were all really tired... but as soon as the movie started we were completely hooked on Krzysztof Kieslowski’s amazing movie. I’d persuaded my friends to drive into town to watch this on the strength of a TV screening of Kieslowski’s A Short Film About Love and his Decalog (which includes a shorter, alternate version of that film but with a different ending).

Blue didn't disappoint any of us... it was everything we were looking for in a movie right then... if we even knew what we were looking for. Rewatching it for the first time in a very long time, I was struck by how the director’s movies are both so distant and yet so utterly involving in their complex make up. Something about his movies gives you a very voyeuristic feeling... which is kinda strange considering that Kieslowski’s style of filming is quite artificial and the absolute antithesis of something like the “more than questionable” “style” of Dogme filmmaking which became slightly fashionable for a while (and don’t start me off about the inherent contradictions in the Dogme manifesto which make it impossible to even begin to shoot a movie in that style without ignoring the ground rules... I get kinda passionate and angry about it).

Kieslowski’s Blue uses a very strong colour palette (as some of his films do), and you will get primary colours juxtaposed against each other, much like in the movies of Mario Bava or Dario Argento, although they are not as deeply saturated as the colours those directors play with... but Kieslowski shows us that these colours are certainly strong enough to bounce off each other and create their own colour space without having to accent them so strongly. And of course... there’s a lot of blue filtering in this movie. It’s a visually striking film.

Blue tells the story of Julie, deftly played by Juliette Binoche, who is in a car crash at the start of the movie to which she loses both her young daughter and her famous composer husband. When she alone survives and finds that she is unable to take her own life, she runs away from it all and gets rid of as much of her previous life as she can and just tries to stay out of people’s way. Not so easy because a colleague of here husband, Olivier, is in love with her and tracks her down and keeps trying to find ways to attract her attention. It's suggested as a possibility, early on in the narrative, that Julie might be the actual writer of her famous husbands compositions. This is neither confirmed or denied because Kieslowski seems to have a fondness for filling his films with ambiguity and an acute lack of closure... which is absolutely fine. You make up your own mind. Certainly, as she assists and pretty much takes over from Olivier in his task to finish her husbands last important composition, the circumstantial evidence is compelling that she might well have been the true author of her husbands works.

Kieslowski tends to focus on little details in his films... little moments of extreme beauty like the drip, drip of the fuel from the tail pipe of a car or a feather lightly blowing in the wind. And it’s really interesting to watch these artificially accented shots because they are also a window into the main action which puts you in a fly on the wall position quite often and give you that sense of voyeurism that is in few director’s works. The performances are all absolutely amazing... as they always are from the actors in his movies... and this attention to pulling perfect performances out of very talented people allows room for the artificial concentration of some of his shots to work and breathe without worrying that bad performances are going to heighten the lack of naturalism... these really are expertly crafted films.

Kieslowski and composer Zbigniew Preisner’s fictional composer Van den Budenmayer (their equivalent of Hal Hartley’s Ned Rifle and Ryful) also pops up in this one (as his music does quite significantly later on in The Double Life of Veronique). Preisner’s score in this is fantastic and swells up at unexpected times when the screen fades to black in the middle of a shot... only to fade back in after the music... like the director is “pulling a Godard” and wanting you to see that he’s making a point. I think what he’s doing is highlighting every time the lead character is posed with a choice or question that pulls her back closer to the land of the living. When she follows music with her fingers in various sequences of beautiful close up photography, a filter is used so all but the one note being played is in focus in the centre of the screen at any one time... a beautiful film to look at.

And then, of course, there’s the sugar cube shot. Once of the most memorable celluloid images and perhaps my favourite single shot of any movie. Julie dunks a sugar cube into a cup of coffee and in extreme close-up we watch the cube soak up the coffee over the space of five seconds. This looks cool on DVD but I can’t stress enough how much Kieslowski’s films need to be seen on the big screen. When you see a giant sugar cube soaking up coffee in your face at the cinema... it’s a moment of true beauty. I didn’t know this until earlier today but apparently Kieslowski went through all the sugar companies until he could find one which absorbed the coffee in exactly five seconds. No more... no less. Now that’s attention to detail!

Kieslowski’s Blue is the first part of a trilogy which continues in White and Red. His movies are some of the most beautiful pieces of motion picture art ever shot. If you’ve not seen this and you’re seriously into film then you may want to give his movies some of your time.