In Fabric

Dress To Kill

In Fabric
UK 2019 Directed Peter Strickland
UK cinema release print

In Fabric is the new film by Peter Strickland, a director whose previous two works, Berberian Sound Studio (reviewed here) and The Duke Of Burgundy (reviewed here), I totally failed to get on with. The former because it was misrepresented as using a giallo sensibility when it clearly didn’t (more a mixture of British exploitation filtered through Lynchian surrealism) and the latter because it managed to make completely tame the cinematic representation of a BDSM relationship (even given it was trying to channel films like Check To The Queen... which I reviewed here).

I’m very pleased to say, therefore, that I quite enjoyed In Fabric although, truth be told, it’s still a little tame around the edges in what the camera declines to accurately portray. This is, kind of, a horror film mixed with some light comedy and it’s a little bit like The Yellow Rolls Royce in that it’s a film about a specific object... in this case a kind of demonically cursed object channelling a spirit, in some ways... and what happens to it over the course of a number of owners. Alas, in this film we only focus on two of those owners... main protagonists played by Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Leo Bill in separate segments which are interconnected between the red dress of the title, the cursed object I mentioned earlier... and the department store/manufacturer of this specific dress where, at the very least, one can deduce that some of the fashion mannequins work in human form.

The film is vaguely surreal and quite sparklingly witty in places, with some nice performances from everyone involved with a special shout out to Steve Oram and Julian Barratt as a gay couple of bank managers who happen to be the boss of one of the main characters (and they were so good together in Aaaaaaaah! which I reviewed here that I was just pleased to see them together again). Captain Phasma herself, Gwendoline Christie also has some nice, sexually antagonistic moments on screen and Hayley Squires acquits herself well here and also shows a lovely comic side to her personality, such as when the somewhat weedy Leo Bill accidentally demonstrates his unknown ‘super-power’ in her presence.

The film is quite in your face and features much more of the ‘cut away to a visual montage’ moments than the director has manifested in one film before. Here, they usually take the form of either TV adverts for the shop which spawned the accursed dress or, quite often, flat print fashion advertising that give these sequences more of a ‘mood board’ element to them in the film rather than, I think, pretending to be anything that either forwards the plot of the piece (such as it is) or comments overtly on the nature of the narrative.

It’s also looking very 1970s, not just in terms of the period represented on screen (there’s a lot of equipment I remember from growing up through that time here) but also in terms of the style of the film-making and the way in which the shots are put together... which are very much Strickland but also very retro in feel and, I honestly don’t think that’s unusual for this director. The wonderful score by Cavern Of Anti-Matter which, alas, I can’t find on CD, is very much another element of the movie which highlights the pull back to the cinema of yesteryear and I was quite impressed by the audio soundscape of this film, to be sure (as I was by The Duke Of Burgundy score but, alas, that one couldn’t save the picture for me).

Once again, though, if you’re looking out for possible future signature devices from this director (like Ari Aster, I don’t think we’ve seen this guy’s masterpiece yet), it does kind of blend the subtle surrealism of a David Lynch movie still with the jolting, anti-immersive, almost tangental doses of surrealistic inventiveness reminiscent of someone like Jan Svankmajer.

In terms of story, though, it does make a lot more sense than something like, for instance, the director’s own Berberian Sound Studio. There’s no real impenetrable mystery at the heart of the movie which isn’t revealed in such a way that the audience can’t piece together a rough structural chain of cause and effect of the way in which the dress fulfils its purpose. In some ways, this does make the film somewhat predictable... I was kinda waiting for a sequence that showed two or three of the dead characters, from each section, revealing what their final fate would be... but, at the same time, Strickland leaves the ‘t’s uncrossed and the ‘i’s undotted so the audience is free to build on the rough narrative framework that is revealed in any way in which they please. Or at least, that’s the way it seems to me.

If anything, the film just doesn’t quite go far enough for me in terms of what’s depicted on screen. There are some violent moments, some of them bloody but... they never feel as impactful as they could be and that’s maybe because they are less surprising in the half nightmare, half candy factory world the director has managed to weave for us here. Similarly, the sexuality depicted on screen is all pretty much implied with nothing shown in camera as such and it kinda felt bereft of an edge to the ‘on screen shenanigans’ of various characters. So, I guess what I’m exploring here is why I felt the film was somewhat tame like his previous picture... so I should probably focus on something else, perhaps, such as the sparkling and flowery dialogue of the ‘people’ who work at the store or the absolute camp madness of the shop manager but, I don’t want to spoil all of the surprises 'in store' for you here.

In Fabric is... as I said... the first film I’ve actually liked by this director (or at least not hated) and so I’m happy to say that I can now look forward to his next one with a sense of excitement rather than what my expectations were when I dragged myself into central London to see this one. Films like this are, I should say, made for a big screen so if you want the full impact... especially in terms of the deliberately degraded stock effects he’s used in some sequences... then you really need to get yourself to a cinema to see this one. Not a film I would say would strike it big with horror fans but fans of comedy and things which are just a little, subtly unusual should get a kick out of this one.

Aaaaaaaah!

Pant-hoot Suite

Aaaaaaaah!
UK 2015 Directed by Steve Oram
Fright Fest Blu Ray Zone B

Pant-hoot - noun: A breathy hooting or honking call uttered by a chimpanzee, typically in a series rising in a screaming crescendo and tailing off with quieter calls; a series of such calls.
Oxford Living Dictionary.

If you’ve seen Steve Oram’s movie which he co-wrote and starred in with Alice Lowe... Ben Wheatley’s  Sightseers (reviewed here)... you’ll no doubt already know that this guy’s film projects are worth watching. Even so, this movie was not even on my radar until a friend of mine recommended this film to me (along with a few others which will make interesting review material) when I was touring the merchandise stalls at the Frightfest last August. Well... I say recommended it. What happened was we were looking at the stall where all the Fright Fest* branded films were and I pointed to this one with a dubious title and a strange cover of a gorilla unzipping from a human suit and asked him if he’d recommend it. He looked at me with a smile on his face and said he really loved Aaaaaaaah! but that he was reticent to recommend it because it’s extremely bizarre. I then went on to explain to him that this statement was, in fact, the best recommendation he could give me so I went for the extremely ‘value for money’ purchase of the blu ray version. I didn’t realise just how ‘value for money’ that was until I finally got around to watching it this gem.

Aaaaaaaah! is one of the most insanely entertaining, completely unique and mesmerising movie watching experiences you can have. It's even just a little mind blowing in some places but... you know... mind blowing in that good way. If you’re anything approaching a cinephile or even a casual watcher of movies (like myself) then you really need to be grabbing this one and seeing what all the fuss is about as soon as possible.

Oh, wait a minute. What fuss? There hasn’t been any notable fuss about this and on checking the internet, I can’t even buy this for any of my American friends because it’s never even been released over there. This is definitely a 'crime against filmanity' right there and some wily distributor needs to rectify this as soon as possible.

The only thing I can liken this film to, in my history of watching good movies, is the very first time I watched David Lynch’s Eraserhead. Aaaaaaaah! is one of the great moments of movie art of the 21st Century and it needs to be seen by anyone who is in love with cinema. Although, saying that, it’s got some pretty strong imagery at times and it’s not exactly ‘safe for work’... or for relatives, for that matter.

So what is the film actually about? Well, I’m not 100% sure that’s the right kind of question for this kind of movie experience although it does, when you think back on it, have a sort of story to tell. This is how the movie starts off...

Steve Oram and his friend trek into a forest. Oram gets out a photo of a bride, presumably now deceased by the expression on his face. He puts it on the floor and, rather than bury it, his mate starts pissing on it before Oram stops him. Oram then whips his own cock out and starts defecating on said photograph, while the tears of grief are still streaming from his eyes. His mate then cleans the head of his penis and Oram goes to have sex with a tree while the other squats and watches, before they go off to see what else is going on.

After not very long you will realise that all of the inhabitants of the movie, who are speaking in grunts and groans and using their bodyies to communicate just as much as their vocalisations, are in fact apes. That’s the premise here... everybody is a physically a human being living in a, mostly, human world, but they are all of the mindset of apes and so you get a thorough and blindingly funny, dissection of the way their small tribes (or family units in human terms) interact with each other.

They have their own TV show showing a cooking programme, hosted by a lady with her breasts on display as part of her outfit as she prepares to roast a hog and also, cover it in sugar (or perhaps salt but my guess is sugar). When two ladies go out to do a bit of clothes shoplifting, they are caught by the manager and his assistant which, obviously, means they have to be molested by said shopkeepers... before one of the girls does something a little more drastic to cut short the assistant’s pleasures.

There’s even a party scene with various apetastic social interactions on display such as a courting ritual for Oram and one of the girls and a teabagging moment (which will lead to a heck of a lot of trouble for some of the characters later in the film). The shindig is presumably thrown by the mother figure of the household, played brilliantly by once-upon-a-pop-star Toyah Wilcox. In fact, all the actors in this are absolutely brilliant. If you want to see some absolutely amazing, Oscar worthy acting then this movie is the absolute epitome of unbridled expression to achieve an end. And we see the soft but ferocious hidden sides of characters too, like the one I call Battenburg man (played by Julian Barratt), who carries his Battenburg cake with him as a precious object and even, in one instance, uses it as a makeshift brush to help paint the walls of his new family’s home.

But it’s not just the acting, of course.

The point is, how did Oram’s mind actually map this thing out in the first place? He’s said he was watching a video of two tribes of gorillas, one of whom was attacked by the other and about the death and rape in that moment and the reflection of it by the male apes of the attacking tribe afterwards. Well, I don’t know how Aaaaaaaah! was filmed but I am assuming that the majority of the cast and crew had to get pretty familiar with the rituals and habits of the various ape families to be able to turn in the enthusiastic performance they did here. Especially since the whole thing was apparently shot in two weeks.  I’m assuming that there was a fair amount of improvisation on the set too but, as I intimated earlier, there’s certainly a structural narrative in place. I’m also pleased to say that the final denouement of the movie is something I did not, for once,  see coming... so I’m really pleased about that. The point is, though, the story line does kinda work towards that ending in a few sections of the film but I was sufficiently misdirected to not figure out what the end pay off to that was (and I’m not 100% sure now I'd have been able to second guess it anyway). But I do know it didn’t let me down.

The camera work is fairly roaming and energetic in certain places, as you’d expect, but the edit makes it all work really well and not seem jarring to the eye at any point. It’s already jarring to the mind in some places, to be honest, and that’s not a bad thing. Usually I rely on the score to unify this kind of stuff and, about that...

The film soundtrack uses a lot of synthesised, zany sounds and beats and I wasn’t sure about this matching up with the tone of the movie until I realised that this simplistic approach may well appeal to the apes/people inhabiting the movie and then it all clicked into place for me. So when we see montages like Oram and his new lady friend, played insanely well by Lucy Honigman, going shopping while he is still carrying around the arm he tore out of another character in the film, the music provides a narrative about the absurd simplicity and intensity of the lives we are watching, even as it helps glue the edit together. I’m actually not sure, now, whether those particular scenes I just described actually have any music on them but... you get the idea. It’s a clever modus operandi for the film and it works a treat.

And there’s not a heck of a lot more I can add to this, to be honest. Is this a solid recommendation from me? Yes, of course it is. I think anyone who’s into film should pop this on in the format of their choice, possibly cover it in sugar and watch it until their eyeballs show signs of falling out. Easily one of the most original works I’ve seen in quite some time and I’ve already inflicted it on one set of friends with, I expect, more to follow (yeah... sales of Aaaaaaaah! are going to be going up a little sometime soon, I reckon). Not something for everyone, I would say but, even if you don’t actually like the movie, it’s definitely an experience and you should probably, at least, try it once.

*Although why this movie was branded up with Frightfest is anybody’s guess... since it’s totally not a horror movie.

Sightseers

Tramdemonium

Sightseers
2012 UK 
Directed by Ben Wheatley
Studio Canal BluRay Region B 

Warning: Some spoilers ahead on the route.

The only other film I’ve seen by Ben Wheatley was Kill List (reviewed here), which was brutally unpleasant in places and, by the time the final frames had played out, a bit of a masterpiece of modern British cinema, it has to be said. Sightseers is a different kind of movie to that one in that it’s pretty much a comedy but, even though it has a lighthearted charm all its own, it still has a raw, dark edge to the movie that, while it doesn’t confront you with anything too nasty, does leave you wondering how many people you know in real life hide a passion for murdering those they find even remotey annoying. Or more importantly, since I suspect the answer to that might be pretty high, judging by some conversations I’ve overheard in the wacky world of “commuting to work”, how many people are not able to keep that kind of angry impulse in check.

The film’s main protagonists, Tina and Chris, are played by Alice Lowe and Steve Oram and it’s interesting to note that these two actually co-wrote the screenplay, along with additional material by Amy Jump. Seeing as they get the credit for the movie in terms of its sparkling script, I’m wondering just how much of the dialogue was improvised during rehearsals and how much it was polished on the actual shoot. I don’t know anything about the work process of either of these two to be able to hazard a guess but I do know that, however this one was put together, there’s some good on-screen chemistry between the two of them and their contribution is really felt.

The film itself takes the form of a roadtrip as Tina’s new lover Chris takes her on a caravan tour of the English countryside, to include stops at a Tram Museum, a Pencil Musuem, the Blue John Cavern etc... much to the aggressive dismay of Tina’s mother. He is a budding writer and Tina is his muse, it seems, and the characters are down to earth and, basically, people you really wouldn’t mind hanging out in a pub with. However, it doesn’t take long before you realise that both of them are just a little bit twisted inside when it comes to certain things. When Chris “accidentally” runs down and kills a man for dropping litter and being rude, he gets away with it but there’s something not quite right here and after a while, Tina starts to catch on and realise that Chris has a penchant for solving his problems with fatal violence.

Ben Wheatley’s direction is both matter of fact in terms of the way it’s shot, with a lot of hand held camera, but also incredibly beautiful somehow in terms of the cinematography. It sounds like it should be a bit of a mismatch but it really isn’t. At least, not with Wheatley in charge it isn’t. Not quite sure how he walks that thin line between beautiful and ugly but he manages to capture it quite well. Of course, the breathtaking scenic joy of the English countryside is pretty amazing in itself and Wheatley nicely captures this. It’s the appreciation of this, and the affection that the two main protagonists share for each other, which allows you to not be completely alienated from them and appreciate the absurdist humour of their dark deeds.

There are some great comedy moments in here and I laughed out loud at details such as the way in which Tina realises that the second murder is, in fact, deliberate. Chris has taken his victim’s digital camera, which Tina assumes is his, and is looking at the pictures on the camera of their newly acquired (aka stolen) dog which she doesn’t realise are not shots that Chris has taken. Then she starts looking at the close up “naughty pictures” that she assumes he took of them the night before, when she was making love with him in her knitted bra and crotchless knickers... yeah, you heard that right. She has knitted, kinky underwear and, frankly, I don’t know why nobody has thought of this before... it’s fantastic. Anyway, as one of the shots comes up she looks down between her legs and goes mental, hollering at Chris... “This is not my vaginaaaaaa!” She automatically assumes that her new boyfriend has been having an affair but, no, as she clicks on she realises that Chris is a serial killer. Of course, after coming to terms with this, the relationship then starts to hit a snag as she does her own first murder, much to her new boyfriend’s dissapointment.

I won’t tell you where this goes but the film is not quite as formulaic as you might think, given the basic premise, although I did kinda guess what the final shot would be on this one (it’s a damned sight more penetrable than Kill List, that’s for sure). The acting, as you would expect from this kind of film, almost out of neccessity, is as great as the direction and cinematography and there’s some really nice musical choices on the soundtrack. I wasn’t completely blown away by the score on this one but it was certainly appropriate. I did find the choice of using two different cover versions of Donovan’s Season Of The Witch enthralling, though, and it’s rare that I find pop songs wedged into a film’s underscore as effective as these ones were, to be honest.

All in all, this was kind of the film I was expecting but without it slipping into the kind of predictable pattern I thought it would. It’s a charming piece of work from a cast and crew who really seem to have got their act together here. I’m struggling a little in this review, to be honest, because I don’t have a lot to say about a movie which is so well put together. However, if I did have to find anything slightly critical of it, it might be to say that the final sequences felt like they were just a little “rushed towards” at the end. I felt there needed to be a bit more repair and closure to the state of the relationshiop between Tina and Chris before the very last shot, if that would have been possible without telegraphing the final outcome too much (it’s one of those movies which could have gone either way in the last couple of seconds) so, I guess I would have liked another five to ten minutes towards the end, I think, to maybe give a sense of returning camaraderie, perhaps fanned by the fear that the police are closing in, before going on that final destination with the characters. But, honestly, that’s only because I enjoyed the characters so much and sometimes it’s easy to forget that great movies stem, not from their story, but from the way the characters are put together... and Sightseers is nothing if not a film about lovable characters. Unhinged and slighly round the twist, perhaps, but still lovable for all their faults. Faults like brutally murdering people with rocks and sticks, for example.

Sightseers is a truly great, little gemstone which reveals its dark treasures at a leisurely pace but without ever getting complacent by resting on the laurels of the main characters. The people these two encounter as they murder their way through the great outdoors are all good little character pieces in their own right and the tension and release between Chris and Tina as they try to get a measure for each other keeps you drawn in and watching intently, trying to catch all the little details, like Chris’s smirk to himself after his first murder or the subtle, unspoken messages between the two of them as their eye contact communicates their murderous intent to each other in the face of adversity. A nice little British movie which shows off our beautiful countryside and showcases the kind of quirky, and often grim, humour our country is perhaps best known for internationally. This one’s definitely worth a watch.