Women Who Kill

Life's Kills

Women Who Kill
2016 USA Directed by Ingrid Jungermann
London Film Festival screening, October 15th 2016

Warning: Very light spoilers.

So the second of my movie choices for this year's London Film Festival was the black comedy Women Who Kill. Now the fact that it was a comedy must have somehow escaped me when I read the brief description of the movie in the LFF programme this year... otherwise I wouldn't have gone. I usually only respond well to comedies if they have Woody Allen or The Marx Brothers in them, truth be told. However, if the comedic tone was somehow underplayed a tad in the description, I'd have to say that was kind of a wrong move for fans of the genre because, frankly, not only is it a comedy... it's actually a very good one.

Describing it as a black comedy might be a little off though, it seems to me. Despite the tone of the scenes and the way the dialogue is delivered, it's actually quite a broad comedy and had the audience laughing out loud and almost rolling in the aisles. Not me, of course, because I rarely actually laugh or smile at comedy, but I was certainly enjoying and appreciating it as much as the next person.

The film focuses on Morgan, played by the writer and director of the movie, Ingrid Jungermann, who co-hosts a podcast she does with her ex, live-in girlfriend Jean, played by Ann Carr. The two women both research and host this podcast, Women Who Kill, which concentrates on some of their favourite female serial killers and goes into a lot of the detail which they’ve researched about their subject matter. In fact, they even go to various prisons to interview different serial killers for their show. The one they see in their latest edition is nicknamed, The Clipper, and played briefly, in two scenes, by Annette O' Toole. Everybody thinks that Morgan and Jean should get back together again properly but, at this moment in time, they are both kinda half resistant to the idea.

Enter Simone.

Played by Sheila Vand, the star vampire of the wonderful Iranian film A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (which I reviewed here), this bright young thing comes from nowhere and enters the story, making a play for Morgan which the latter is more than ready to pursue. And so Morgan has a new relationship in her life with a woman who, she confesses, is a big fan of Morgan and Jean’s serial killer podcast. However, as the relationship plays out Morgan starts to feel a little more paranoid and vulnerable each day... refusing to ask her lover about her locked ‘mystery box’ until, when her suspicions get really aroused, she breaks into it one night and finds samples of different peoples fingernail clippings... which are labelled with the first names as the victims of... ‘The Clipper’. With a suspicious sudden death at the place where she and Simone work, Morgan is forced to ask herself if can this be The Clipper’s daughter and, if it is, is her life and the lives of her friends in danger?

Well you’ll have to go see to find out and I certainly urge you to. This has got a fantastic batch of actresses in the movie and the chemistry between them all is just wonderful. Jungermann’s script is tremendously funny and becomes a finely honed tool to extract laughter as the deadpan and somewhat understated delivery by Jungermann and Carr of some amazing one liners reach levels of high art in their performance.

Even situational comedy is great in this, such as the sudden unexpected announcement of the Sat Nav system in Morgan's car which is when you first realise that the main protagonists are going to interview someone in prison. Or a tremendous, actually somewhat suspenseful mini sequence where Morgan reaches for a weapon in the cutlery drawer of the kitchen when she believes Simone might be about to attempt to kill her... only to find later her hands had found a less than useful egg whisk for the situation. This is great stuff but the humour and extreme wit to be found in the, frankly, near perfect screenplay, also explores the tender and intricate sides of the central relationships, giving valuable insight into these characters and also a little look at the bigger picture in how these kinds of cutting observations apply to humanity’s collected experience. At least, that’s what I got from it.

There also seems to be a strong subtext dealing with the way a person’s interests and obsessions can also intrude into the smooth running of their life and how it can affect all of that person's relationships like the ripples from a stone being dropped into a body of water. Is Morgan bringing about her own problems and leading herself on in an example of self fulfilling prophecy or is there really much more to Simone than may at first meet the eye? The excellent but highly comical approach to the scoring tells us to disregard our own ideas about Simone but, is it leading us down the garden path, so to speak? And no, I don’t know who did the wonderfully light score to this movie, which seems somehow typical in terms of music for American independent movies, because the IMDB is no help here whatsoever, as it turns out.

What I will say is that the end of the movie is pretty bleak but not necessarily for the reasons you might expect. In some ways it reminded me of the original ending of Kevin Smith's Clerks. If you've ever seen that alternate ending you'll know it gets uncompromisingly dark in the films final minute. Women Who Kill also explores depressingly darker territory in the film's final minutes and, though I don't want to give anything away, I will say that the ending might haunt you unexpectedly after you've seen it and start forcing you to question your perceptions of what you have spent the last hour and a half of your time watching. You won't necessarily be able to find a consistent solution and I suspect the last few minutes might not sit well with some audiences, but it's a pretty interesting finish to the film and I find those kind of 'almost inconclusive' conclusions are often the best, at times.

So there you have it. If you're a fan of US indie cinema and you actually get the opportunity to see Women Who Kill on release sometime, definitely take a chance on it. The dialogue is scintillating and the static nature of some of the camera set ups goes hand in hand with the understated, but hilariously funny, performances... letting them breathe so they can worm their way into your imagination. A truly cool film, this one, and worth some of your time.

2016 London Film Festival @ NUTS4R2

Zoology (Zoologiya)
Women Who Kill
Mifune - The Last Samurai
Prevenge
Spaceship

Another Earth

Sphere Pressure

Another Earth
2011 USA 
Directed by Mike Cahill
Fox Searchlight UK DVD Blu Ray B

Warning: Slight spoilers on the set up, 
mostly found in the trailer anyway.

Another Earth is the previous feature made by the same guy who gave us the recent cinema release I raved about called I Origins (reviewed here). It stars Brit Marling, who also co-wrote this... just as she did another film with her in it, called The East (reviewed here). It’s a film I really wanted to see when it was originally released in the cinemas over here in the UK but, like a lot of US independents (the ones that get any kind of release over here at all) it only lasted a week at the cinema and I missed it. But I Origins reminded me about this film and with some extra prompting from @sawlady on twitter (the gal who plays the musical saw on this film’s soundtrack), I sought out a cheap Blu Ray and am really glad I decided to acquaint myself with this movie properly.

I’ve often mentioned this before in some of my reviews, I’m sure, but there are a lot of science fiction movies which are just an excuse for B movie Western shenanigans in a specific, conceptual reality...  and then there’s the really good science fiction which is more in line with what the best literary sci-fi does... which is to use a science fiction concept to explore something which is a magnification of a real life concern. If you want to explore an emotional issue like the spectre of loneliness or a human failing like a reliance on drugs or alcohol, or a world of other things, then you can use a sci-fi concept to push the analogy you’re exploring to a point where you couldn’t get to if you were just surrounded by the trappings of a normal drama.

That’s what Another Earth does. It’s the best kind of sci-fi. It takes a concept which is, to be fair, way more in your face on the trailer than it is in the movie. This is then used to inform the drama rather than exist as its own phenomenon, utilising the premise to expand where the characters can go with their emotions in a way a normal dramatic movie couldn’t.

The film starts off with a science major called Rhoda (played by the aforementioned Brit Marling) about to embark on a promising career (do all of Mike Cahill’s movies start off with a party scene?). As she drives home one night she hears the announcement that a new planet, what looks like an identical match for Earth, has appeared in the Universe and will be getting closer to our orbit over the next few years or so. She looks up out of the car window as she is speeding along to try and catch a glimpse of the new planet. Parked in another car is a composer, John (played by William Mapother), who is in his car with his wife and very young son. As Rhoda looks up at the heavens her car speeds straight into John’s in a head on collision. She escapes the wreck but there’s no signs of life from the anyone in the other car... nor from the dead toddler she stands over in the road.

Cut to a few years down the line. Rhoda gets released from prison where she has been doing time for manslaughter as a result of the crash. She is a depressed, guilty individual who lives at home and wanders about day by day as though she is a almost a zombie... her joy of life crushed by the horrible accident. She takes a job at a high school as a cleaner (although her employment adviser reminds her that she is so smart she could get a really good job) and that’s pretty much her life. Until she finds out that, although John’s wife and child were killed in the crash, John himself was just in a coma for a few months and is living not too far away. She goes to seek him out to apologise for wrecking his life (as well as her own) but ends up not telling him, posing as a cleaner, and getting an unpaid job (only she knows she is not getting paid) where she goes to clean his house every week. The two get to know each other and bond but Rhoda has not yet told him her terrible secret.

While all this is happening, the science fiction concept of a second Earth is gently playing in the background. When a lady at NASA finally gets through to the other planet, she is greeted by the equally startled same lady from NASA on the receiving end, who she quickly discovers has an identical life to her own, including small details of circumstance. A trip is planned to take a crew of explorers to the other Earth and Rhoda enters an essay competition to win a seat there. Presumably, the same thing is happening on the other version of the planet. Everybody is faced with the fact that they have a carbon copy who has lived exactly the same life on another planet except... and here’s the thing... the sudden appearance and awareness of each other’s planet changes things and, from the moment they became aware of each other, that’s when people’s timelines on each planet began to deviate from each other. So the question for Rhoda is... did the accident even happen on the other Earth? Did John’s wife and son survive on this other planet and, if so, how will all this impact on her new, developing romantic relationship with the man whose wife and son she inadvertently killed?

Another Earth is a beautifully shot film and it’s one of those pieces of cinematic art which understands very well that less dialogue and long periods of reflection without words can say so much more, sometimes, than the current popular style of "overly talky" cinema. It touches at both the heart and the mind of the audience at the same time and, as a result, it’s truly breathtaking and inspiring. There’s some real nice uses of colour and composition, especially in the early car sequence where the director utilises cool shots which are fractured through reflective and transparent surfaces. Truly lovely stuff.

This film, as you may have figured out by now, is a film about atonement and, with the dangling carrot of another world filled with identical people with identical personalities, there’s even a possibility of partial redemption for Rhoda’s character at some point down the line... which is, of course, an element to the drama the writers and actors would not be able to explore without the presence of a science fiction concept lurking at the heart of the story and, like I said... Another Earth is good science fiction. Soft science fiction like Philip K. Dick might have written, for sure, but that just means it’s the best kind of science fiction there is, as far as I’m concerned.

It’s also extremely well acted, well edited, has a nicely appropriate score (that goes on my Christmas list, I think) and, as I implied earlier, its very much a film which is a good example of the cinema of reflection. Quite frankly, if you want someone who is a fantastic actress but who can also just stand around looking thoughtful and be the one presence in a frame you just can’t take your eyes off, then I think Hollywood should be waking up to the fact at some point that Brit Marling is definitely your go-to girl for this kind of stuff. Absolutely astounding actress and someone who I shall definitely be looking out for in future movies... I usually just crush on following the directors and composers unless both the acting and screen presence of a performer is extra special and Marling has “that kind of special” in spades, if you ask me.

So there you go. Another Earth. Astonishing movie and a very strong and firm recommendation from this reviewer. One of the best movies I’ve seen all year and I really regret, now, missing it at cinemas on its first run release. Grab a look as soon as you get an opportunity.

Liquid Sky

High Society

Liquid Sky
1982  USA
Directed by Slava Tsukerman
Seen at the National Film Theatre on 
Saturday 15th November 2014

Liquid Sky is a movie I’ve been wanting to see for over three decades. I remember being desperate to see it when I was a teenager, still riding the Star Wars bandwagon of cinema releases at the tricky age of 14. There was very little said about it on the radio, where I think I first heard about it, but it sounded like it was combining two of my favourite things, science fiction and sex (hey, nothing ever changes much) and I couldn’t wait to see it. So I puttered about my daily business in gleeful anticipation of it turning up one week at my local ABC Cinema sometime soon.

And I waited and I waited and I waited.

And it never turned up and became one of the few movies that got away... that is, until now.

Of course, now I’ve seen it, I can see exacly why it didn’t make an appearance at my local. Even though the ABC chain was quite happy playing 1970s softcore sex movies and horror film double bills as regular features some weeks, Liquid Sky would have tested the patience of a lot of their clientele at the time, I suspect.

My understanding is that my old friend, @cultofthecinema, had a similar experience to me so, when I found out that the NFT would be playing it as part of their sci-fi season, we were both delighted and tickets were promptly booked. He even brought his wife to the screening and, as I leant over to him half way through this performance, I whispered in his ear... “You’re wife’s never going to want to come and see another movie with us ever again, dude.”

Liquid Sky is not, I’m afraid, the blend of surrealism and European “arthouse” (for want of a less insulting term) movie making I had imagined it to be. It concentrates more on the “alternative” night life of New York city in the early 1980s and pretty much captures the people and mood of that specific time, it seems to me. The lead actress, Anne Carlisle, who was an alternative theatre performer, as are both of the parts she plays here (she stars as both a male and female character) is apparently channeling her real life experiences... like most of the cast are, from what I gather.

The science fiction element comprises of a tiny flying saucer which lands on her apartment after a fantastic opening credits sequence with some, it has to be said, quite striking electronic music and a kind of “Clockwork Orange on acid” zoom pull back cut into the mix. The flying saucer, or the permanently unseen inhabitant of said saucer, then proceeds to extract certain nourishing elements in the human brain as people have sex... when they reach orgasm, the brain secretes a chemical akin to an opiate (hence the name of the film... Liquid Sky is street slang for heroin... at least it was at the time this was made) and through the wonders of some quite tacky animation and posterisation effects on the film stock, the aliens extract the bits they need and the humans in question are vapourised as a result of the extraction.

It sounds better than it is though and that’s the whole story right there. It’s just a frame for the writer and director to capture what often looks like a mostly improvised series of lines although, saying that, I’m sure this thing had a script... but I suspect some of the actors involved were probably offering alternate readings and additions each take (I may be wrong here so if anyone wants to chime in, please leave a comment below). What it does do... and does well, I suspect... is show a certain section of the avant garde at the time and, to be honest, it’s not a pretty sight. It’s all about finding where the next high is coming from, trying to rip people off for their drugs and inhabiting a sexual culture that seems to rely on a lack of mutual consent as often as not. These people seem to get off insulting each other and squabbling over petty issues repeatedly and it usually ends up in a struggle, a fight or a rape... usually, in that last instance, of the Margaret character (the female role played by Anne Carlisle), who the alien is hanging around because sex, consensual or otherwise, and drugs seem to follow her around wherever she goes. It’s a bit like watching kids constantly arguing with each other... not that fun.

There are some pretty uncomfortable scenes involving Margaret and the taunting  insults fly thick and fast around the lethal apartment she lives in with her, frankly, antagonistic girlfriend. At one point you wonder why she doesn’t just tell her colleagues to go f*** themselves and, within a short space of time, she is indeed, f***ing herself, as the male character she plays, Jimmy, ends up passively/aggressively forcing himself on Margaret.

In many ways, Margaret can be seen as a victim of the lifestyle she leads although, it has to be said, not as much as some of the more aggressive losers who populate this film and she does start to take back the power when she realises that the people she’s having sex with are being vapourised as they cum. In a way, she’s a prototype for the character that Jess Weixler plays in Teeth, although she doesn’t take nearly as much pushing to become and avenging angel and she has the advantage that, once the deed is done, there are no bodies to be taken care of.

Except in one case...

One of the things about this movie is that the internal logic of the story seems a little screwed up... at least at first. The first person to die from what I can only describe as “alien orgasm extraction” actually does leave a corpse behind and much is made of this as Margaret and her girlfriend try to get rid of it... after her girlfriend tries to have sex with the corpse. After this first one though, people are getting vapourised left, right and centre... so it seems a bit of a strange one in terms of the consistency of the writing, that’s for sure.

The film is not without its charm but mostly that comes in the way of some of the less intentional comedy and the line readings. There’s a kind of charmingly ineffectual Van Helsing style UFO hunter who arrives to give advice and his character was giving me a lot of laughs... although I’m not 100% sure whether I was supposed to be laughing at that point. When the film had finished I said to my friend... “I bet Andy Warhol would have loved that.” Well, I didn’t know it then but, when I looked up this film in the IMDB afterwards, I found that it’s considered by some to be an update of Paul Morrisey’s film, Andy Warhol presents... Trash. So that kinda figures actually because I definitely picked up on that whole "factory" vibe as I was watching it.

Plus, that “in your face” musical score from the start of the movie really gets to you as you get through the running time. It seems almost inappropriately overscored in most places and that score is definitely, at the very least, striking in its tone... especially when pitched against the images. I’d love to pick up a copy of that on CD but I think it’s pretty much extinct in any form other than vinyl, at time of writing this, so I might have to put that one on hold.

Now if I was reading this review back, I’d say that this sounds like a fun film but, honestly, as far as I’m concerned... it’s not. A lot of people really like this one and it’s got a lot of positive reviews so, I feel a bit like an outsider for saying this but, for me, Liquid Sky is purely a social document, of interest in capturing the zeitgeist of a certain part of the New York scene around that time. As an entertainment it mostly just irritated me, I’m afraid. It wasn’t that the movie is in any way challenging... it really isn’t. Maybe it’s the way the whole thing looks like it’s being held together with spit and sticky tape in regards to editing although, I have to say, the editing is at least competent in terms of allowing a clear decoding of the shots. The footage and fashions have a kind of Blade Runner feel to them, which makes sense as they were being shot around the same time, but you get the impression that Scott’s movie took the fashion and accented the bits he needed to make it work as a unifying feature of his movie whereas, in this one, you kinda get the feeling everyone just maybe turned up in their own clothes.

At the end of play, I have to say that it’s not a movie I would recommend to many, if any, of my friends and it’s not something I have a sudden blinding urge to watch again. It was nice scratching the itch and ticking the box from my teenage years but, despite its continued popular following, Liquid Sky just doesn’t work very well for me, I’m afraid. Which is a great shame because, I have to say, I was really looking forward to finally seeing it.

The Tunnel: Gaza-Israel War Border

Tunnel Vision

The Tunnel: Gaza-Israel War Border
2008 Israel 
Directed by Gennady Kuchuk
Viewed on the internet at the invitation of the director.

You know, one of the perks of writing a movie review blog on the internet is that sometimes, more often than you’d think, you get directors emailing or DMing you on twitter (it’s mostly through twitter) who want you to see their film. It’s a nice compliment because, presumably, it means they’ve read something that you’ve written somewhere (or one of their friends has) and it’s been appreciated by someone at some point. Sometimes it can turn out to be a bit of a bugbear too because, occasionally the films turn out to be not that great and you wonder if you really would be doing them a disservice if you wrote an honest review of the work in question. Then it can get a bit tricky.

However, I’m happy to say that, right from the first, beautifully coloured, 2.35:1 aspect ratio opening shot of Gennady Kuchuk’s The Tunnel - Gaza-Israel War Border, I knew that I was glad this guy had asked me to take a look. To be honest, I found the first few shots of this movie quite astonishing, not just because of the striking clarity of the detail but because of the richness in colour of an opening sequece which is capturing an external location. I could understand it later on, when most of the action takes place in the tunnel of the title, because it must be a lot easier to control the look of interior shots but, seriously, I was really into this movie from the first frame and, anyone who’s read my blog for as long as I’ve been writing it, knows that I’m not that often into viewing shorts (although I’ve seen a fair few good ones over the last few years so I’m really going to have to stop saying stuff like that). Special shout out to cinematographer Asaf Korman for his work here. He also edited this thing and it gets quite inventive in that regard, which I’ll talk about in regards to a montage shot a little later.

Anyway, this movie is essentially a two hander and it follows a patrolling soldier who, after the brief establishing of his character using a couple of props (inhaler, musical photo card of his girlfriend back home), all of which are reused at key moments later in the film, is shown on patrol but then finds himself falling through a hole in the ground and winding up in a tunnel. He can’t go back up and, as he explores his new environment, he finds one of the enemy in there. As they are fighting, an explosion goes off and closes off the rest of the tunnel, trapping the two of them in there.

Have you ever seen Hell In The Pacific. It’s another two hander directed by John Boorman, starring Toshiro Mifune and Lee Marvin as rival soldiers in World War II who are shot down on a deserted island. At first they play military games with each other, each trying to get the upper hand, and then eventually they start to cooperate to get off the island. I don’t want to say too much about that particular film but I wouldn’t be too surprised if I found out that Kuchuk was a fan of that one because he essentially captures the same kind of values and explorations of the human spirit that Boorman did in his feature... except Kuchuk does it in just under 20 minutes.*

Kuchuk doesn’t have Mifune and Lee but he does have two, very capable young actors playing the two lead soldiers in this one called Artur Marchenco and Joelal Msarva. These two do a wonderful job in playing people who start off as rivals and then, when compassion comes into play, they cooperate to try to dig their way out of the tunnel and back into their respective parts of the conflict. There’s some really nice things going on in the performance as the two grudgingly earn a healthy respect from each other as their confinement continues and the director captures the reddy brown hues of the tunnel’s walls, perfectly creating an atmosphere of claustrophobia almost palpable in its illusory intensity.

There are some good things happening in the edit too, especially with a time montage sequence where shots of the two soldiers digging are rotated around as slow moving, 360 degree inserts on a black frame to indicate the passing of the hours and the progress they have made. That's kinda new to me, I think. I don't remember seeing a film that expresses the passage of time in exactly this manner before... so that was a nice surprise. Especially with Dimitri Lifshitz’ deceptively simple score gluing it all together with a melody that adds weight to the almost hypnotic circular motion of the sequence. This is good stuff.

At last knockings, I don’t want to give too much away about this film because it’s worth you taking a look at it some time. I will say that the ending is a little bit clichéd but, at the same time, if it hadn’t have ended in the way it does, you might have felt a little bit cheated by it and, besides, the final pan shot across the desert sand and the quick glimpse of something else you get is such a nicely understated gesture to the gravitas of what’s just occured that I wouldn’t have wanted to miss that final and subtle, visual moment.

The Tunnel: Gaza-Israel War Border is available to rent or buy from Indie Reign here. The film is also available on demand at Distrify  here and if you want some more information about the film, including a trailer for it, it can all be found here. A nice little movie about the nature of conflict and the way in which your personal politics evaporate in light of the chance of survival, the enlightenment of empathising with your enemy... and the ultimate price you pay for your peace. Check it out when you can.

*Between writing this review and publishing it on my blog, the director contacted me again and told me he’s never seen John Boorman’s Hell In The Pacific. Which is great because it means he’s got a great movie to add to his “to watch” list and I think he’ll like it as the two directors both tackle the same kind of themes in a very similar, head on manner. Hope he likes it.

Upstream Colour

The Pig Sleep

Upstream Colour
2013 USA
Directed by Shane Carruth
Metrodome Blu Ray Zone B 

Sort of Warning: This review may or may not contain spoilers... probably not because I suspect everyone is going to have their own interpretation and relation to the events that take place on screen... but still, putting this warning here just in case.

Upstream Colour is the second feature directed by Shane Carruth, who also writes, produces, does the cinematography, co-edits, stars in and composes the soundtrack for the film. Like his absolutely brilliant first movie Primer, it takes a science fiction base but grounds it absolutely in a very matter-of-fact contemporary setting, exploring a very basic premise but in the most clever, non-linear and almost impenetrable way.

The editing choices in this movie allow for some almost random placements which don’t adhere to a strictly linear presentation of the narrative (if you’re happy to call it a narrative) and which is best received by an audience member as a jumble of puzzle pieces which are there to decode but which will not necessarily lead to an ultimate rendering of a specifically correct conclusion. So while Primer shares a certain style and atmosphere with this movie, the place the content leads you to in this one is more along the lines of something like, for instance, Ben Wheatley’s brilliant Kill List (reviewed here), in terms of it not taking where you think the destination might be or, if you did get there first, taking you there for no specific reason.

However, I think in the case of Kill List, the clues and provocative moments are deliberately inserted to lead you to a place which has no real solution to it (and if I’m wrong about that, please tell me so) whereas I’m pretty sure this film has a very specific linear narrative hiding behind the frames, as it were, and which still holds up solidly, no matter what the common or popular interpretation of it is. For instance, I didn’t feel I was totally getting it so I read a synopsis of the film on Wikipedia afterwards and I have to say that, after reading that quite detailed synopsis... I ended up thinking, “Hey, they didn’t get it.” Like in the case where a dream sequence is mentioned to explain the presence of a specific character (played in the most passively haunting but somehow sinister way by Andrew Sensenig) who can be quite often seen watching other characters in the movie. I don’t think these were supposed to be dream sequences at all, to be honest. More like visual metaphors to define the presence of a person watching his pigs/experiments... if that makes any sense and, unless you’ve seen the movie, it almost certainly won’t.

Here’s what I could piece together.

A woman’s life is completely destroyed by a man who uses a specific kind of maggot, which he hides in a pill capsule and gives her as drugs. It has already been demonstrated that the maggot can form a very strong bond between minds which even allows two people to synchronise their movements via their thoughts. This maggot gets into Amy Seimetz character Kris and, once it’s in her system, the man has total hypnotic dominance over her mind. In the aftermath of her lengthy encounter as his slave, for all intents and purposes, she is left without money, a job and brutally scarred from when she was trying to get the maggot out of herself. In the middle of this all she is lured to a man to remove them who actually pulls it from her body and implants it into a pig. She then forgets everything and has to rebuild her ruined life with no knowledge of how she got like this.

A year later, Kris meets a man who seems to share a common empathy, even though they seem to have no interest in each other initially. The man is called Jeff and is played by Shane Carruth. As their relationship develops, certain things slowly come to light, as much as the editing style and placement of the narrative allows it to do so in your mind, and it becomes very clear that Kris is not the only person who has been through this devastating experience. What’s more, Jeff is also a victim of this process and it appears that maybe this is why the two of them seem so dependent on each other... something that gets more acute as they begin to share the same thoughts, emotions, physical feelings and even perceive childhood anecdotes of each other as their own. Things come to a head and, with the help of their shared identity with various pigs, orchids (I think, don’t ask) and the published musical compositions/sound scapes of the pig man, they end up taking their personal thread, joining it up with many other individuals (who presuambly form a connective identity), and basically take over the pig farming business by giving them a much better life.

If that sounds kinda skewed and unlikely then... yeah, it probably is. That’s my interpretation of the movie at my level (it’s true, I may be stupid) and I suspect everyone is going to come up with something different. Is the pig farmer genuinely observing the plight of the various victims of the process started by the man with the maggots, for instance? I don’t know but I’m willing to assume he’s tapping into their heads somehow and maybe shares a link from the same process as them... maybe that’s how Kris comes to get the upper hand near the end of the film and, in some ways, take over the process while bringing an end to the potential ruin and devastation of people’s lives.

What I can tell you for sure is that Upstream Colour is absolutely gripping throughout, just like Primer was, and it seems to me to be artistically successful in all that it tries to do. The performances are electrical and about as naturalistic as you can imagine. The cinematography is superb, giving us drab and neutral tones pitched against some beautiful, almost luminous colouring for certain sequences. The editing is both easy to follow... even if it does feel like Nicholas Roeg on acid, but without the fanfare... and that editing serves to provoke an atmosphere of puzzle solving which leads to your full engagement with the material on offer. The soundtrack, while a little clichéd, perhaps, for a film of this nature, serves the onslaught of images very well and never once outstays its welcome.

If I’d have seen this film at a cinema last year as I’d wanted to (Seriously UK film distributors... what happened to it? It didn’t play in my local Cineworld once!) then it would easily have made my top five movies from last year. As it happens, I’ll have to be content with saying that this movie is a very definite and hard recommend from me. Shane Carruth is an artistic force to be reckoned with (he’s even pretty watchable as an actor, as it happens) and this movie is a great work of art all lovers of cinema should see at least once in their lives. Very much a blu-ray I suspect I’ll be lending to a lot of people who wouldn’t normally see a movie like this and it’ll likely get a return visit from me sometime in the near future too. Take a look when you get the chance.

Noirish Project

Truth Paste

Noirish Project
Directed by James Devereaux
Private screener

Clarification Disclaimer: Please note that, while I freely gave my time and costs to Noirish Project, I produced three campaigns (60s UK/US, Italian 70s and modern) and a couple of early teaser pieces only... comprising around 30 finished designs (and generating hundreds of files). I also designed one set of title cards and a “video on demand” header. Since my work on the project, other factors have come into play and, as far as  know, my artwork is now not being used. I don’t know whether my title cards are still in the film but I would guess/hope not since that would, obviously, further dilute the brand strength of the movie in relation to the poster campaigns. I am clarifying this here, not so much as to distance myself from the project but to firmly establish to any future collaborators who require my expertise in design matters that some of the stuff surrounding the project has not been produced by me and therefore the quality and consistency of the layout and typography on certain pieces should not be mistaken for my own. I actually have a degree in graphic design and over a quarter of a century in the field, so I’m not in the habit of making any typographic mistakes or poor judgemental decisions within the realm of my work unless insisted on by a client. So please don’t judge me by some of the  stuff you may have seen surrounding this project as I may well not be guilty. I wish James Devereaux every success with this and future projects and, as always, I hope you enjoy his unique spin in his work.

Noirish Project is a movie by actor/writer/director James Devereaux which you might have been hearing about on the internet for a while. It was a project I first got caught up in last year when I was invited to produce a poster campaign for it, which kinda snowballed into three (see here) and also got me on board with designing the static title cards for the film itself. So I was pleased to, just recently, be able to see an internet preview of the movie and to see how the film lived up to my expectations of it.

I’d have to say, it’s a pretty good watch...

Following two credit cards, the film starts off with a long, static establishing, almost panoramic shot of the city of London with a train pulling in from left of shot to right and slowing down to make way for another coming in from the opposite direction before travelling on its way. Knowing the director’s concerns and previous history in the arena of short films, somewhat, even before the shot had finished, I immediately took this as a metaphor for the way people approach each other, fail to communicate and then pass each other by. So, yeah, that first opening shot is kinda representative of the whole movie in a way.

The film then starts proper with what I can only describe as a “slow chase” or trail sequence which sets the tone for the movie quite accurately, as it’s kind of like watching a muffled urban road movie punctuated by the odd, sobering contrasts of absurdist humour stabbing out from the dialogue’s inescapable bursts of human non-connection as played by the two skillful lead actors of the piece - Alfie Black as Billy and James Devereaux himself as Jimmy. This non-communication is aggravated or exasperated by the fact that it’s fairly obvious from the start, and made implicit by the end of the movie, that one character is "playing" the other throughout the course of the film.

However, the intent and inherent contradiction of one of the characters at the basic level of story, serves the bigger picture in this case. Devereaux’s films are not about story. Story is, for the most part in his works, at least the ones I’ve seen so far, a necessary evil which needs to be served at ground zero in order to get you to see the real movie and what it’s about. In this particular case, the strong humour and plot device of the recovery of some paste pearls are the window dressing and the shelving for a study of two people who are dislocated from each other, basically pointing out the alienation which is part and parcel of everyday living in the 21st century.

For example, that slow trail sequence at the opening of the film, which dislocates you a little in its construction, followed by a shot where the old 180 degree rule is nicely broken in such a way that you are left on a shot of two park benches with James and Alfie entering from screen right (instead of left, where you'd expect to see them coming from), serves to re-enforce this sense of disengagement by disorienting the viewer somewhat in the way the movie is decoded.

Many of the shots in this movie are very well designed but even they serve to back up this overview of general disruption. A shot of Billy and Jimmy standing against a wall with windows, for example, is well chosen since Jimmy’s shoulders are precisely aligned with where the texture of the wall ends and the windows begin. This leaves the head of his character and, to a lesser extent but certainly in contrast to this, that of Billy, existing in split sections of the frame, sectioning off the characters in multiple planes within the same space.

Yet another shot, splits planes horizontally towards the camera as a character walks towards a pub in the background and we suddenly realise there are cars going past him between us and the camera and, again, more in front of him. This sudden chopping up of the perceived reality of the situation by displacing the casual viewer in space seems to be a constant theme throughout the movie, and this is aided immensely by both the writing and the performance, as the rightly suspicious Billy is bamboozled throughout the film’s running length.

Other examples of the visual fractures would be a long sequence where everything is slightly out of focus or the fact that a close up or series of close-ups will appear before any kind of establishing shots in certain sequences, a psychological trick I first saw used in a 1960s movie in an effort to prime the audience for a certain mindset but which is used more overtly here as a way of transitioning with a kind of jagged and brisk cut. This transition of contrast is something which occurs again and again throughout the movie and is equally reenforced by the different sound designs for each section, rubbing against each other in the mix.

The film incudes a minimum of characters but the appearances of Gerald Davidson and The Doctor and the always lovely Liane Rose-Bunce as Miss Haverford West in a scene which plays out in terms of indifference, aggression and ultimately absurd and over the top humour, is a welcome one and helps propel the story, such as it is, back into the realm of the two hander and into the true interests of the writer.

That’s probably as much as I want to say about this project at this point. One, because I don’t want to spoil it for you and, two, because I’m possibly too close to the project to want to get too involved with it as a reviewer. What I can say, though, is that the film continues to see the development of Devereaux as a writer/director who seems to be developing his unique visual language in a progressive fashion with each project I see him complete. If you get the chance to see this film then I would urge you to go take a look as it captures the essence of British zero budget film-making as it is at present in an interesting and, more importantly, endearing way. For more details, see the Norish Project web site here... http://noirishproject.wordpress.com/