Sudden Impact

Dirty Law

Sudden Impact
Directed by Clint Eastwood
USA 1983
Warner Brothers
Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Okay... more spoilers. Big ones. Take a look at them... make my day!

The Enforcer (reviewed here) was supposed to be the last Dirty Harry movie but, a string of less than stellar box office performances and certain other factors brought about this sequel, Sudden Impact, seven years later. I think it was a good choice and it made the most money, I believe, out of the five movies in this sequence. Although he’d been offered the direction of at least one of the previous Dirty Harry movies and had directed numerous other films, even directing one of the scenes in the first in this series, Eastwood finally agreed to pick up the reigns on this one and he does not disappoint. It was also the last of six movies that he and his then girlfriend Sondra Locke made together. 

This one’s a little different than the others too and, many might say the character oversteps his moral parameters and elevates himself above the law... which, of course, he does but, it’s also a crowd pleaser because of that, I think. It tells the story of Jennifer Spencer, played by Locke, who was gang raped along with her sister ten years prior to the main action of this film. There are flashbacks to that sequence, which made her sister non-responsive and with her mind lost in hospital since... but I have to say the constant flashbacks to highlight characters who took part in this crime does seem a little heavy handed, especially by today’s standards, I think.

So, it’s ten years later and Jennifer is slowly seeking out each of the perpetrators and killing them with a gunshot to the genitals (her signature move) followed by a gunshot to the head. She travels to the coastal town to catch up with the perps one by one in their home territory but it’s also where Harry, played by Eastwood, ends up, primarily to get him out of San Francisco and partially to investigate the first of these crimes, as it’s the home town of the first of an ever increasing number of victims. This brings him into friendship and romantic entanglement with Jennifer and, the usual load of trouble with authority figures.

And it’s all good fun. 

There’s a nice line where Eastwood crashes a party to intimidate a suspect (he manages to accidentally intimidate him into a fatal heart attack) and he foreshadows the potential for harm to two bodyguards by asking the lady on the door to phone for an ambulance due to the two guys suffering multiple abrasions and lacerations. Of course, this is a nod back to A Fistful Of Dollars, by way of Kurosawa’s original template of that movie, Yojimbo, where the leads asks for a number of coffins to be prepared. A lot of the film takes place at night, which seems to give all the characters a more sinister tone and Jennifer is certainly no exception. The play of shadow and light in certain shots really hammers home the darkness, such as a shot where we are watching a front view of Locke working on a painting but the artificially created light throws the shadow of her arm painting into a small section of the screen behind her. There’s almost a German expressionist element to the shot. 

The film opens strongly, after we see Jennifer despatching her first victim, with Eastwood briefly attending a court case before going to a diner and being warned a hold up is in progress by the waitress, who has been serving his coffee for the last ten years, dumping a load of sugar into his cup. It’s in this scene where he first uses his latest  and most culturally influential catchphrase “Go ahead... make my day.” 

All well and good but let’s talk about the waitress in this scene. One of Clint’s early roles was a very brief, almost but not quite an extra level part in Tarantula (reviewed here). The film starred Mara Corday as the leading lady and she and Clint Eastwood had been good friends ever since. It’s she who plays the waitress here and she also turns up in a few other of his films over the years.  

Lalo Schifrin provides one of his best scores for the series, taking on contemporary percussion style orchestration into his usual fusion of jazz and suspense and... it’s really something. There are also a few nods to his original Dirty Harry score thrown into the mix. 

But lets finish up with the real elephant in the room here. The audience probably had a problematic unease building up when they first saw this movie... I know I did. The problem being that, while she’s clearly been disturbed and affected by her experiences, Locke’s character is absolutely who the audience is siding with. Up until now, Harry has always been about justice rather than the law but, it always came down to a line he wouldn’t cross. Justice must prevail but, only within the limitations of the law. Not here though. He finally crosses the line and does the right thing in spite of the law... breaking it and muddying the waters with a specific piece of evidence so Jennifer can go free at the end. I’m still not sure how I feel about it all these years later, in all honesty. It’s a moment which severely compromises the Harry Callahan character but, at the same time, nobody wants to see Jennifer brought to justice for her own crimes either. Everyone she takes out is pretty horrible and her vigilante character is serving up revenge that seems to bring a real sense of justice to the piece. 

So yeah, Sudden Impact brings a taint on Clint Eastwood’s character but it makes it a very interesting entry in the series (although not my favourite... that will always be The Enforcer). After this... well nobody really expected Eastwood to do anymore of these things but, just five years later, what is now the last of the series was released at the cinema. In all honesty, I remember hating that one when I went to see it but, let’s see if it’s improved any over time. I’ll be revisiting that one next.

Rambo - Last Blood

Blood Wiser Bear

Rambo - Last Blood
Directed by Adrian Grunberg
2019 USA
UK cinema release print.

Aaah... not sure where to start with Rambo - Last Blood.

Regular readers of my blog will know I have a lot of respect, time and admiration for Sylvester Stallone. I think he’s one of the few, true, larger than life ‘Hollywoood stars’ we have left but also a great actor and strong writer who could have maybe had a more varied career. The Rambo films are, for me, among his least interesting films but I loved his fourth one, Rambo, and I’ve always loved the scores to these things. If you want to know my feelings on the other Rambo movies, my review of the whole tetralogy before this one is here.

I was actually fairly looking forward to this fifth entry into the cycle but, it has to be said, I was a little disappointed with it. Not because it’s that badly written (in terms of dialogue at least) and the clichéd plot is not necessarily a thorn in its side either... I think this kind of storyline could have made a good Rambo movie, to be honest. And the revenge/action device as a call to arms present here is also pretty good... the movie is honestly a lot of fun in places.

The acting is not bad either. Stallone is cool (although... I think he his characterisation is part of the problem here) and his supporting cast, especially Yvette Monreal as the niece who Rambo has to go and rescue from the prostitution ring who have enslaved her, are all very good here.

And the action is, mostly, well put together. Or at least, the dramatic weight of it is. Stallone is one of those few actors (and directors, when he puts his hand to it... I’m assuming he has a lot to say when being directed himself and so has an influence on the way things turn out in the movies he’s in)... who understands that if you want to have an action cinema then you have to have the long pauses between the action sequences to give the audience a break and to make the scenes of violence or kinetic energy more potent when they come. Using those elements more as a punctuation to the story rather than being what the story is about. Kurosawa knew this. Steven Spielberg knows this. Sly Stallone knows this. And there is that element here to the film too.

And it is a lot of fun and certainly an entertaining picture a lot of the time.

I do, however, have three problems with the film and, for me, they do put quite a dampener on all the positive stuff but, you never know, some films grow better with age when you watch them again in later years and I suspect this might well be the case with this fifth one.

So my first problem is John Rambo himself. The way he is written and, because of that, Stallone’s portrayal of him, is really not like the character as we've known him. For a start, he talks too much. Rambo was always the strong silent type and though there is one scene where he lets his glares do all the talking for him, when he first approaches the Mexican traffickers, he really is not like the Rambo we’ve known in previous movies and I had a really hard time trying to equate this version of the character with the one we last saw eleven years ago, to be honest. Yeah, I know the character has moved on and he’s become a different person now but, even so, it still felt a bit of a wrong departure for this movie. This big bear of a man is wiser but not necessarily as close to his origins as I would have liked. This felt like it could be any generic action movie with any one of many modern action stars playing the central role... it didn’t feel like a Rambo movie. The plot... yes. The character... no.

Secondly, the big action sequence at the end seems terribly edited to me. It was way too fast. It was very gory and I’m not complaining about that... this element was perhaps the only part of the whole affair that brought it back in line with the previous four but... it has to be said, I was struggling to follow it. Not the sequencing or anything, I was cool with that. It was the details of the deaths which I was struggling with... they were just too fast for me to see what was going on. I could see lots of people's heads and limbs were being folded, spindled and mutilated but, before I had time to register what had happened when somebody's face suddenly got pulverised, for instance, the film had already moved on. So I could have done with a little more understanding of what I’d just seen in a few instances.

Thirdly... the score. I love Brian Tyler’s music and it was when he provided the score to the last film in the series, following in the giant, mythical footsteps of the late, great Jerry Goldsmith, that I first started to notice Tyler’s work and, I’ve been an admirer of his scores since then. This one, however, felt less like a Rambo score but... it’s hard to tell, to be honest. He does quote Jerry’s themes a little but it felt to me like there were some real missed opportunities, especially near the end, where he could have elevated the spirit of Rambo through the music a little more than he did. Not necessarily his fault, of course, he might have gone that way and the studio rejected those cues for all I know. However, this is a very noisy film when the action starts and, for the most part, Tyler’s score is not dialled up far enough in the sound mix to really hear it properly or feel the benefit, I thought. I’d love to hear it away from the movie but, alas, it looks like this may be the first Rambo film not to get a CD release (just a stupid, electronic download thing which isn’t the best way to actually hear the music as recorded) and so it looks like I may never get a chance to hear it now. Which is a great shame. I’m hoping Intrada records might leap to the rescue here at some point but I’m not holding my breath.

And that’s all I’ve got on Rambo - Last Blood. The film ends with a montage of clips from all five films with the last section even having a further hint at John Rambo’s final fate with a bit of footage you don’t get to see in the main film... but again, the scoring on this section felt wrong and it could have really done with some more of Goldsmith’s original themes in here. All in all, if you’re a fan of modern action movies and have no great loyalty to the earlier films in the franchise, then I’d say you’d probably have a good time with the new one. Some older fans may struggle with this version of the character but, ultimately, it’s a solid action movie so it should win the majority of them over, I suspect. Not my favourite of the series by any sense of the imagination but I’m glad I saw it and I wish they’d have done a ‘final stand’ movie which was more appropriate to the original character. I was a little disappointed with this one.

Revenge

Blood And Sand

Revenge
2017 France Directed by Coralie Fargeat  
UK cinema release print.

Wow... what a great movie. I really wanted to see Revenge and I was hoping/assuming it would get a wider release to one of my local cinemas or, at the very least, play to full houses in all the London venues. Alas, it was a real problem to track the film down, taking me out of my safety zone and trying to find a cinema near a train station in order to catch the last one home in the unusually small amount of screens showing this at, it has to be said, way too inconvenient times to be doing this film any favours.

However, even as the first moment of the film came up on the screen and the dot above the vast, static shot of a desert landscape grew to show a helicopter zooming at us dead centre of the frame, masterfully anticipated by the thwup thwup thwup of ROB’s (aka Robin Coudert) truly outstanding electronic score, I knew it had been worth tracking this film down and getting to look at this thing in the cinema.

The film is, as the title suggests, an old cliché of a revenge plot but the actual execution of the story is a lot less ‘held back’ by the way the genre tropes are usually represented in these... in some ways at least.

So we have the main protagonist, Jen (played by Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz), who is... and I’m almost sorry to say this... a vacuous airhead of a character and, I think this is a deliberate ploy by the writer/director (I’ll touch on this again in a minute). She is brought along to the desert retreat of her married lover, Michael (played by Kevin Janssens) for a couple of days of sex and sun before his two friends arrive for their annual hunting trip. However, after Stan (Vincent Colombe) and Dimitri (Guillaume Bouchède) arrive a day early, Jen finds herself left alone with the two while Michael has to go out for a couple of hours. When he returns, Jen has been raped by Stan and when they all try to appease the tearful girlfriend, she resists the idea and tries to escape into the desert. At this point, Michael shows his true colours and pushes her over the edge of a cliff, impaling her on a tree.

The next part of the film is Jen’s return to conciousness as she ‘goes feral’ and seeks to kill the three men who are hunting her after realising she somehow survived the incident. And, yeah, that’s a pretty standard revenge movie plot, to be sure, but the thing I was most impressed with here, in terms of the way the character of Jen, brilliantly portrayed by Lutz, is presented is... even though she becomes a dangerous predator herself who actually learns how to survive as she goes (such as an incident with an abruptly ending trail of blood used as a trap which gives her pause for thought when a similar tactic is used later in the film)... she still seems to retain the ‘vacuous airhead’ part of her character. She has instinctual intelligence but in no way seems to demonstrate the intellectual lift that one usually associates with the ‘woman goes savage’ trope in these kinds of affairs and that’s really refreshing, in some ways. Of course, I could just be misinterpreting that because, I believe, after the character returns to the story I don’t think she has any lines of dialogue but... well, that’s the way it came off to me.

The direction and shot design on this are superb, too.

Take the house interior, which is used in the first and last quarters of the movie, before and after the narrative has turned into a variant of The Most Dangerous Game (an exploitation remake of which is reviewed by me here). These are shot with a kind of ‘giallo filter’ to them in that the colours juxtaposed such as different full length windows in pink and blue glass and the way the verticals within the shots are used to split and delineate characters quite rigidly in different segments of the screen, are more than reminiscent of the kinds of colourful theatricality inherent in the gialli which prospered mostly in late 1960s to late 1970s Italian cinema. I suspect Fargeat is a fan of this kind of cinema and she does this kind of thing so beautifully throughout the movie.

Another thing she likes to do is focus on little details of a shot or situation and extend or slow them down with an exaggerated sound volume to dwell on things such as a man’s teeth tearing into a snack or drops of blood landing next to an ant. She sometimes does this simply by allowing her characters to walk out of shot and then not following them, electing instead to linger on the leftovers of a scene rather than rush to capture the next. Which is a nice way of doing things, I thought.

Everything in the movie seems to be enhanced in a similar way and the richness of the colours throughout, together with the augmented audio experience reminded me a lot, actually, of the fantastic films of husband and wife team Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, with such works as Amer (reviewed here) and The Strange Colour Of Your Body’s Tears (reviewed here) and I mean this absolutely as a compliment to the slightly off kilter genius of this director... this is Coralie Fargeat’s first feature length film but she’s obviously one to watch.

It’s to her credit also that in a film which is so ‘dialled up’ both visually and aurally, that a scene where the mescaline from some peyote kicks in with one of the characters feels like its been ‘turned up’ even more. There’s something about the way this director isolates and distracts by normalising the audience’s expectations which make even this scene a contrast to what has gone before.

A similar visual ‘stylistic push’ seems to come from the look of the actors. I don’t know whether this was conscious or not but, for instance, Guillaume Bouchède has the kind of ‘Italian Peter Lorre’ look one might associate with Luciano Pigozzi and Vincent Colombe could almost be a young Eli Wallach at times here. As for Kevin Janssens, his angular and expressively dead yet somehow flattened face looks nothing less than something Hergé might have drawn as one of his antagonistic thugs in The Adventures Of Tin Tin. The whole look of the movie, even it’s visually giallo-like similarities, almost feels like it was destined for the pages of a 1970s issue of Metal Hurlant (aka Heavy Metal) and it’s a nice fusion of styles, rather than clash, which helps give the film its heightened sense of intensity.

The director also seems to like a lot of violence... well maybe not violence but more the goriness and aftermath of violence. In fact, one of the things I noticed mostly was not the abundance of violence, since there are only three antagonists to hunt down and present with ‘pay back’ in the entire movie... it was more the way in which the lead in to each violent act was similarly extended to give both the most apprehension as to what will happen next and also the most appreciation (if that’s the right word) of the levels of gory detail which Fargeat's lens lovingly lingers on. I think I would most liken it to sexual foreplay as the director teases and slowly brings the violent elements to a boil before each orgasmic character denouement in the story.

Also, I noticed an almost fetishistic obsession with wounds and their post-trauma penetration while the recipients of said conflict are still alive. So pointy branches are cut out of wounds, deeply assimilated shards of glass are fished around for in a foot (in a scene of intense grimness that becomes almost deliberately comical when reflected in the face of the person in question... I wasn’t the only one in the audience laughing at this moment) and I have to say that by the end of the film I was waiting for it to happen with every scrape or bodily penetration depicted. It became very much a case of... “Oh, that person’s just received a very nasty wound... I guess someone will be sticking their fingers in that in a few minutes then.”... and, sure enough, there weren’t too many opportunities missed in the ‘wound invasion’ department.

One odd thing about the violence presented in the film is that, even though it’s not really a ‘first person point of view’ kind of affair, whenever Jen gets hit on the head and loses consciousness for a few seconds, the screen goes dark for a moment. Which I found interesting. Kind of a ‘first person by proxy’ implication, in a way.

Another nice thing involving the violence and goriness in one scene is the way the director turns up a ‘shopping channel’ on a TV to provide a kind of ‘consumer counterpoint’ to the grimness of what is going on in the rest of the scenario. I haven’t seen this much blood since Argento’s Tenebrae (aka Tenebre reviewed here) and the walls and floor of the house are literally painted red by the end of the film with the characters slipping in their own blood in an effort to escape or pursue one another (the film had one walk out about a third of the way through with the audience I saw it with).

And that’s about all I’m saying about this one other than... I can’t wait to grab a Blu Ray transfer of this at some point in the near future. There were a couple of moments where I didn’t understand how they could work technically in real life... including a brilliant ‘branded tattoo’ moment which I won’t go into in case it’s considered a spoiler but, ultimately artistic licence will always win out for me when the films being made are as skillfully crafted as this. Coralie Fargeat is definitely a director I need to keep my eyes open for in the future and Revenge is a brilliantly stunning debut feature. I can’t wait to see this one again.

The Villainess (aka Ak-Nyeo)

Trouble And Strife

The Villainess (aka Ak-Nyeo)
South Korea 2017
Directed by Byung-gil Jung  
Arrow Video Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Very mild spoilers about action content,
if you consider such a thing a spoiler.

The Villainess is a brand new action movie by Byung-gil Jung which, apparently, received a standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival. Having now seen it after the absolutely pitiful cinema release it got here in the UK I can certainly see why (if you were lucky enough to catch a 'blink and you’ll miss it' screening then well done to you). It’s a frenetically choreographed action revenge movie of the sort which has become fashionable over the last decade or so and technically it’s brilliant. Matched with some truly astonishing camerawork and some sound editing which really doesn’t obscure the communication of what’s going on in a sequence (some directors are just not good at this, these days) the film is a real visually kinetic tour de force which is both exciting but which also brings in some good character writing and spot on performances from the various leads.

The film opens with a quite violent, visceral action sequence as the main protagonist Sook-hee, played by the lovely and, as it turns out, extraordinarily capable Ok-bin Kim takes out a whole building full of criminal thugs in various locations on her route to the man in charge. The action starts on a very long, protracted single sequence through the building shot in a first person point of view mode, just like if you were playing a video game like Doom or Duke Nuke ‘Em and the creative stunt work is full-on right from the outset. While the arterial spray of the various people that Sook-hee stabs, shoots, kicks, punches and slices up are not at 1970s Japanese levels of ‘ nonsensically over-the-top fountaining claret’ there is a fair amount of splashing blood and gore in this first sequence which sets up the tone for the rest of the film. There's just loads of violent action in the movie and its all punctuated with some somewhat satisfying viscera for fans of that kind of action.

Somewhere near the end of this astonishing opening sequence, once you may have asked yourself, just like I did, how the heck the camera could actually get in and out of the sturdily choreographed violence in such a manner, the main protagonist (aka, the camera at this point), is smashed head first into a mirror and its as we see the reflection that we catch sight of actress Ok-bin’s face for the first time. As if the delivery method of the footage has somehow been disabled by this jolt, the film then continues from that moment on in a more traditional, third person point of view style narrative... as we see Sook-hee finish off the last of the, 'must be more than fifty', antagonists by killing the boss of the gang... strangling him with a chord wrapped around his throat as she smashes through a window onto street level. It’s there that the character’s journey begins to be defined in the narrative as she is arrested by the police and taken away.

After this, she is recruited against her will by a top secret, government cell of trained killers and it wasn’t long before I realised that the elephant in the room which none of the marketing or publicity for the film had emphasised or even identified (as far as I could see) became fairly self evident. That The Villainess is, more or less, a remake or reboot (or whatever the hell you want to call it these days) of Luc Besson’s outstanding movie Nikita (aka La Femme Nikita). Where it differs from that one is by giving the main character a vengeful back story and a lot of deception and extra skullduggery on top of the same basic structure, with lots of flashbacks and twists and turns which brings the central character right back to the heart of what she originally set out to do, take revenge on her father’s killer. However, the way it’s done here is through a quite complex set of reveals and a veil in the form of the same kind of plastic surgery which Sook-hee is given when she is ‘recruited’.

Now, I absolutely love Besson’s Nikita and that movie is never going to be topped in terms of similarly themed tales, I think. However, there have also been a fair few remakes and retreads of Nikita and, of the ones I’ve seen (mostly in the form of Asian remakes or homages), this one is by far the best and most engaging... and it has a hell of a lot more action to it, for sure. While, I feel, the writers has tried their best to distract from what I personally believe is an ‘homage’ to Besson’s classic, they have also snuck in a fair few little visual references and echoes of the original in the form of sequences like a sniper’s disassembled rifle hidden in the toilet and ready to be used by the central protagonist because the room’s been set up to give her a window for a target (in this case, the minute or so of required bullet play comes up during the character’s marriage)... or a shoot out with a group of bad guys in a kitchen.

That being said, the amount of levels of flashbacks to different points in the central characters life and the way the agenda of both the agency and the lead villain, make this film a fresh and more complex riff on a familiar theme and it does manage to present the audience with a unique experience which delivers on its own terms as well as being an action fest inspired, at least in part, to the French classic.

Added to all this, the film is beautifully designed too, with some stunning colour palettes and some lovely shot compositions. For instance, there’s a flashback scene where Sook-hee finds out her husband has been killed, where he and a colleague are standing looking at his badly mutilated corpse in the back of a car. We then cut to a shot of a road with the silhouette of a bridge going diagonally across from left to right with a central strut of the bridge splitting the frame vertically. The neon glow of the lighting on the street shining through the two rectangles created by that dark vertical, with the two characters and the car in the right hand rectangle and with the street in the left hand shape empty. Such a lovely frame in a movie which is full of cool stuff like this. The audience also, by this point in the proceedings, knows that the very next sequence following this, before we cut back to the present plot, would have been the opening slaughter of the gang in the building.

In addition, the editing in this thing is, as I said, quite amazing and one is just left to wonder, as I commented on the opening sequence, just how the camera could actually get in and film all this fast moving carnage in the first place. There’s another incredible scene which is basically a motor bike chase/high speed sword fight with the camera weaving in and out, getting up close and personal with all the main action points while somehow not getting totalled by flying bikes (or people) which makes you wonder just how long that sequence took to shoot.

All in all, if you are a fan of female lead action/revenge thrillers and you want to see some incredible stunt work and, as it happens, some nice character work from a bunch of great actors, then The Villainess definitely comes heartily recommended. The only thing I was left wondering at the end was... why the heck was it called The Villainess? Certainly, since the main protagonist is far from a villain, I couldn’t really identify anyone else in the tale who would somehow match that description.

Elle

Palindromic Vengeance

Elle
France/Germany/Belgium 2016
Directed by Paul Verhoeven
UK cinema release print.

I’ve quite liked some of Paul Verhoeven’s films in the past, with Robocop being the stand out one for me. It has to be said, though, that the films I’ve seen by him have tended to be American productions and, somehow, feel more like comic book movies than real films for consenting adults. Not a pop at Verhoeven, by the way... I think this applies to most theatrical releases these days and sometimes that kind of stylistic choice goes down a treat. However, I’m not used to seeing a film which is a, relatively, complex and subtle picture like we have here from a director like him.

One of the partial reasons for this, apart from the writing, is that he’s filled the roles with incredible actors, most of whom I don’t know but many of whom seemed familiar and recognisable. Recognisable or not, though, they all do some great work here... not least the true star of the piece, Isabelle Huppert. I’ve not seen too many of the films made by this outstanding French actress, living in a small town which is even, technically, in London means the opportunities to see anything other than big budget US movies is fairly limited... but I’ve been a fan of her work ever since seeing her in the lead role in one of my favourite living director’s films... Hal Hartley’s Amateur. Truth be told, it was her name that brought me to Elle rather than Verhoeven’s (well, actually it was a train). Plus it had some good word of mouth so I took a trip out to the Hackney Picture House to give it a look (the film isn’t showing locally to me... surprise, surprise).

Elle stars Huppert as Michèle Leblanc, the joint founder and director of a video game company. She’s a successful business woman but her character is a lot more interesting, emotional, devious and complex than her seemingly muffled exterior might lead her friends to believe. Part of this wealth of depth which, in all honesty, I imagine very few actresses other than Huppert could have successfully  pulled off, stems from an extremely traumatic incident from her childhood which has obviously left a mark on her and which, perhaps, gives some insight in the way her character reacts to things in certain scenes. Which is an observation I couldn’t imagine myself writing all that often about a female character in an American film, to be sure but, if cinema is good at one thing it’s good about its diversity of expression, so maybe I’m being a little unfair to Hollywood in this comparison.

The film starts off with a black screen and the sound of Michèle’s struggles and cries on the soundtrack, followed by a cat watching what she is going through before Verhoeven’s camera reveals a scene of Michèle being beaten and raped in her house. The killer, wearing a body suit and mask which makes him vaguely reminiscent of the comic book character Diabolik, leaves her recovering on the floor. The scene is quite intense and, as the film plays out, we see the impression it has made on Michèle’s mind as she flashes back to it internally, replaying and sometimes changing the outcome of the encounter. This is a good tool to help the audience grasp the weight of the incident on the central character, actually, because the way she deals with this event externally is with considerably less alarm and upset than one might reasonably expect from a woman placed in this kind of situation.

The first half of the film is basically a mystery as, while still getting threats and a humiliating computer game movie of her made public, she tries to learn the identity of her assailant who, by the way, doesn’t stop at attempting just one attack on her through the course of the film. Meanwhile, she has a convoluted life to handle, having an affair with her best friend and business partner’s husband, amongst other amorous interests, and dealing with her ex-husband, her mother and her son. When she finally reveals who the rapist is in the movie, I have to admit I was just a little disappointed, at first. I can usually figure out the identity of the mystery at the heart of most movies I watch and, alas, in this movie I had already figured the identity of this person the first time we see him in a social context without his mask. That being said, it didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the movie and certainly, this mystery is only the first half of the film. The next part is the long played out vengeance of Michèle as she takes stock of her social situations and slowly pulls together various threads of her own convoluted life to bring about a denouement which I didn’t really, quite, see coming but which absolutely fits her character’s history. The path to the conclusion of the film is not a black and white one and, I’m glad to say, not all the scenes in this movie follow that dull, cause and effect pattern endemic to a lot of modern movies. For instance, Verhoeven includes a sequence where Michèle gets one of her employees to teach her how to use a gun, setting up the idea that she will buy and use one at a later point in the film. But she doesn’t and it’s exactly this kind of detail in the drama of these kinds of richly woven movies that make them so much more interesting than a lot of product around. Scenes in a story don’t always have to lead to something else, they can just be about re-enforcing the inner state of where a character is at, rather than lead you onto the next stage of the journey.

Anne Dudley’s score to the movie is somehow slow, light and more ponderous than I was expecting from this film but, once the character of Michèle is in your head and you see the way she deals with events in her life, it makes perfect sense and seems completely right for it. I’d like to hear it away from the movie but the CD is so expensive compared to others that I probably won’t rush out to buy this one straight away (and I’m certainly not going with a cheap download option... thanks but no thanks music labels). It certainly maintains an atmosphere of ‘muffled reality’ in some scenes which perfectly reflects the way Michèle conveys herself to her friends and relatives.

Elle is a dark work of art with a wonderful cast and some nice choices by the director which don’t push the movie over the top in its exploration of, in all honesty, the kinds of events and incidents which could easily be exploited in a more spectacular fashion. Despite figuring out who the main antagonist is (and even that word may be too strong for his character, in some respects... this movie greyshades its depiction of events pretty well) I had a really good time with this and would recommend it to anyone who wants to see something a little different to the kind of stuff you usually get in cinemas these days. Lovely film. Not enough of these kinds of affairs are given a release in this country. Which is a shame.

Prevenge

From Fear To Maternity

Prevenge
2016 UK Directed by Alice Lowe
Screening as part of the London Film Festival
October 16th 2016

My only real proper recollection of the phenomenon that is Alice Lowe, prior to this movie, is of seeing her in Ben Wheatley’s excellent film Sightseers (reviewed by me here) and I will always have the moment stuck in my mind from that where she screams “This is not my vaginaaaaaaa!” When reading up on her, though, it turns out I’ve actually seen her in quite a few things without actually realising it. I chose Prevenge as my fourth 2016 LFF movie purely on the strength of Lowe in Sightseers and, frankly, I’m really glad I did... I saw five films at the festival this year, most of them very good in one way or another and this particular one certainly is a magnificent and shiny little masterpiece, it has to be said.

The plot is straight out of the kinds of 1980s pulpy horror paperbacks I used to read as a teenager. You know the ones? Where a baby inside a mother’s womb starts controlling the parent and manipulating the outside world, usually resulting in much bloody mayhem. I’m not implying any of those trashy novels were a direct influence in this case, far from it, but this movie could slot nicely into this genre while, at the same time, being the absolutely most amazing and strikingly sensitive portrayal of that kind of idea we’ve yet had on screen.

Lowe plays the, mostly quite tragic, protagonist Ruth. She has lost her boyfriend in a 'terrible event' before finding out she was pregnant. As the baby grows in her belly, she is compelled by the unborn child to work her way through a kill list of seven people (which actually changes at one point, but I don’t want to post any spoilers on this one), murdering them one by one as the movie progresses but, of course, since it’s Alice Lowe, the film is also a comedy and the bleakness of the situations are shot through with a strong dose of extremely funny humour which will quite possibly have you laughing out loud, even through some of the goriest set pieces showcased here. There’s a set up, for example, where Ruth’s midwife, played by Jo Hartley, says something about what Ruth will be going through in her pregnancy which comes back to haunt her during a murder scene in an absolutely hilarious moment that had the audience roaring. Again... don't want to spoil that moment here.

The film opens strongly with a scene of a pet shop owner, played by Dan Renton Skinner, showing Ruth his ‘dangerous animals’ and right from the bat we notice that the majority of the men in the movie are portrayed in a funny but extremely unsympathetic light... which works really well to help keep the audience sensitive to Ruth’s plight, to a certain extent. What with Skinner's witty but slimy innuendo, for example, or Tom Davis’ performance as the appallingly ‘orrible DJ Dan, you can’t help but side with Ruth in certain situations. Not that this film is sexist in that way. The wonderful Kate Dickie is one of a couple of women who turn up on the kill list although, it has to be said, the girls certainly don’t seem as sleazy as some of the men in this movie.

All the performances in this movie, in fact, are pretty much amazing and... as good as everyone is, I do have to still shout out Lowe in this, not least because she’s directed and starred in this, from her own script, while heavily pregnant. I mean, c’mon, that’s a feat in itself but to also turn in some of the finest acting in one of the absolute best revenge films going takes some talent. Lowe has a gift for melancholy and she expresses it amazingly well throughout the film but... she can also express a sudden burst of joy and when you see the quick contrast between the two states, as you will in the closing scene of this movie, again for reasons I can’t divulge, the audience will get an emotional rush from it, I’m sure... at least, I did.

The set up for the revenge in the film is held back and not overtly spelled out at the start of the movie. This is another of the film’s strengths because, as the story progresses, the audience can begin to piece together the truth about what has happened to Ruth’s ex-boyfriend and the events surrounding his death as the director slowly drip feeds us the necessary information as the central protagonist/antagonist works her way through her shopping list of revenge killings. It’s a smart way of doing this, actually, and you can’t fault the writing here because, what might have just ended up as a catalogue of killings, one after the other... for that’s basically what the structure is here, is lifted by the mystery of the motivation for Ruth’s actions and... well all I can say is you certainly aren’t going to get bored by this one.

Another interesting facet to Ruth’s character and the actions which her baby, whose voice we hear in Ruth’s head all the way through, compel her to take is that of her compassion for other human beings. Before she takes another person’s life she, in almost but not quite all situations, talks to the characters before they realise her intention... as she gauges if they really deserve the gory retribution she is about to serve up. We get a real feeling throughout the movie, and this is also reiterated in the words of Ruth’s midwife, that the baby is the one in control the whole time and it’s not always Ruth’s decision to get the job done, so to speak. This gives her a much more 'human' feel and is another layer which wraps us up in her experience and allows a certain empathy with a character who is, after all, a serial killer.

The end of the film is pretty cool and it leans a lot on the editing and rhythm established earlier in the movie. There's a scene where Ruth (and presumably her unborn child... nothing like a womb with a view) is watching a silent movie actress on television. I think it might be Theda Bara* but I'm not 100% on that. Anyway, the attitude and performance of this actress kinda captivates and then informs the sensibilities and confidence of Ruth, which is made clear through the associations made in the editing of that sequence and echoes of this throughout the movie. In the second to last scene in the film, Ruth is forced to ponder that there might be a different catalyst for her killing spree than she, and the audience watching, had at first realised. This is made beautifully clear in the last scene in the movie where the last two edits confirm these suspicions while at the same time celebrating them in a wonderful moment which, I suspect, may divide some audience members.

And that's all I've got for you on this one. Prevenge is, as I said before, a mini masterpiece of a movie and it's definitely a hard recommend from me. If you like revenge movies in general then I certainly think you'll like it. If you like them laugh out loud funny and, relatively, bloody then... so much the better. What I can definitely say without reservation is that it's a well written, artfully crafted and technically brilliant example of modern British cinema at its best. Seriously... don't miss this one.

* No, I was dead wrong on that account. I asked Alice about this sequence on Twitter and here is her reply... "It was an excerpt from Crime Without Passion 1934. The Furies represented by uncredited actresses. thanks for the great review! xx"

2016 London Film Festival @ NUTS4R2

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