The jury of the 62nd Cannes Film Festival has just bestowed a number of honours upon films screened at the festival, with the coveted Palme d'Or picked up by The White Ribbon by Austrian auteur Michael Haneke. This pleases me greatly as a fan of Haneke's work, particularly since his last film, an English-language shot-for-shot remake of his own Funny Games, was of little interest to me (I have yet to see it), partly since the original is my least favourite of his films (those who have seen it but little else of his other work may be puzzled to hear this is mainly because I find the film too 'warm'). Many have noted that the President of this year's jury, the singular Isabelle Huppert, has featured in two Haneke films, The Piano Teacher (2001) and The Time of the Wolf (2003) (winning a second Best Actress at Cannes for the former, her second after for Claude Chabrol's Violette Noziere (1978)), though many had thought this may have been a hurdle for Haneke. Few have noted, however, that this year's controversial choice for Best Actress, Charlotte Gainsbourg (whom all are obliged to point out is the daughter of Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin) for Lars Von Trier's Antichrist (which frankly sounds bonkers), is not the first whose award-winning performance featured a scene of genital self-mutilation. The previous one? Huppert in The Piano Teacher.
Every film distributor would love to use an award given by the Jury (or other panels at the Festival) to help sell their film. However, there are two Cannes award-winning films which also picked up an award that was unlikely to sit alongside the Palm on the poster. The two films in question are Canadian: the 1994 FIPRESCI Prize winner, Exotica, and the 1996 Special Jury Prize winner, Crash. Apparently, both won Best Alternative Adult Film at the Adult Video News (AVN) Awards, the so-called "Oscars of porn".
Crash is, of course, David Cronenberg's adaptation of the 1973 novel of the same name by the dearly departed J. G. Ballard (much can be said about this man- I direct you in the meantime to a post by my brother). Cronenberg had already accidentally made a Ballard semi-adaptation in the form of his first feature, Shivers (1975) - think High-Rise meets Night of the Living Dead by way of a parasite that is both phallic and faecal. The form of Crash is close to that of a pornographic film, with the plot largely structured around a series of sex scenes. However, in Cronenberg's world, these sex scenes are not there for titillation- if they were they would hands down fail on that count, as the scenes are clouded in distinctly cold anti-passion. Cronenberg in fact left one sex scene out that he found to be too warm. Ballard himself admitted he would have considered his book a failure had he ever had an erection whilst writing. If Cronenberg's Crash (and it is Cronenberg's - Iain Sincliar's BFI Reader on Crash points out a Borgesian relationship between the author and auteur, Cronenberg the Menard to Ballard's Cervantes) is pornography, then it is pornography for the mind, not the phallus. On a side note, in an earlier film, Rabid, cast a pornographic actress (the also sadly recently-departed Marilyn Chambers), with a plot the porn industry may rather forget (zombie-like epidemic as metaphor for STDs).
Atom Egoyan's masterful Exotica seems on the face of it a standard erotic thriller from its central setting, the titular strip club, to its tagline ('In a world of temptation, obsession is the deadliest desire.') And yet Exotica turns out instead to be more of an elegant filmic puzzle, owing much to a European arthouse tradition. By his own admission, Egoyan structured the film like a striptease, removing layers gradually to reveal the bigger picture, eventually offering food for thought rather than arousal. Unlike Crash, Exotica has no sex scenes, the closest thing being the strip dances performed within the environment of the club. As the film progresses, these teases take on far more depth than they would in a by-numbers softcore thriller, no small thanks to a standout performance from Mia Kirshner, showing an acting maturity beyond her then 18 years (across-the-board the cast are accomplished yet underappreciated Canadian actors, including Elias Koteas, who also appears in Crash as the deranged Vaughan). At the conclusion, the viewer may well feel implicit guilt for their part in the voyeurism.
The awarding of Best Alternative Adult Film to both these films seems rather misplaced, neither one is successful pornographically, though this is because neither one strives to be. Yet, with a more naïve reading of its title, adult as in intended for adults, the winning of this prize by two intellectual filmmakers can make more sense.
Showing posts with label Film. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Film. Show all posts
Monday, 25 May 2009
Sunday, 8 March 2009
Man On Ledge
Two of my favourite films of last year were Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg and James Marsh's Man On Wire.
Guy Maddin is a fairly unique voice in cinema. He has long been going to painstaking lengths to ensure his films echo the style of early cinema - taking clear influence from film noir, Eisenstein's agit-prop and German Expressionism. He was hauntological before the term existed. Others may have recently borrowed this retrofied style, see for example Esteban Sapir's enjoyably pulpy La Antena, but Maddin takes his films into the bizarre and psychosexual - one only need look at Careful, his incestuous take on the German mountain movie.
Recently Maddin has delivered a series of semi-autobiographical works, the latest of which is My Winnipeg, a docu-fantasia looking at his hometown. The film sees Maddin (appearing through voiceover) trying to escape Winnipeg. He decides to film his way out of the city- subletting his old home and hiring actors to play his siblings in order to recreate childhood events with his 'real' mother (played by the late Ann Savage, best-known for her femme fatale role in Edgar G. Ulmer's low-budget noir Detour). All the while, using stock and created footage, Maddin discusses events and landmarks in the history of the city. Some details are clearly true - when the city's NHL side the Jets moves to the more wintry climes of Phoenix (becoming the Coyotes), the team's former home, the historic Winnipeg Arena, is made redundant by the erection of a new ice arena, the MTS Centre, on the site of the beloved Eaton's department store, but this new arena apparently has too small a capacity to entice back an NHL franchise. Other events seem more flights of fancy - the winter when horses froze in the lake, with only their heads protruding; or the public baths consisting of three stacked, segregated swimming pools. However, with Maddin's seamless blending of footage, and further of fact and fiction, it is often hard to tell which parts are actually true. While this might come across as a problem in less capable hands, Maddin is so witty and inventive that, real or not, his Winnipeg is the one you want to believe in.
Man On Wire is a documentary about the high wire walk performed between the Twin Towers in 1974 by Philippe Petit. Carried out without consent, Petit enlisted a group of friends to help him achieve the feat he had dreamed up before the Towers had been constructed. Combining both real and recreated footage, the plot is played out in the film like a heist, gripping you in spite of its well-known conclusion. However, no footage of the wire walk itself exists. This compares interestingly with My Winnipeg: one 'recreates' footage of imagined events, while the other cannot do this for its central, real event. And yet, this is no flaw: understandably it is impossible to recreate the event for real, and no amount of trickery would do it justice. Instead, by simply using still photographs, the vertiginous moment is given a strange air that borders on the surreal, recreating the wonder of the onlookers (or, rather, 'uplookers'), trying to believe the unbelievable.
The one issue I have with the film is in its use of the music of Michael Nyman, culled mainly from the films of Peter Greenaway. Having seen these films, I so strongly associate the music with them, that they evoke strong senses of Englishness (particularly Chasing Is Best Left To Shepherds, as mentioned in a previous post) that seem at odds with the tale of a Frenchman in New York.
Much of the enjoyment of the film though comes directly from the extraordinary personality of its protagonist, which was perfectly illustrated when Man On Wire picked up the award for best documentary at this year's Oscars.
Guy Maddin is a fairly unique voice in cinema. He has long been going to painstaking lengths to ensure his films echo the style of early cinema - taking clear influence from film noir, Eisenstein's agit-prop and German Expressionism. He was hauntological before the term existed. Others may have recently borrowed this retrofied style, see for example Esteban Sapir's enjoyably pulpy La Antena, but Maddin takes his films into the bizarre and psychosexual - one only need look at Careful, his incestuous take on the German mountain movie.
Recently Maddin has delivered a series of semi-autobiographical works, the latest of which is My Winnipeg, a docu-fantasia looking at his hometown. The film sees Maddin (appearing through voiceover) trying to escape Winnipeg. He decides to film his way out of the city- subletting his old home and hiring actors to play his siblings in order to recreate childhood events with his 'real' mother (played by the late Ann Savage, best-known for her femme fatale role in Edgar G. Ulmer's low-budget noir Detour). All the while, using stock and created footage, Maddin discusses events and landmarks in the history of the city. Some details are clearly true - when the city's NHL side the Jets moves to the more wintry climes of Phoenix (becoming the Coyotes), the team's former home, the historic Winnipeg Arena, is made redundant by the erection of a new ice arena, the MTS Centre, on the site of the beloved Eaton's department store, but this new arena apparently has too small a capacity to entice back an NHL franchise. Other events seem more flights of fancy - the winter when horses froze in the lake, with only their heads protruding; or the public baths consisting of three stacked, segregated swimming pools. However, with Maddin's seamless blending of footage, and further of fact and fiction, it is often hard to tell which parts are actually true. While this might come across as a problem in less capable hands, Maddin is so witty and inventive that, real or not, his Winnipeg is the one you want to believe in.
Man On Wire is a documentary about the high wire walk performed between the Twin Towers in 1974 by Philippe Petit. Carried out without consent, Petit enlisted a group of friends to help him achieve the feat he had dreamed up before the Towers had been constructed. Combining both real and recreated footage, the plot is played out in the film like a heist, gripping you in spite of its well-known conclusion. However, no footage of the wire walk itself exists. This compares interestingly with My Winnipeg: one 'recreates' footage of imagined events, while the other cannot do this for its central, real event. And yet, this is no flaw: understandably it is impossible to recreate the event for real, and no amount of trickery would do it justice. Instead, by simply using still photographs, the vertiginous moment is given a strange air that borders on the surreal, recreating the wonder of the onlookers (or, rather, 'uplookers'), trying to believe the unbelievable.
The one issue I have with the film is in its use of the music of Michael Nyman, culled mainly from the films of Peter Greenaway. Having seen these films, I so strongly associate the music with them, that they evoke strong senses of Englishness (particularly Chasing Is Best Left To Shepherds, as mentioned in a previous post) that seem at odds with the tale of a Frenchman in New York.
Much of the enjoyment of the film though comes directly from the extraordinary personality of its protagonist, which was perfectly illustrated when Man On Wire picked up the award for best documentary at this year's Oscars.
Sunday, 1 March 2009
Today, I didn't die.
One of the films I'm most looking forward to at the moment is Crank: High Voltage, the sequel to the Jason Statham film, Crank. For those that haven't seen it, here is the trailer for the first film.
So, the Stath plays Chev Chelios, a hitman. At the beginning he wakes up groggy with a DVD nearby, on which a gangster informs him he has been injected with the 'Beijing Cocktail'. This will kill Chelios if he cannot keep his adrenaline above a certain level. This is essentially Speed with Statham being the bus. But whereas that film simply required the bus to stay at a high speed, Crank uses many methods for Chev to keep himself alive, played out in real-time. Herein lies the stupendous brilliance of the film, you struggle to keep your jaw off the floor as Chev headbutts a succession of hoodlums, shouts "Al-Qaeda!" at Arab cab drivers and practically rapes his girlfriend in a bustling Chinatown street. However, the conclusion of the film sees (SPOILER ALERT!) Chev fighting his enemy in a helicopter at a great height and then in freefall. Chev has sufficient time on his way to the ground to snap the gangster's neck, and then phone his girlfriend and apologise to her. The impact upon hitting the ground would be more than enough to kill anyone, but not our Chev, as two heartbeats are heard before the end credits roll. So now we have a sequel:
Thankfully they have managed to come up with an even more absurd premise for Chev to put himself through hyper-strenuous ordeals: Chev must shock himself with jolts of electricity to keep ticking the mechanical heart which the gangsters replaced his natural one with. Fairly recently there have been two bizarre/intriguing additions to the credits. Firstly, slick-haired, wacky-vocals man Mike Patton is to score the film. This is probably a good thing, one only need look at Fantomas' The Director's Cut album to see he is a man of good cinematic taste, and an aficionado of fine soundtracks (Mancini, Herrmann, Rota, Morricone, Badalamenti, Komeda). More importantly though, Geri Halliwell has apparently been cast as a "chavvy mother" (her words). One only need look at her previous acting credits (Spice World, Sex and the City, the acclaimed film-adaptation of the Viz comic strip Fat Slags) to see that her performance will be a surefire shoe-in come next year's awards season.
So, the Stath plays Chev Chelios, a hitman. At the beginning he wakes up groggy with a DVD nearby, on which a gangster informs him he has been injected with the 'Beijing Cocktail'. This will kill Chelios if he cannot keep his adrenaline above a certain level. This is essentially Speed with Statham being the bus. But whereas that film simply required the bus to stay at a high speed, Crank uses many methods for Chev to keep himself alive, played out in real-time. Herein lies the stupendous brilliance of the film, you struggle to keep your jaw off the floor as Chev headbutts a succession of hoodlums, shouts "Al-Qaeda!" at Arab cab drivers and practically rapes his girlfriend in a bustling Chinatown street. However, the conclusion of the film sees (SPOILER ALERT!) Chev fighting his enemy in a helicopter at a great height and then in freefall. Chev has sufficient time on his way to the ground to snap the gangster's neck, and then phone his girlfriend and apologise to her. The impact upon hitting the ground would be more than enough to kill anyone, but not our Chev, as two heartbeats are heard before the end credits roll. So now we have a sequel:
Thankfully they have managed to come up with an even more absurd premise for Chev to put himself through hyper-strenuous ordeals: Chev must shock himself with jolts of electricity to keep ticking the mechanical heart which the gangsters replaced his natural one with. Fairly recently there have been two bizarre/intriguing additions to the credits. Firstly, slick-haired, wacky-vocals man Mike Patton is to score the film. This is probably a good thing, one only need look at Fantomas' The Director's Cut album to see he is a man of good cinematic taste, and an aficionado of fine soundtracks (Mancini, Herrmann, Rota, Morricone, Badalamenti, Komeda). More importantly though, Geri Halliwell has apparently been cast as a "chavvy mother" (her words). One only need look at her previous acting credits (Spice World, Sex and the City, the acclaimed film-adaptation of the Viz comic strip Fat Slags) to see that her performance will be a surefire shoe-in come next year's awards season.
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