Film: Ivul
Release date: 27th September 2010
Certificate: 15
Running time: 96 mins
Director: Andrew Kotting
Starring: Capucine Aubriot, Manon Aubriot, Jacob Auzanneau, Jean-Luc Bideau, Adelaide Leroux
Genre: Drama
Studio: Artificial Eye
Format: DVD
Country: Switzerland/France
Kent born artist and film director Andrew Kötting is an intriguing and difficult talent to fathom, with a body of work that’s diverse, unpredictable and uses a variety of mediums. A performance artist at heart; Kötting’s occasional forays into feature filmmaking perhaps serve as his most accessible work for those not familiar with the man’s idiosyncrasies. His latest narrative feature Ivul – his first since 2001’s This Filthy Earth – takes him away from Britain and to his ancestry roots of mainland Europe.
Ivul is based around teenager Alex (Jacob Auzanneau) and his family – comprised of his mother Marie, father Andrei, elder sister Freya, and younger sisters Manon and Capucine – living in a large chateau in the Swiss countryside along with mute labourer Lek. Alex has a particularly close bond to his teenage sister Freya, both sneaking off during the night to explore the complex underground cave structures near their property.
Regardless of Alex’s borderline possessive feelings, Freya prepares for a lengthy trip to Russia. She permits Alex to give her a farewell kiss on her abdomen with the intention of taking it further. Frustrated by Freya’s instructions, Alex gets carried away, and is interrupted by the appearance of Andrei and Lek.
Andrei is devastated and banishes Alex from his land. Angry by false accusations of sexual abuse, Alex literally honours his father’s wishes and climbs onto the roof of the house by form of protest. From that point on, Alex makes a point of not setting foot on the ground much to his parents’ dismay. He takes to the trees and fends for himself during the harsh winter.
Meanwhile, perplexed and devastated by the whole situation, the remaining family unit begins to disintegrate…
Semi-autobiographical of the film’s director, who spent much of his youth up trees and exploring the great outdoors, Ivul, however, is less interested in Alex’s transformation from teenager to modern Tarzan than the aching void created by his stubbornness as experienced by his family - best realised during a hollow Christmas dinner celebration whereby his parents both resort to hitting the bottle. The film, then, serves as an unusual examination of the family dynamic, manifested through the notion of landscape as poetry - a core subtext that permeates through much of Kötting’s previous works.
This allegiance to landscape – which takes greater precedence than the film’s narrative – is confirmed during an early scene where Andrei (Jean-Luc Bideau) explains to Alex (prior to his catalytic encounter with Freya) his cultivation inspired theory on how civilisation develops. The answer: it develops “when old men plant trees, knowing they’ll never rest in their shade,” which in turn accentuates the overall dubious nature of the film in general. The moment of disequilibrium when Freya permits Alex to perform pseudo-sexual play on her person, only to be repulsed by the results, is equally questionable. It’s interesting and yet quite baffling for her character to consider a kiss on the lips from her brother to be too intimate and therefore inappropriate, but has no problem with him toying with her nether regions. The presence of family factotum Lek (Xavier Tchili) also seems somewhat spurious, existing seemingly as a means to make the family appear more quirky, or to help maintain a pervasive dream-like atmosphere.
Performances are solid all round, but special mention should go to Jean-Luc Bideau’s Andrei, playing the cantankerous patriarch with apparent ease - and stealing almost all of the scenes he is in, including the ones where he lays comatose after a near fatal collapse as a result of too much drink. Auzanneau’s Alex is also a fine performance, displaying great athleticism in the name of not setting foot on the ground, which is solved in a number of ways from climbing trees to using buckets as stepping stones. Capucine and Manon Aubriot playing Alex’s two younger sisters of the same names occasionally steal the limelight in a variety of scenes that see them frolicking about unsupervised, and make for an innocent yet patience testing double act.
Nick Gordon Smith and Gary Parker’s camera work captures the proceedings well, with, as one would guess, a particular favouritism towards landscape; using frivolous time-lapse photography to usher in a new day or to replace one season with the next. This very noticeable technique is upstaged by some rather intriguing editorial decisions; one of which being Alex and Freya’s journey through the cave being played out in reverse, as well as some fascinating incorporation of archival found footage placed during key moments in the film. The most effective example being when Andrei’s collapse is followed by sped-up stock footage of surgeons performing heart surgery.
The film is bookended by old black-and-white footage of people performing a variety of games and activities, most of which involve the participants not touching the ground – pillow fighting on a raised wooden beam, for example – functioning as some kind of self-referential inspiration for what occurs within the narrative; a race that involves people having to walk on buckets mirrors an aforementioned act of travel that Alex undergoes in one scene. However, the inclusion of such footage brings its own set of problems. For every instance where the inclusion of it works really well – the surgical sequence for example – there are moments where it feels jarring, and comes across as being self-consciously arty, making it all too clear that Ivul is the work of an artist as opposed to a filmmaker.
Ivul is an intriguing if somewhat haphazard work that, while it has plenty of ideas, is marred by a certain level of ambivalence, particularly in its final denouncement that lacks any real sense of resolution or satisfaction, leaving multiple loose ends in the process. It’s a very interesting yet flawed film that, to its credit, never comes across as being overtly indulgent, but neither does it feel particularly rewarding. MP
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