skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Film: End Of Love
Release date: 7th June 2010
Certificate: 18
Running time: 97 mins
Director: Simon Chung
Starring: Chi-Kin Lee, Ben Yeung, Clifton Kwang, Guthrie Yip
Genre: Drama
Studio: Network
Format: DVD
Country: China
Like his 2005 debut The Innocent, the second feature by young Hong Kong director Simon Chung offers up another tale of a gay man and his rite of passage.
Hong Kong, the present. Young Ming arrives at a rehabilitation centre in the hillsides of Hong Kong to serve a three-month term of incarceration for a first time minor drug infraction, presumably as an alternative to a prison sentence. The centre does not have guards or fences and the prisoners are well behaved, having appeared to have accepted the Christian beliefs that the centre is based on, and which Chi-an, the centre director teaches in daily prayer meetings.
Chi-an notices Ming's recalcitrant ways and assigns a slightly older man, Keung, who is a recovering heroin addict, to help him stay on the straight and narrow during his time at the centre. Ming responds positively to Keung's gentle guidance, and though Ming does not reveal much of what brought him to his conviction, we learn through flashback that Ming is gay, and that after taking up part-time male prostitution he also started experimenting with drugs, such as ketamine, ecstasy and poppers, supplied by his flatmate Cyrus, who also arranged his first payment-for-sex assignation.
Keung leaves the centre before Ming, and when Ming’s term at the centre is over, he takes up Keung's offer to stay with him in his city apartment while he finds himself a job.
On arrival, he meets Keung's girlfriend, Jackie, who, like Keung, works at a hair salon. Jackie at first dislikes Keung, but later on seduces him, despite his sexual preference for men, in a drunken moment when they are alone. Soon after she breaks up with Keung, which causes a relapse for Keung into heroin use. Out of a sense of guilt and friendship for Keung, Ming again seeks out Cyrus for prostitution assignments...
End Of Love is clearly a film with a social conscience that wants to say something about the ills of modern life and the sterility of sex without love – unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to know what that is, and doesn't offer the audience much consolation in terms of drama or style either.
Clearly this is a very low-budget film, but that's not much of an excuse - there have been some great low-budget films about relationships, from Cassavetes’ Shadows to Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears Of Petra Von Kant, from Kieslowski’s A Short Film About Love to Almodavar’s Matador... What those films had which End of Love lacks is style, a strong political or personal viewpoint, a sense of irony, and a passion for life.
The performances in this film, particularly the young hero, are insipid, except where they are occasionally histrionic, but the major problem seems to be the script itself. The result is an oddly polite film, which is happy to show its characters taking drugs or having sex parties (both done with so little excitement, you wonder why the characters bother), but is uncomfortable getting under the skin of its characters or examining the society they live in.
The soundtrack is monotonous cheap electric guitar ‘atmosphere’, the photography and editing more suited to daytime soap opera than the medium of film.
Worst of all, though, in all likelihood this was made with the best intentions for a predominantly gay audience, yet it only reinforces the stereotypical idea that homosexuality leads to loveless and financially-exploitative relationships, drug abuse, prostitution and, finally, prison or death - this presumably unintentional subtext is sustained by the film’s failure to question the doctrine of redemption through self-control and prayer, which the Christian-run rehabilitation centre lays on Ming in the first half of the film (in fact, the few joyful moments of the film occur during Ming’s incarceration there, including a trip to the beach)... If not for the gay sex scenes in the film – which are as miserable as everything else in it – one might think this film was financed by a Christian morality group.
This film is really is a good example of how liberal intentions to treat the subject of homosexuality naturalistically and ‘seriously’ most often result in bathos and earnest tedium, and conversely the importance of camp and irony in the creation of dramatic and dynamic ‘Queer Cinema’ - as the vivid filmmaking of Fassbinder, Jarman, Almodovar and others have proved. JC
Film: Le Mepris
Release date: 5th April 2010
Certificate: 15
Running time: 99 mins
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Starring: Brigitte Bardot, Jack Palance, Michel Piccoli, Fritz Lang
Genre: Drama
Studio: Optimum
Format: DVD
Country: France/Italy
Le Mepris is one of those films that divides critics and cineastes strongly. Some unreservedly hail it as a modern masterpiece of European cinema, while others find it a cold, detached film whose visual style doesn't compensate for its general sense of ennui.
1963, the south of Italy. Novelist Paul Javal (Michel Piccoli) is hired by the unsentimental American film producer Jerry Prokasch (Jack Palance) to rewrite a script for a film version of Homer's 'The Odyssey'. Paul takes the assignment for two reasons - the $10,000 being offered for the rewrite work, with which payment Paul intends to purchase in full the airy flat he rents to please his beautiful wife Camille (Brigitte Bardot) - and because he admires and is flattered to have the chance to work with the film's famous director, Fritz Lang (playing himself).
But from the moment he signs up for the work, he begins to lose the respect of his wife Camille. The reasons for Camille's sudden and escalating contempt for Paul are left somewhat mysterious, though she does tell him she preferred him when he was writing novels, and she also seems to resent the casualness with which he allowed the aggressive Prokasch (Palance at his wolfish best) to whisk her away from him early on in the film.
Camille accompanies Paul to the isle of Capri, where Lang is in the process of filming his version of The Odyssey, while Paul tries in a desultory kind of way to work out a fresh angle to the script, and Camille spends a fair bit of time sunbathing nude. When her contempt for Paul reaches an irreversible zenith, she leaves Capri as the mistress of Prokasch.
After a surprise twist, we are left with a final image of the actor playing Odysseus in Lang's film, looking out across the Tyrrhenian Sea heroically, perhaps intended as an ironic contrast to Paul, the classic modern man of indecision and self-doubt…
The film critic David Thomson included it in his book 'Have You Seen...?' (2008) as one of the thousand movies he felt his readers should see, but at the same time he also remarks that this is where he feels the director Jean-Luc Godard (Breathless, Alphaville) starts to show his own developing contempt for movies and their part in the capitalist system that would lead to him abandoning filmmaking at the end of the ‘60s for more than a decade (and return mostly only to deconstruct and critique the process).
Perhaps so, but Le Mepris packs an emotional punch very much because of the film's cool, detached approach to the story. The opening scene of Camille and Paul lying naked in bed and speaking intimately to one another may, as Thomson claims, have been a cynical concession to producers keen to have the commercial appeal of nude scenes with Bardot, but it still has a genuine eroticism (in a poetic sense, rather than as an upgraded name for sexploitation) found in only a handful of great films.
The viewer will be disappointed if they come to the film looking for a strong plot or logical character development, but if they look at it more as a kind of poem on modern love masquerading as a film, there is a great deal to enjoy here. JC
Film: JCVD
Release date: 2nd February 2010
Certificate: 15
Running time: 93 mins
Director: Mabrouk El Mechri
Starring: Jean-Claude Van Damme, Francois Damiens, Karim Belkhadra, Jean-Francois Wolff, Anne Paulicevich
Genre: Crime/Drama/Action
Studio: Revolver
Format: DVD
Country: Belgium/Luxembourg/France
As an actor, Jean-Claude Van Damme is a strange man. It is not often one could reasonably assert that, as a career has dwindled, the performances have grown better. Gone are the days of Timecop or Bloodsport - films characterised by oiled muscles and flashy action - in their place we see performances like that witnessed in Until Death: gritty, downtrodden, filthy and ultimately fantastic. JCVD is one of the latter.
JCVD tells the story of a 'real-life' Jean-Claude Van Damme as he tries to come to terms with a broken marriage, tax problems and a dwindling career. Now, initially one might read that and wonder how exactly a film so exclusively about one man's personal problems could be considered an action/crime drama. However, having established Van Damme as a hugely sympathetic character who has seen his life more or less fall apart around him, Director Mabrouk El Mechri places him in the midst an attempted post-office robbery in Belgium - an attempt to juxtapose his real-life problems (many of which are based on reality) with problems his previous characters have historically been faced with. In doing so, the film allows Van Damme a return to what he is famous for, without ever ceasing to be self-aware or relentlessly 'real'.
Working in support are Herve Sogne as the brilliantly downtrodden police lieutenant attempting to reconcile what he and the general public perceive to be going on (i.e. That Van Damme has robbed the post office) with what his better judgement is telling him. The disjointed (and occasionally outright neurotic) criminals, played by Fracois Damiens, Jean-Francois Wolffe and Karim Belkhadra, do a fine job of placing Van Damme in an apparently untenable position. Will he protect those who have also been taken hostage, let the police work it out and hope for the best, or join with the criminals in order to ease his spiralling debts? It is a question asked frequently of him, and ultimately leads to a bitter-sweet conclusion…
The star performer, without a shadow of a doubt, is Van Damme himself who, for essentially the full 97 minutes, is the focal character, and the hub around which all of the action flows - and make no mistake about it, there is action in this film. Perhaps not as much as a fan of his previous work might be used to, and perhaps not in the same style, but the film deliberately and cleverly compromises ostentatious action for a sense of realism that compliments Van Damme's portrayal of a character that is, for all intents and purposes, himself.
In fact, the action is almost below-par in some scenes, and this is not down to it being poorly executed, but merely because at times it just doesn't seem to suit the mood. Indeed, part of what makes Van Damme's character so sympathetic are the occasional day dreams he has where he fantasises about taking out all the bad guys single-handedly. This is poignantly demonstrated when, in one of the final scenes, what Van Damme's character can do is powerfully contrasted with what he as a man is capable of. This is a theme that runs right the way through the film: an attempted humanisation of someone who is so frequently (both within the film, and the wider world) viewed as a stereotype. The weakened action hero is a role that could really go both ways, but such is the power of Van Damme's performance that how we feel about his character rarely comes into question. While this may ostensibly be a film about action and crime, at its heart there lies the story of man still trapped by his past successes.
The film, set almost entirely within the shuttered-up post office, or the shop across the road which becomes the base of operations for Sogne, attempts to establish a claustrophobic atmosphere in order to compound what is going on inside the protagonists mind. It is always ambitious to limit oneself so directly in terms of where you can shoot (although recording actually took place across Belgium, Luxembourg and France); however, the setting occasionally feels too drab. That is not to say that the attempt at realism doesn't work, just that the best moments of the film are the parts where Van Damme revisits former glories in his own mind. Never is this more evident than during the films finest moment when a nearly-broken-but-still-fighting Van Damme turns to the camera and delivers a heart-breaking soliloquy about his life, drugs, infidelity and money. It is as enthralling as it is tragic, and could only have been delivered by a man such as Van Damme; someone who has experienced first-hand and can therefore imbue it with real emotion. This and other scenes like it are what make this film more than just another low-budget action flick. One could argue that they would not work as well if they weren't so starkly contrasted with the boring, real-life interior of the post office set, but it would have been nice to have more of them.
As a 15 certificate, one might expect JCVD to deliver slightly more bang for your buck in terms of action, so those who are hoping for a straight-up guns-blazing kind of film might be better suited to some of Van Damme's previous work. However in terms of acting talent on show, quality of writing and emotive content, it is hard to be dissatisfied with what it offers.
Rarely do former action-stars branch out as brilliantly as this and, although the film is not without its flaws, JCVD provides proof that the ‘Muscles from Brussels’ is as much heart as he is biceps. JC
