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Film: Taste Of Cherry
Year of production: 1997
UK Release date: 27th June 2011
Distributor: Artificial Eye
Certificate: 15
Running time: 98 mins
Director: Abbas Kiarostami
Starring: Homayoun Ershadi, Abdolrahman Bagheri, Afshin Khorshid Bakhtiari, Safar Ali Moradi, Mir Hossein Noori
Genre: Drama
Format: DVD
Country of Production: Iran/France
Language: Persian
Review by: Karen Rogerson
Released as part of The Abbas Kiarostami Collection. The most celebrated Iranian director of the late 20th century, Abbas Kiarostami’s film career began in the early 1970s. With a largely non professional cast, and shot almost entirely using a camera fixed in a car, Taste of Cherry deliberately retains the simplicity of the self-taught Kiarostami’s early works.
In the outskirts of Tehran, a man circles the streets in his Land Rover with apparent aimlessness, cut off from the hubbub of the crowds outside, ignoring appeals from labourers surrounding the car asking if he wants to hire workers. Eventually, the man’s purpose is revealed.
In the dusty hills circling the city, he has dug a grave in the hillside. That evening, he intends to take his entire stash of sleeping pills, lie down in the ground and wait to die. He’s trying to find a stranger who will agree to come to the grave the next morning and call out his name to see if he is still alive. If he is, the man must help him out of the grave; if he has died, the man must shovel dirt into the grave to cover his body.
The driver, identified only as Mr Badii, is offering a generous financial reward for this task. The men he encounters are dispossessed, immigrant workers earning meagre wages, scavenging rubbish heaps for plastic bags to resell, enduring the loneliness and tedium of guarding a deserted construction site, or far from home and drafted into the service of the army. But despite the promise of money, it’s no easy task for Badii to find someone to help him. His proposal is met with fear and unease from some, and compassion but moral objection from others.
The film takes place over the course of one day and its following, decisive night, centring upon Badii’s search and composed almost entirely of shots within his car and of its progress through the hills…
With no music, save for the opening and closing titles, the film is soundtracked by the gentle crunch of the car’s wheels on gravel as Badii cruises the bare roads of the barren, dusty hills surrounding the city. This monotony is broken by the occasional cry of a wild bird, the sounds of traffic, the racket of a construction site, or the far off barking of a dog. The colourlessness of the soundtrack is matched by the dusty bleakness of its landscape. Towards the film’s end, the sudden injection of colour in shots of trees turned to gold by the late evening light and the dramatic contrast of a thunderstorm over the hillside at night give a last minute suggestion of vitality which may or may not indicate some renewed attachment to life on the part of Badii.
The predominance of shots filmed on a fixed camera within the car is characteristic of Kiarostami’s filmmaking. He has spoken of the particular quality this device lends to personal interaction – “I have a very intimate sense when I am in a car with someone next to me...silence doesn’t seem heavy or difficult.” Badii and the strangers he talks to in the car always appear separately on the screen, emphasising the isolation between them, as well as the peculiar intimacy in which the dialogues take place.
Homayoun Ershadi’s performance as Mr Badii is grave and dignified, expressive of depression’s blank eyed lack of reaction to life - and to others - and the way it can obscure the possibility of hope. At the same time, Badii is able to empathise with the loneliness and aspirations of the men that he meets, even if these interchanges become increasingly mechanical and desperate as his search goes on. Abdolrahman Bagheri also shines as the harsh voiced but compassionate Turkish stranger who relates his own story of a confrontation with despair, a tale which has the quality of a fable in its simplicity and lack of moralising.
Taste Of Cherry examines one man’s dark night of the soul, and the lack of any explanation for Badii’s choice of suicide lends the film a sense of abstraction which makes the story that of any man battling between despair and the sense of life’s preciousness. A moral debate goes on in the film about the nature of suicide, whether self destruction is as great a sin as murder, or whether perhaps unhappiness itself and the pain it causes others is a greater wrong. The repeated appeal to the successive strangers for help has the quality of a religious parable, as each man’s response reveals his own beliefs about the nature of compassion for his fellow man, and whether the most compassionate act could be to help that man towards his own destruction with some dignity.
Despite the artfully crafted naturalism of its style and the realistic and quietly affecting performances of its cast, Taste Of Cherry is as bleak as its subject. Its repetitive shots of the Land Rover creeping along the hillside roads – in some cases, they look as if they have been literally reused – creates a mood of numb blankness. This is probably a deliberate device to evoke the colourless nature of the world seen through the viewpoint of Badii’s despair, but this visual blandness and the incredibly slow pace make the film hard to engage with, seeming longer than its hour-and-a-half duration. Taste Of Cherry’s creeping pace and uncomfortable silences – however deliberately meant – don’t do credit to the best scenes, which appear towards the film’s end (in which I don’t include its controversial final scene).
Taste Of Cherry is an artful piece of filmmaking, showcasing Kiarostami’s work’s characteristic qualities of naturalism, lack of sentimentality and a refusal to overegg the drama of a simple plot for the sake of manipulating the audience’s emotions. Cleverly constructed, it won critical acclaim and the Palme d’Or in 1997, but its cleverness doesn’t make it the easiest film to like. KR
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Film: 10 On Ten
Year of production: 2004
UK Release date: 27th June 2011
Distributor: Artificial Eye
Certificate: 15
Running time: 88 mins
Director: Abbas Kiarostami
Genre: Documentary
Format: DVD
Country of Production: Iran/France
Language: Persian/English
Review by: Karen Rogerson
Released as part of The Abbas Kiarostami Collection. Award-winning director, Abbas Kiarostami delivers a masterclass in film direction, revealing the techniques underlying his artfully artless filmmaking. The documentary focuses on his 2002 work 10, a film which showcases the hyper realism which is Kiarostami’s signature style.
The documentary retains the same pared down minimalism as 10, being entirely shot within a car while Kiarostami addresses the camera directly. Delivered in the style of a lecture, Kiarostami’s talk is divided into ten sections, covering crucial aspects of filmmaking, such as the role of the camera, script, location, music, actors and director.
Kiarostami describes how he attempts to minimise the artificial impact of the technical traditions of filmmaking, techniques which can impair telling the naturalistic stories for which he is renowned. Digital camera or video is favoured instead of “artistic” cinematography. Music is rarely used, as this can manipulate the audience’s reactions to move or excite, like “picking pockets in the dark.” Kiarostami favours using a large number of non-professional actors, both to give flesh and voice to his characters and to avoid a contrived style of acting. Simple locations – his preferred one being the interior of a car – are used to allow the film to focus upon the characters without distraction.
Kiarostami is clearly keen that his role as director is not that of a critical and controlling presence, but one who enables his characters to tell their stories with the minimum of interference, without the distraction of superfluities, such as a literary narrative voiceover or unnecessary visual flourishes. In his conclusion, Kiarostami warns students not to disregard the formula of American cinema. Hollywood’s success has enabled American films to dominate cinema throughout the world, so despite his obvious distaste for the Hollywood formula, he advises that it shouldn’t be taken lightly or disregarded...
The documentary raises some useful insights into filmmaking. It’s difficult not to be aware, when watching mainstream cinema, of the methods which are often lazily used to manipulate audience reaction and distract from the absence of any real substance. Crassly overblown music makes films laughable when it’s disproportionate to the emotional impact of what’s actually going on onscreen. Big budget special effects don’t compensate for overlooking a decent script or a good cast. As Kiarostami comments, the absence of complicated technical equipment or special effects can free filmmaking from the shackles of capital and censorship, in an industry where production and distribution backing figure so largely that it determines whether a film gets widespread viewing, or gets made at all.
By contrast to the Hollywood machine, Kiarostami adopts an almost punk ethos in his filmmaking, where a lack of technical sophistication – all the skills needed to film are contained in a digital camera, he says – helps to minimise the artificiality of the process. This type of film undoubtedly has an important place and it’s a natural reaction to the out of control commercialism that’s produced so many sub-standard sequels and poor English language remakes of far superior European originals.
Interesting as Kiarostami’s ideas are, they overlook the fact that more metaphorical modes of filmmaking can also depict a kind of truth. Visual art and literature moved away from naturalism and linear narrative in the early 20th century to exploring different ways of representing reality – whether through the fractured planes of Cubism, the emotional intensity of Expressionism, or the interior dreamscapes of surrealism. Film became a popular medium at the same time, and filmmakers have never shied away from the opportunities it offers to present human existence in more experimental ways. Kiarostami’s recreations of everyday dialogue and situations may ape reality, but that doesn’t mean that the expressionism of directors such as Terence Malick or the surrealism of Luis Buñuel can’t be equally valid ways of expressing the experience of human consciousness. As Kiarostami admits, he is a self taught director, and his principles may not be for all, but they certainly contribute an important insight into his own methods for creating films with artistic integrity and serious intention.
An interesting watch for any film student, but a little dry for anyone who isn’t, Kiarostami talks intelligently and persuasively about the ethos behind his work. Any filmmaker, particularly those drawn towards the low tech and improvisational approach used by directors such as Mike Leigh, should find food for thought in Kiarostami’s methods, even if the pared down naturalism of his work may not be enjoyable for all audiences. KR
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Film: Taxi zum Klo
Year of production: 1980
UK Release date: 23rd May 2011
Distributor: Peccadillo
Certificate: 18
Running time: 83 mins
Director: Frank Ripploh
Starring: Frank Ripploh, Bernd Broaderup, Orpha Termin, Peter Fahrni, Dieter Godde
Genre: Comedy
Format: DVD
Country of Production: West Germany
Language: German
Review by: Karen Rogerson
Thirty years after its original release, Frank Ripploh’s semi-autobiographical film about the sexual exploits of a gay teacher in Berlin receives a digital restoration and its first UK fully uncut release (and there’s plenty of cut and uncut being released onscreen, too). In the early 1980s, Taxi zum Klo’s explicit scenes gained it notoriety (the title translates as ‘Taxi to the toilet’) but it also received critical and popular acclaim for its groundbreaking and frank depiction of the Berlin gay scene.
The mild-mannered hippie demeanour of Taxi zum Klo’s leading character, Frank, contrasts with his colourful personal life. Describing himself as a “normal, jaded, neurotic, polymorphously perverse” teacher, he is torn between the daytime responsibilities of his work and his night time wanderings of the toilets and bath houses of the city in search of constant novelty and fresh conquests.
A hook up with Bernd, the manager of a gay cinema, appears to be the start of a more serious period in Frank’s life, and his nocturnal adventures give way to a settled domesticity. But while the solemn and earnest Bernd dreams of buying a house in a village and growing vegetables, Frank hates the idea of living such a banal existence in an atmosphere of small town ordinariness.
The conflict between the two reaches a climax – a dramatic climax rather than, for once, any other kind – at the Queen’s Ball, where Frank, flamboyantly dressed as a princess in diaphanous veils and shocking pink make up, flirts outrageously with middle-aged queens and pretty stable lads alike. Frank must decide which of two possible fates are preferable, the loneliness of his old, peripatetic lifestyle or the tedium of clockwork domesticity with Bernd…
Frank Ripploh wrote and directed the film, as well as starring in it, so it’s very much a one man show. Without the tongue-in-cheek humour of his performance, Taxi could easily have ended up pretentious or merely pornographic. Light-hearted and carefree, Frank spends his evenings sitting on a toilet cubicle correcting student papers and peeking through a hole in the wall at men playing with themselves, brazenly hitting on everyone from the man filling his car up with petrol to whichever random stranger happens to be hanging around in a designated pick up spot.
The film’s scenes of unsimulated oral and penetrative sex inevitably meant that it encountered problems with distribution in the ‘80s. Originally only intended for screening in private cinema clubs, it was seized by the US censors and refused an ‘X’ classification by the BBFC unless various scenes were cut, which the distributor was not prepared to do at the time. In 1994, it was released on an 18 certificate, after cutting 1 minute 43 seconds of footage, which showed a golden shower scene and, bizarrely, a clip from a genuine German public information film warning against the dangers of paedophiles and their alluring stamp collections, apparently irresistible to the fresh faced youth of Germany (commenting on the paedophile’s bouffant combover, Frank’s cross dressing friend says “you can tell what they’re like by their hair”…).
The sex in Taxi zum Klo is explicit, but the purpose of the film and, to some extent Frank’s own unconscious desire, is to understand how his sexuality defines him. The sex scenes are shown literally warts and all, but they also show the playfulness of those random encounters, the genuine and sometimes touching understanding between those involved, and the intense eroticism of Frank’s verboten experiences. It’s little wonder that, during a pleasant but insipid evening bowling with his colleagues, Frank is distracted by powerful recollections, flashing up on the screen, of threesomes or whippings.
Shot on a shoestring budget, the film isn’t concerned with fancy cinematography or artistic direction. The production values give it the appearance of what it aims to depict, a man whose life is, in many ways, as ordinary as anyone else’s, whose parents send him pants, socks and towels for Christmas, and whose father has a heart complaint. His double life is lived secretively but matter of factly, without the gloss of romance or glamour.
Plot and storytelling take second place to an episodic structure. Each of Frank’s individual, random encounters represents both the day to day substance of his life, and how he is defined by his restless sexuality and impatience with the mundane and predictable. Underneath his light heartedness, Frank is torn between two fears: of ending up as Mr Average and never shedding that feeling of restless discontent, or of never managing to be faithful and ending up, in his own words, as an old fag hanging out in toilets. The sexual content of the film might mark it as ‘gay interest’, but Frank’s fear of defining himself by his lifestyle choices and ending up as a caricature of himself is likely to touch a chord with wider audiences - if they’re not offended by the sex scenes.
Shot before AIDS became a major public health issue, the freedom of Frank’s lifestyle in Taxi zum Klo inevitably seems to belong to a more innocent era, but it stands the test of time. The explicit scenes may still shock, but the film’s sense of the absurd and ridiculous and its naturalistic performances make it likeable, amusing, and unexpectedly touching. KR
Film: Rififi
Year of production: 1955
UK Release date: 9th May 2011
Distributor: Arrow
Certificate: 12
Running time: 122 mins
Director: Jules Dassin
Starring: Jean Servais, Carl Mohner, Robert Manuel, Magali Noel, Perlo Vita
Genre: Crime/Drama/Thriller
Format: DVD & Blu-ray
Country of Production: France
Language: French/Italian/English
Review by: Karen Rogerson
Based on the crime novel of the same name by Auguste le Breton, Rififi was one of a number of films of France’s 1950s film noir revival. Using the familiar motifs of the genre – the world weary patriarchal crime lord, the downtrodden women, and the promise of the big heist to end all heists - it explores the loyalties and betrayals that form the dynamics of its demimonde society.
Tony le Stéphanois (Jean Servais) is back in the big bad Paris underworld following a five year stint in jail. He’s short of cash and status amongst his peers and has been abandoned by his lover, Mado, for a night club owner. Tony’s former associates, the brawny Jo le Suedois (Carl Möhner) and the clownish, ebullient Italian Mario Ferrati (Robert Manuel) pitch an idea to Tony that could revive his fortunes. Their simple plan of a smash and grab raid on the jewellers Mappin and Webb is transformed, under Tony’s leadership, into a far more sophisticated operation to disable the shop’s state of the art (for the 1950s) alarm system and crack the safe.
To do this, they need the legendary skills of the safe cracker César le Milanais (played by director Jules Dassin under the alias Perlo Vita) of whom it’s said that “there’s not a safe that can resist César, or a woman that César can resist,” a knowing forewarning to the audience that playing with film noir’s seductive women is a dangerous game on both sides. Tony’s discovery that Mado left him for a succession of different men when he went to prison has a violent outcome, and she flees in fear for her life. At the night club owned by Mado’s lover, César hooks up with the sultry Viviane, who sings the film’s theme song, ‘Le Rififi’, against a dramatic backdrop of the silhouetted figures of a gangster and his moll, miming attitudes of seduction and violence. The criminal world of Rififi, she explains, means trouble and danger, but also holds an irresistible attraction.
Following the complicated undercurrents of relations in the night club, the subsequent heist scene has a sense of clear purpose and camaraderie, illustrating the understanding, patience and almost artisanal quality of the criminals when working together on a job. The planning, knowledge and skill of Tony’s people is clearly second to none, but will this be enough to overcome all possible obstacles and mishaps that could jeopardise the heist and their own lives?
As with any film in the noir genre, Rififi allows its audience to dabble vicariously in the darkness of its criminal world, both in the shady shabbiness of Paris’ seedier arrondissements, and in the tight lipped and perilous alliances of its characters. In a world where women are both victims and betrayers, and the tenuous status quo depends upon selfless observance of a code of loyalty and silence, the characters’ cards are marked. Loss, violence and death will surely be the consequence for some.
Despite the sense of inevitable failure, there is an irresistible inclination, watching with heart in mouth, to want the criminals to succeed. This tension builds throughout the iconic heist scene, which Dassin extended from a short episode in Le Breton’s book to a twenty minute sequence without music or dialogue, in which Tony, Jo, César and Mario communicate only by eye contact and gesture. In this scene, their individuality becomes subsumed in the professionalism and dignity of their work. The dandyish César, dressed in evening wear, becomes quiet and purposeful. The foolishly demonstrative Mario becomes sober and restrained. Lumbering Jo displays a delicate hesitancy in his work, and the hangdog face of Tony presides over all, lending a gravitas to their undertaking. The silence allows attention to focus on the finely choreographed sequence of actions.
With little room in the criminals’ world for effusiveness and exposition, the characters are fairly sketchily drawn but the skill of the acting, dialogue and action makes them believable and engaging. Tony and César are enigmatic, but their underlying air of authority and violence indicates unrevealed layers of complexity. Servais’ Tony has an air of beaten resignation tempered by unshakeable conviction that the underworld’s code of loyalty must prevail. The incompleteness of Tony’s story, hinted at here and there, makes him all the more intriguing. The characters of Jo and Mario are more fleshed out, as we see Jo in domestic scenes with his wife and young son, and Mario flirting playfully with his girlfriend. The added emotional context makes the grim consequences of the criminals’ actions more explicit. There’s an air of desperate abandon to the brilliantly shot final scene which dramatically punches home the sense of loss that is Rififi’s inevitable outcome.
With world weary gangsters in door-jammingly wide shoulder pads, moodily shot and beautifully lit cinematography, a thumping score and a steadily building sense of tension and engagement, Rififi is a classic of the genre which continues to influence filmmakers today. KR
Film: The Burmese Harp
Release date: 21st February 2011
Certificate: 12
Running time: 117 mins
Director: Kon Ichikawa
Starring: Rentarô Mikuni, Shôji Yasui, Jun Hamamura, Taketoshi Naitô, Shunji Kasuga
Genre: Drama/War
Studio: Eureka!
Format: DVD
Country: Japan
Based on the bestselling book of the same name, The Burmese Harp is the story of one Japanese army unit’s experiences at the tail end of the Second World War, retreating through war torn Burma. The film was the first of director Ichikawa’s works to be shown internationally, garnering an Oscar nomination and awards from the Venice Film Festival. The film gave Western audiences one of the earliest depictions of the Second World War from the point of view of the Japanese forces.
The soldiers make their appearance in the film picking their way through South East Asian jungle, a familiar war film motif which swiftly develops into something atypical, as the soldiers are led by their captain in a sentimental song of home, with one soldier accompanying them on a Burmese harp. The narrator, one of the unit’s soldiers, explains that “we often sang...these songs lifted our spirits in times of sorrow and pain”.
The company’s attempt to retreat across the border from Burma to Thailand is curtailed by an encounter with the British army, when they discover that the Japanese war command have surrendered and the war is at an end. Taken prisoner by the British, they are told that they will be taken 200 miles south to a POW camp, to await transport back to Japan. But one of the soldiers will be making this journey alone.
Mizushima is asked by the British to help them persuade another Japanese unit who are holding out in a mountain stronghold to surrender. Here he encounters the Japanese code of honour that is familiar from many war movies – that surrender is shameful and, when faced with capture, death is the only acceptable recourse.
Unable to dissuade the soldiers from their imminent destruction, Mizushima nevertheless manages to survive the British attack. A Buddhist monk offers him food and shelter, but Mizushima is keen to rejoin his comrades and steals the monk’s cloak in order to adopt a safe disguise for the long and lonely journey south. The journey is a physical ordeal as, close to starvation and with bleeding feet, he traverses harsh landscapes under the sun’s unremitting glare. But the journey’s emotional impact is even more harrowing. Over and over, Mizushima encounters the slain bodies of his countrymen, left in the open air to rot and be picked over by birds of prey. The experience causes him to undergo a profound change.
Among his friends at the camp, Mizushima achieves a semi-mythical status, as they fret over the possibility of his survival and catch unconfirmed glimpses of him in the vicinity of the camp. Mizushima reaches his physical destination, but a spiritual chasm has opened between his former and present life, and the film’s purpose is to illustrate how this comes about, and the manner in which Mizushima feels he must resolve it…
The Burmese Harp is a curiously unwarlike war film, with various factors contributing to this. The film’s music plays a major part. Cutting into the film almost from the very start, its music instils a tone of mournful reflection which immediately signposts that contemplation rather than action is paramount to the film’s message. The Burmese Harp was overdubbed with a western pedal harp, while the choral harmonies of the Japanese soldiers are reminiscent of a Welsh male voice choir, giving a curiously European feel to the music. The soldiers repeatedly sing Home Sweet Home, a song which makes explicit the nostalgic significance of music for the soldiers. Far from belligerent, they are disarmed by a melancholic yearning for the simple, lost pleasures of a long disappeared past.
Another aspect of the film which imparts it with a philosophical quality is the way director Ichikawa composes his shots. Perhaps betraying his original background as an artist rather than a director, the light and almost metaphorical anguish of the subject matter of some scenes suggest the devastation of battle as painted by Delacroix or Picasso. The figures of the strangers Mizushima encounters on his journey seem tiny against the monumental landscapes he crosses. When he reaches the shore of a vast river, you could believe him to be at the edge of the river Styx or Jordan, so otherworldly does this landscape appear. Ichikawa frequently frames his shots so that they alternate between the whole group of soldiers and a sudden focus upon a single face, a technique which conveys an impression of how war is experienced by the soldiers both as a collective unit and on a more human, individual level.
Most of the action of The Burmese Harp was filmed in Japan, with only the crew and the lead actor, Shôji Yasui, travelling to Burma to film a limited number of scenes. The Burmese location appears to most powerfully affect towards the end of the film, as Mizushima stands solemnly in his monk’s robe by the worn stones of an ancient stupa, mist drifting among the smoky leafiness of the surrounding trees. For the film to be at all convincing, Ichikawa needed to cast someone in the part of Mizushima who would be believable both as a soldier and as a sensitive man undergoing a profound spiritual crisis. Yasui possesses that quality, which the director identified in Javier Bardem, the lead actor of his film Biutiful, of a “profound and complex inner life.” This quality makes Yasui fascinating to watch, so that the absence of action – and the film does make slow-moving progress – is compensated by the fascination of trying to discern and interpret the inner struggle that Yasui subtly portrays.
Among all this solemnity and emotional longing, the film is lightened by some comic scenes featuring an old Burmese lady who visits the camp to trade goods with the soldiers, providing a link between them and the outside world. These more humorous scenes heighten our awareness of the divide between Mizushima and his comrades, and make his story all the more dramatic in contrast to the more everyday experience of his friends.
The Burmese Harp delivers its pacifist message through the medium of gentle reflection rather than the shock and blood tactics of Oliver Stone or other Vietnam film directors. With modern hindsight, it may seem to skirt the realities of the Japanese campaign in Burma, but there was still relatively little awareness of this at the time of the film was made. Its perspective is humanistic rather than nationalistic, and its images continue to haunt long after the closing credits. KR
Film: Paradox Soldiers
Release date: 21st February 2011
Certificate: 15
Running time: 98 mins
Director: Oleg Pogodin & Dmitri Voronkov
Starring: Aleksei Barabash, Semyon Belotserkovskiy, Dmitri Dyachuk, Ekaterina Klimova, Ivan Krasko
Genre: Action/Drama/Sci-Fi/War
Studio: Metrodome
Format: DVD
Country: Russia
In this follow up to director Oleg Pogodin’s 2008 time travelling/war movie crossover, We Are The Future, four modern day citizens of the former USSR gain a closer understanding of the nature of war than they had bargained for.
The film is set in the Ukraine, at the site of the Battle of Brody, a fight which proved to be pivotal to the Russian struggle to push back the German forces along the eastern front. The battle took place between the Red Army and divisions of the German army, including an SS unit, who were comprised mainly of Ukrainian volunteers. Representatives from St Petersburg and Kiev arrive to participate in a re-enactment of the battle, with the Ukrainians taking the part of the volunteers who had fought for the Germans.
Of the four morally unscrupulous treasure hunters from Pogodin’s first film, only two make their reappearance in Paradox Soldiers. Sergei Filatov is now a sensitive professor of history, while Oleg Vasil’ev has grown out his skinhead but retains his air of oafish stupidity. These two join the re-enactment as members of the Red Army, rapidly coming into real-life conflict with two of the Ukrainian volunteers. Taras is arrogant and scornful of the Russians’ attitude of reverence towards the sacrifices made during the war, and Serji is a spoilt, cowardly mummy’s boy with a moptop haircut, dependent on Taras to protect him.
When the first night of the students’ encampment is marked by a death metal concert and a punch up, historical enlightenment seems off the agenda. But a freak accident throws our four heroes together, as they find themselves blasted fifty years back into the past, having to adapt and survive to escape imprisonment or death at the hands of the Ukrainian Paramilitary Army, the Germans and the Russians…
From this point, events move quickly and towards a predictable moral outcome. The Russians and Ukrainians must overcome their mutual antagonism in order to survive, and a genuine comradeship emerges between them. If this all sounds reminiscent of a boy’s own ripping yarn or a PS2 game, depending on your age, then that’s not too far from the truth. The climactic scene of the characters’ propulsion into the past is devised as a flame filled, bullet time explosion, honing in on the ominously loud ticking of Filatov’s wristwatch, in case any of us were too slow to pick up on the dramatic implication of the scene. Rock music soundtracks the action, from the four companions’ headlong flight through the forest from the Germans to their madcap assault on a strategically important building. There is a genuine sense of tension and excitement in many scenes.
But the tone of the film fluctuates so wildly that it’s hard to know how seriously we’re meant to take any of this. This unevenness is reflected in the various characters. Filatov broods mournfully upon Nina, a beautiful nurse from the Russian medical corps. Without the back-story of the first film, it’s hard to gauge the source of this obsession, and when Nina makes an appearance, sporting an awful lot of eyeliner for a battlefield, her simpering is an incongruous object for Filatov’s soulful devotion.
Aleksei Barabash gives a powerful performance as the belligerent Taras. In his opening scenes, he seems to be merely an arrogant thug, but once transposed to the arena of the real war, he quickly – so quickly as to be rather mystifying – shows himself to be thoughtful, quick-witted and courageous. Lumbering Oleg is so dense that when Taras tells a suspicious Russian commander that Oleg’s taciturnity is the result of concussion, it doesn’t require any acting to overcome the commander’s scepticism. But when tested in conflict, Oleg displays strength and almost suicidal loyalty, like the faithful horse Boxer in Animal Farm, providing the brawn to Filatov’s brain. The weedy Stupka also undergoes a predictable transformation. His clownishness adds humour – when escaping the Germans, he asks, “What will I tell my mum? She hasn’t even been born yet.” In the end, he also discovers a previously unsuspected inner mettle, and stands alongside his comrades as they take up arms in the heat of the battle.
There is a strange disconnection between the puerile behaviour of the characters – with the exception of Filatov - in the modern day and the depth of character they display during the scenes in 1944. And no folks, this isn’t just because they’ve learnt a valuable lesson during their time travelling escapades. Without giving anything away, the asinine cheesiness of the final section, complete with air punching and yet more simpering, brings the film’s rating down a notch all by itself.
It’s hard to know what the creators of Paradox Soldiers were aiming for. Barabash and Petrenko bring gravitas to their roles, and there is undoubted technical skill shown – for example, a continuous ninety second shot which swerves through the trenches and follows the aerial path of explosives. Pathos is conveyed in the scenes of civilians retreating from the devastation of the war, or terrified and at the mercy of hate-filled nationalists. However, all this is undermined by humour which sometimes works well in relieving the tension, but at other times seems inadvertent. There’s a slapstick quality to some of the fist fights, which is laugh out loud funny in one scene – apparently deliberately so – but in another case, that of the fight between the students early in the film, just laughably bad. Some of the special effects look dated and inappropriate. Taras kicks over a war memorial, then looks round fearfully as mist emerges in slow motion from the fallen memorial, a hackneyed motif which would fit better in a tongue in cheek horror. The fact that Paradox Soldiers was rejected for distribution by the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture indicates that at least in some quarters it’s been interpreted as an offensive portrayal of Ukrainian nationalism, if not a sabre rattling glorification of Russian military history.
Despite its daft elements, Paradox Soldiers isn’t unenjoyable in a gung ho fashion. Its humorous touches work with varying success, and a decent standard of performance and production design lend an air of tense reality to its depiction of battle. But its heavy-handed treatment of the morality of warfare doesn’t bear much examination, and its uneven tone and the bizarre juxtaposition of elements from different genres makes you wonder what its creators were thinking. KR
Film: Bella
Release date: 7th February 2011
Certificate: PG
Running time: 91 mins
Director: Alejandro Gomez Monteverde
Starring: Eduardo Verástegui, Tammy Blanchard, Manny Perez, Ali Landry, Angélica Aragón
Genre: Drama/Romance
Studio: Kaleidoscope
Format: DVD
Country: USA/Mexico
This is a majority English-Language release.
Mexican director Alejandro Monteverde’s first – and so far only – feature length film is a cross cultural story of love set in New York City. Unambiguously belonging to the indie school of filmmaking, its softly paced tale envisions pain as a path to redemption. In the words of the director, “Each person’s pain becomes each person’s medicine. It becomes each other’s redemption.”
José works as a chef in a restaurant owned by his brother Manny, who trades on the chicness of their Mexican ethnicity for the restaurant’s fashionable reputation. Manny conducts himself with the air of a mini dictator in his small kingdom, indifferent to the personal lives of his staff, and oblivious to their daily trials and dramas. When one of the waitresses, Nina, is late one too many times, he fires her, unaware that she has just discovered that she is pregnant.
Nina flees the restaurant in angry despair, but José, unlike his brother, is unable to stand by and watch another human being suffer without trying to help. Amongst the urban chaos of the city, José begins to earn Nina’s trust, and gradually draws out her story.
Retreating to the tranquillity of José’s parents’ beach house, he eventually reveals, in piecemeal flashback, the story of a traumatic event in his own mysterious past. Why did he throw away a successful career as an international footballer to work in anonymity in his brother’s restaurant? Why is his brother Manny so insecure in contrast to his warm hearted family? Reflecting upon the painful events of their past, José and Nina discover an unexpected symmetry in their experiences which enables both to achieve redemption…
The film – with the exception of the flashbacks and the final scene – takes place over the course of a day and a night, with its emphasis on emotional revelation and reflection rather than any dramatic occurrences. The very gentle pace at which the relationship between Nina and José progresses reflects how slowly trust builds between two wounded individuals. This structure, and the film’s contemplative, poetic mood make it reminiscent of Before Sunrise, but while the chemistry between the two leads is convincing and tender, the film’s attempts at profundity and soulfulness are heavy handed, and lack the originality which made Before Sunrise a more authentic stab at conveying the questioning nature of youthful love.
The film’s opening shot gives a fair indication of Bella’s tone of folksy contemplation. Against images of seagulls careering over sunlit waves, José says, “My grandmother always said, if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.” José takes Nina to meet his parents, whose warmth and fierce love for their children clearly helped to form his open-hearted and generous character. The home life of his Mexican/Puerto Rican parents is full of dancing, laughter, tears, good food and tequila - more clichés than you could shake a maraca at, making it hard to take the intended point, regarding the importance of family life in developing character, seriously.
Eduardo Verastegui as José sports a magnificent beard in the manner of a biblical prophet, which, together with his stained chef’s overall, fails to hide his film star looks, all twinkling and crinkling eyes. His character’s unremitting goodness, while admirable, stretches the bounds of credulity, but Verastegui expresses the humility of remorse and the courage of compassion with conviction. Tammy Blanchard also puts in a solid performance as Nina, switching between prickly anger and a fierce independence and sorrowful vulnerability, although she is let down by the film’s most pedestrian dialogue when she talks about the moral dilemmas of her pregnancy. There is a strong supporting cast, whose contributions help to build the director’s vision of how the accident of personality and chance encounters create the narratives of these people’s lives.
Bella was panned by critics on its release but won the People’s Choice award at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2006, and that gives a fair indication of what can be expected from it. Visually Bella is not particularly striking, and it has some hoary old clichés in its script writing and some over familiar scenarios. But the performances are of a high standard and there is some effective intercutting between past and present scenes which give immediacy and drama to the revelations of José’s former life. It’s a wistful vision of how we should treat each other, rather than a deeply soul searching exercise; its openly and perhaps naively tender hearted approach is likely to divide viewers one way or another.
A sentimental and thoughtful rather than groundbreaking love story, Bella is the filmic equivalent of hot chocolate and churros, dabbing at emotional wounds with a cotton wool touch. KR
Film: A Swedish Midsummer Sex Comedy
Release date: 31st January 2011
Certificate: 15
Running time: 85 mins
Director: Ian McRudden
Starring: Olle Sarri, Lisa Werlinder, Alexander Karim, Anna Littorin, Luke Perry
Genre: Comedy
Studio: Optimum
Format: DVD
Country: USA/Sweden
A Swedish Midsummer Sex Comedy falls within a tradition of light-hearted midsummer sex romps, beginning with William Shakespeare and given 20th century updates by Swedish doom merchant Ingmar Bergman and Woody Allen, that inveterate dissector of sexual neuroticism. Set in an idyllic lakeside location in rural Sweden, the film follows what happens when you mix up a group of friends, rural isolation, a bucolic summer festival and plenty of alcohol.
The brightly coloured Pop Art graphics of the opening titles sets the playful tone for A Swedish Midsummer Sex Comedy. Recently engaged couple Emil (Daniel Gustavsson) and Sussanne (Lisa Werlinder) invite friends to celebrate the festival of Midsommar with them at their beautiful lakeside house in the Swedish countryside. But the jollity of the festivities quickly becomes marred by tensions within the group.
Eva (Anna Littorin) doesn’t understand why her uptight boyfriend Patrik (Per Wernolf) no longer wants to sleep with her. Maria (Annica Bejhed) desperately wants to have a child, but her boyfriend Anders has just discovered he has a low sperm count and can’t bring himself to tell her. Pregnant Katarina (Kari Hamfors Wernolf) thinks her husband Micke (Alexander Karim) is boring and fantasises about her yoga instructor when they are in bed. Even seemingly perfect couple Emil – a suave Tim Robbins lookalike – and beautiful Sussanne seem to have ended up engaged by pressure of expectation rather than depth of feeling.
Thrown into this combustible situation of attractive individuals not having nearly enough sex is Sam (Luke Perry of 90210 fame), an American college friend of Emil’s, who is a womanising chancer keen to discover if Swedish women’s reputation for relaxed sexual attitudes is true.
The film’s predictable story arc follows the characters from the convivial celebrations of drinking and skinny dipping in the lake, through the inevitable emotional confrontations, uncomfortable revelations, and consequent reconciliation, although not necessarily with the results you’d expect…
The film is given a distinctive Swedish look and character by American director Ian McCrudden. Its rural setting is very pretty – all rustic charm and multi coloured clapboard houses, bathed in a cool northern light, conveying the pared down beauty of the Swedish aesthetic and landscape very well, and complimented by the indie flavoured soundtrack which works well with the film’s mood of gently melancholic introspection.
The associations of Midsommar with fertility, drinking and dancing round a big green pole make it a natural catalyst for the emotional/sexual mayhem which follows, although while there’s a smattering of full frontal running about, there’s less bed hopping than you’d expect from the film’s title. Stereotyped notions of Swedishness are played around with. Sam asks Emil if it’s true what they say about Swedish women – Emil’s reply, “What, that they don’t wear any panties in the summer?” takes Sam pleasantly by surprise. When Emil broods following an unexpected misfortune, Sam insists, “Don’t go all Swedish on me”. That sums up the clichéd notion of the Swedish character – free loving women and gloomy Bergman-esque men.
The film’s cross-cultural, dual language character works to particular comic effect when Emil launches a bitter verbal attack on individuals in the group, translated haltingly and drunkenly into English by Anders for the benefit of Sam. There is the occasional moment of slapstick – well that’s what can happen when you drink too many shots of brännvins – but mostly the comedy sits well with the uncomfortable realism of social awkwardness.
There’s little imagination been put into the characterisation, which is pretty sketchy, so it’s hard to become greatly involved with the characters’ predicaments. Despite this, the cast bring genuine warmth which gives believability to the bonds and tensions among the group. Olle Sari is particularly good as the hapless, would-be singer-songwriter Anders, endearing and clown like, while Daniel Gustavsson conveys the necessary gravitas of an alpha male who has an unexpected fall from grace. Luke Perry plays Sam with a nonchalant, opportunistic loucheness which acts as a good foil to the emotional complications within the rest of the group. There’s a shrillness and two dimensionality to some of the other characters, which is occasionally irritating and can give an air of artificiality, not helped by a patchy script which has intermittent flashes of originality marred by some plodding and uninspired lines.
The persistent lightness of the midsummer nights is reflected in a film which is light-hearted in tone but also light on substance and characterisation. Its particular strength lies in the Swedishness of its slant on the sex comedy genre, with a distinctive Nordic flavour and a knowing subversion of stereotypical depictions of Sweden. KR
Film: 22 Bullets
Release date: 31st January 2011
Certificate: 18
Running time: 115 mins
Director: Richard Berry
Starring: Jean Reno, Kad Merad, Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Marina Fois, Gabriella Wright
Genre: Action/Crime/Thriller
Studio: Anchor Bay
Format: DVD & Blu-ray
Country: France
Jean Reno returns to the kind of sensitive tough guy role which gained him worldwide fame in Leon in the early-90s. Franz-Olivier Giesbert’s novel based on real life crime in the Marseille underworld, L’Immortel, inspired the character of Charly Matteï - a one-time gangster who reforms for the sake of a quiet life with his wife and family.
Three years into his retirement from crime, and seemingly safely cocooned in the peace of family life, Charly Matteï is ambushed and gunned down in an underground car park in Marseille’s old port by masked gunmen, his body ravaged by the 22 bullets of the title. Remarkably, he survives to take revenge upon his would-be killers.
The briefly explicated back-story reveals that Charly Matteï had fallen in love with someone equally entangled in the Marseille underworld, a woman under the control of both a violent pimp and her own drug addiction. Extricating her from both, he turned his back on crime’s empty rewards of power and money in order to create a safe and peaceful way of life for his new family. But retirement from the fragile hierarchy, and secret loyalties of the city’s criminal society was clearly never to be as simple as he had hoped.
Charly’s resolution to remove himself and his family from the perils of the underworld inevitably gives way to his instinct to take revenge upon those who have betrayed him, his blood drenched vendetta destined to stain the sun bleached streets of Marseille…
The character of Charly Matteï was apparently inspired by a real life Marseille crime lord Jacques Imbert, who suffered a similarly vicious attack yet lived to tell the tale, earning himself the nickname of The Immortal. The film’s writer and director used this incident and other material from Franz-Olivier Giesbert’s novel as his initial inspiration, augmenting this with his own research carried out in the Marseille underworld. It is a pity, then, that so little of anything distinctive or remarkable survives in either the script or the plot. The film is full of generic and predictable motifs from the mafia film genre – from a lame interrogation scene culminating in the victim’s body falling to the floor in slow motion, to the uneasy bonhomie of a birthday celebration for one of the gangsters - the excess of drugs and drink finding its inevitable ending in a bloodbath.
The actors deserve better than this script. Reno’s irrefutable charisma is given few chances to shine, but takes flight in a handful of scenes where his understated menace puts the thrill into the thriller. A rare humorous scene, Matteï in monologue with a cat, allows Reno to show the character’s humane side in a more original context than the rather schmaltzy scenes of family togetherness.
Marina Foïs provides the other standout performance as the police investigator attempting to break the code of silence surrounding the criminal fraternity, and facing apathetic and political opposition from her own police chief. Her finely understated and, in the main, unsentimental performance is undermined by the banality of the script. When Matteï proposes that she let him walk in order to set a trap for his would-be killer, she counters with the lame line: “I have a tough job to do” – as an exposition of the shadowy moral complexities faced by an investigator implicated by her association with a known criminal, it’s hardly thought provoking.
There are other potentially strong performances that are undermined by the blandness of the script and the predictability of the plot. Kad Merad as the current Mafia boss, a close ally of Mattei since childhood; or Jean-Pierre Darroussin, playing the inevitably morally compromised role of lawyer to organised crime lords. As for Matteï’s current wife, and indeed his first wife who also makes a number of very brief appearances, these are cardboard cut-out parts. Considering that Matteï is supposed to have turned his back on the brotherly bonds of his crime family in order to be with his wife, her part is horribly underwritten.
The other great omission of the film is the underuse of Marseille as a distinctive location. There is the odd shot which gives a sense of the place – the bare bones bleached-ness of a hillside graveyard, the exotically striped facade of the cathedral reflected in the windows of a passing car, or the medieval squalor of rubbish bags piled up in a market place. These intermittently appealing scenes only emphasise the film’s general lack of visual impact. A director of such a film might argue that pretty-pretty aesthetics are not appropriate to the subject – but higher quality cinematography could legitimately be used here to heighten dramatic effect. One scene takes as its setting the industrial backdrop of an oil refinery; the sense of horror of the torture and murder that take place here could have been heightened by better use of the starkly lit alienation of the refinery’s towers lit up against the night sky, but poor cinematography reduces the impact of the scene.
The underwhelming sense of menace is in part due to the cartoonish characterisation of the evil henchmen – again, an inevitable result of predictable plotting and woefully underwritten dialogue. As the villains drive past Matteï following a further failed attempt on his life, there is the merest suggestion of a phantom fist shaking and the words, “I’ll get you, Penelope Pitstop”. Considering how certain actions in the film are – the peppering of Matteï’s body with bullets, boiling water being poured over his face, someone’s head being repeatedly slammed with a car door – the violence appears curiously bloodless and insipid, reflecting the blinkered morality of the reformed Matteï. The hypocrisy of his personal ethics is challenged towards the end of the film, but the challenge lacks the subtlety that could have made this a disturbing and thought provoking examination of a troubled conscience.
22 Bullets has a fine premise – the moral consequences inherent in a reformed criminal trying to turn his back upon the violence and degradation of his former life, and whether such a way of life can be consigned to the past. The calibre of the acting talent is underused by the script and plot, while the setting of Marseille could have been used to much stronger effect to reflect the harshness and beauty of the film’s feudal moral code. Given the promise of its concept and cast, the film disappoints. KR
Film: La Princesse Mandane
Running time: 80 mins
Director: Germaine Dulac
Starring: Edmonde Guy, Edmond van Duren, Jacques Arnna, Mona Goya, Yvonne Legeay
Genre: Comedy/Romance
Country: France
This film was screened at the 3rd Fashion In Film Festival in December 2010. This special screening was accompanied by music on piano, keyboard and accordion by Stephen Horne, giving a musical experience approximating that of a live orchestra and choir.
Feminist director Germaine Dulac shows a more commercial and populist approach in this 1928 feature than the avant garde and experimental style for which she is better known. The film reworks Pierre Benoit’s novel, L’Oublié, but while Benoit’s novel was a more straightforward tale of adventure and derring do, Dulac transposes the film’s opening scenes to the mundane urban setting of a factory, and constructs a parable about the delights and dangers of fantasy and escapism.
The film tells the story of Etienne, a young factory foreman who, the intertitles tell us frankly at the film’s outset, is a bit smug and ambitious. While his devoted fiancée Annette thinks only of Etienne’s wellbeing, he spends his free time browsing in shops selling saucy publications, and beguiling his hours with day dreams of success and riches. Above all, he dreams of Princess Mandane imprisoned in the far away principality of Mingrelia, and of rescuing her from captivity.
The imaginations of Annette and Etienne are fired by the stories of intrepid adventure at the cinema, but each are influenced differently by these tales. When Etienne volunteers for an adventurous mission as part of a scouting party for a construction project, he envisions himself in the role of pioneering hero while Annette only has visions of Tartars poking out his eyes.
Once Etienne embarks on the expedition, a plot development of the “it was only a dream” formula ensues, in which he falls asleep and dreams – for the vast majority of the film – of the court of Mingrelia. Arriving in the guise of an ambassador, he woos the princess and attempts to inveigle himself into the trust of her sinister court of ministers, who keep her in unwilling captivity. As the dream progresses, Etienne discovers that events in his fantasy world don’t necessarily go according to plan…
Dulac’s film includes some clever and playfully self referential ideas on fantasy, romance and cinema as a means of escapism. The highlight of the week for Annette and Etienne is their Saturday night visit to the cinema, a way of forgetting the tedium of factory life, which is represented by repeated images of a clock, a steam whistle, and a reel of wire turning tirelessly round and round. Although Etienne’s daydreaming makes him ridiculous, there’s some real sympathy here for the human need to dream and fantasise which no cinema lover could be immune to.
One of the most enjoyable elements of the film is Edmond van Duren’s portrayal of the vain Etienne. Wittily, but again not unsympathetically, he shows a wonderful range of expression, gazing with limpid eyes and simpering smile upon the princess, casting his gaze afar upon imaginary horizons where he envisions his future glory, or adopting an attitude of self-conscious nobility. His poise falls flat, particularly in his scenes of attempted seduction, where he struggles not to trip over the princess’ extravagantly long sequinned train, or is upstaged by an aristocratic hound from her menagerie of pets.
The most outstanding visual effects are the repeated use of double exposures for different purposes, from the more mundane to the metaphorical. During Etienne’s journey as part of the scouting party, multiple layered shots of roads give the impression that great distances have been covered. When he departs on the train for the expedition, a shot of his fiancée and another woman, presumably his mother, waving white handkerchiefs is superimposed on the train, encapsulating the nature of departure in a single image.
In a scene displaying the more surreal tendencies of Dulac’s work, the princess and Etienne listen to a radio broadcast from France while images of Paris appear superimposed on the radio speaker. A clichéd Paris is evoked by these views of the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe and the rolling boulevards, and when the princess sighs, and says that in Paris a woman may be free, the effect is of pure silliness. She herself is susceptible to this particular fantasy – or so she would have Etienne believe. Even more bizarrely, in the same section of the film – bearing in mind that this is in effect an extended dream sequence – there is a fantasy within the fantasy, when Etienne beholds a ghostly vision of himself, bare-chested, lifting the princess above his head in a dance of seduction.
Despite these very fun elements, and the clever self referentialism of the film, it seems that Etienne’s head is sadly not a place in which you really want to spend an extended period of time. The prolonged dream sequence does start to drag. Considering how much content is packed into the opening episodes of the film, it’s surprising that the pace dawdles so much in these later scenes. This seems to be down to the court falling, as it were, slightly flat. The princess is consistently, impressively sparkly, a motif which seems to play as a metaphor for illusory glamour. But otherwise a few oriental rugs and the odd monkey don’t really convey the necessary exoticism of Mingrelia, although we could of course blame this on Etienne’s imagination scoring pretty low on the interior design front and way too high on the time spent thinking of minxy women front.
Witty and clever, with a surprisingly modern and tongue in cheek send up of cinematic romance and heroics, it seems almost churlish to say that, like Etienne’s daydreams, La Princesse Mandane does run on a bit. Edmond van Duren is dashingly handsome and conceited, Edmonde Guy makes the role of disdainful diva look easy, and there’s a delightful visual playfulness in the film’s artfully constructed shots. With the exception of one of her more avant garde features, La Coquille et le Clergyman (The Seashell and the Clergyman), Dulac’s work is not on general DVD release, so film seasons such as this programme offered by the Fashion in Film Festival offer a rare opportunity to see another facet to this fascinating director’s work – another reason for foreign film lovers to keep an eye on special programmes and festivals such as these. KR
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| The Red Spectre |
Saturday, 4th December 2010.
At the first of two afternoon screenings held at the Barbican, London as part of the 3rd Fashion In Film Festival, there was a hint of Oriental exoticism, and that was just in the audience. In today’s era of multiplexes and dressing down, there aren’t many screenings where you can find the audience sporting knee breeches, velvet smoking caps or Elizabethan ruffs. These homages to old school glamour perhaps reflect a recognition that today’s film stars don’t embody the style, mystique and poise of the film divas who were the focus of these rarely screened silent films.
Writer Anna Battista, resplendent in monochrome graphic print like one of the Red Queen’s playing cards, provided a brief introduction to the programme of shorts. At the turn of the 20th century, cinema was in its infancy and still regarded as a lower form of art than opera or theatre. One of the ways in which film innovators drew audiences to the cinema was through the magnetism of the divas – the dark haired and doomed heroines who became the glamorous focus of the extravagant cinematic creations of d’Annunzio and other Italian directors.
These divas inspired imitation among their fans. ‘Borellismo’ was the term coined to describe the craze for copying the style and mannerisms of actress Lyda Borelli – a fad which became ridiculous, said Battista, with some understatement, establishing that celebrity culture was a phenomenon decades before its current, sleazier incarnation.
Battista highlighted a recurring use of veils in these films as a metaphor for self transformation. Veils or draped fabrics feature in a form of movement known as the serpentine dance, which occured again and again in these shorts. The dance rose to fame at the Folies Bergère revue in the 19th century, and used the swirling movement of a full skirt, cloak or veils in a figure of eight movement, creating an illusion reminiscent of butterfly wings. The draping of the costumes also resembled the sleeves of a kimono, a reminder that the perceived exoticism of the middle and Far East was also a source of fascination to western audiences at this time.
The veil has an obvious eroticism, hinting at rather than revealing the form beneath, disclosing only obliquely. Battista told us that the divas’ characters nearly always died at the end of their films, but didn’t go on to draw out the implicit point that, despite audiences being fascinated by the divas, they were still uncomfortable with the women’s portrayal of sexual power. The repeated juxtaposition in these shorts of the diva and the devil suggests that society’s appreciation of the seductive glamour of the diva was accompanied by a suspicion that it was likely as not the path to moral destruction.
The festival’s programme comprised early cinematic pieces which explored these motifs of the diva, the devil, the veil and the serpentine dance. Not only was this festival a rare chance to see these shorts, but these screenings were made even more special by a live accompaniment by pianist Lilly Henley. The earliest of these rarely screened shorts is The Pillar Of Fire (La Danse Du Feu), 1899, by the French director Georges Méliès. A green tinted devil conjures up a woman who performs the serpentine dance, the ragged edges of her costume suggesting flickering flames while smoke billows around her. Méliès’ background was as a theatrical showman, basing his act on magic and illusions, and it must have been a delight to be able to use the revolutionary medium of film to create a more sophisticated version of traditional stagecraft.
Aragonese director Segundo de Chomón – inventor of one of the most important early film innovations, the “dolly” or moving camera - presents a similar theme with greater refinement in The Red Spectre (Le Spectre Rouge), 1907. The devil/magician performs various tricks with three ladies as his assistants/stage props. The illusions include levitating one of the ladies, a jerky procedure that was obviously done by wires, and not too well. But there is a beguiling illusion in which the figures of the three women appear superimposed, in miniature, over three glass bottles, so that they appear trapped inside them. There is also unexpected humour in an incongruous vision of a man dressed in flowery, matronly drag feeding a St Bernard. Chomón was obviously moved beyond trying to recreate traditional magical tricks, inventing original illusions which could use the malleability of film images much more imaginatively.
The other short by Chomón, La Creation De La Serpentine (France 1908), also features a devilish magician whose horns, very unimposingly, resemble stripy antennae. The woman who he conjures up performs – yes you’ve guessed it - the serpentine dance, although she does look like she’s having altogether too jolly a time to pull off any aura of diva-esque mystique. As she’s joined by other women dancing in a circle, the sequence appears comical but, as with other scenes in the shorts which now look anachronistic, this has a certain charm.
The Italian film The Butterflies (Le Farfalle), 1907, takes an Oriental theme for its tale. Geishas dance, their twirling parasols hand tinted an array of pastel colours, in front of a cage in which a woman/butterfly is imprisoned. The geishas make the butterfly woman dance and, when her black clad lover appears to rescue her, the Geishas tear off his wings. Pretty disturbing for so delicate and pretty a composition...
The focus of the programme was Nina Oxilia’s masterpiece, Rapsodia Satanica. A stirring original score was written for the film by composer Pietro Mascagni, wonderful to hear performed live for this particular event. Starring the luminous Lyda Borelli, Oxilia’s film takes the legend of Faust as the inspiration for its plot. Borelli depicts the elderly Alba d’Oltrevita (translating as “beyond life”), who lives in the castle of illusion (subtlety is not the watchword here). Mourning the lost beauty of her youth, she makes a pact with the devil that she will renounce love in exchange for being restored to her former beauty. Delighting in her regained charms, Alba is courted by two brothers, Sergio and Tristano. Sergio threatens suicide unless Alba declares that she loves him, but she is unable to show compassion for his plight, and instead attempts to seduce Tristano. Once Sergio is dead and Tristano has abandoned her, Alba realises the error of her ways, and spends some time moping picturesquely in the grounds of her castle, before meeting her inevitable death at the hands of the devil who double crossed her.
The story is predictable, but narrative isn’t the focus of Oxilia’s film. Alba’s story is played out by means of costume, gesture and expression, with the various stages of her tale each having a very distinctive visual look in the costumes by designer Mariano Fortuny. First Alba is a stooped old woman, shrouded in black and moving with painful slowness. In her newfound youth, she adopts the costume of a flapper, with an almost masculine character to the freedom and expansiveness of her movements, as she smokes and flirts with the two brothers. When events take a more sinister turn, and the heartlessness of Alba’s character is revealed, she is a femme fatale in an exotic, Egyptian costume, transformed from white clad innocence to shiny sexual predator, like the iridescent carapace of a scarab beetle. Once her fortunes turn, and she is tortured by remorse, her costumes have simple lines and muted tones, her cold and marble countenance and her braided hair recalling the frozen tragedy of a pre-Raphaelite heroine.
Just as the fashion designer Fortuny experimented with the use of stencilling in his costume designs, so Oxilia used stencilled colour to provide visual emphases in the film to heighten dramatic and emotional effect. The contrasting tints of the film’s most breathtaking scenes appear as the heroine approaches her dramatic downfall. In the murky sepia tones of a mirror, the camera focuses on Alba’s chiaroscuro reflection as she swathes herself in icy green veils, transforming herself into a priestess of love and death, ready to embrace her fate. The scene becomes drenched in blue tones as Alba steps out of the house. Shrouded in veils, she already appears to be what she will soon become, as white and deathly as a carved angel on a headstone.
The film is a real visual masterpiece, with jewel like colour accents and an admirable and fearless extravagance in its narrative and emotional scale. The obsessiveness of the director and designer in creating a true and self contained vision of distilled and heightened emotion rings through this piece, while Borelli’s magnetic performance flits between light hearted callousness, bored insouciance, or brooding melancholy with apparent effortlessness, cementing her reputation as one of the finest divas of the silent era.
The Fashion In Film Festival’s programme was a rare opportunity to view these early works. The films gave an insight into both the technical development of film – the adoption of stencilling and hand colouring, and the use of double exposure to create visual metaphors and illusions – and the cultural significance of costume as a means of interpreting character and of creating the phenomenon of the diva. For those who would like to learn more, a tie in illustrated publication Birds Of Paradise: Costume As A Cinematic Spectacle by the festival’s curator, Marketa Uhlirova, is due to be published by Wallflower Press in the spring. KR
