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Film: Dobermann
Year of production: 1997
UK Release date: 25th April 2011
Distributor: Second Sight
Certificate: 18
Running time: 99 mins
Director: Jan Kounen
Starring: Vincent Cassel, Tchéky Karyo, Monica Bellucci, Antoine Basler, Dominique Bettenfeld
Genre: Action/Crime/Drama/Thriller
Format: DVD
Country of Production: France
Language: French/English/Spanish
Released back in the late 1990s, Dobermann was an antidote to the bland offerings of the time and a French response to English speaking taboo breakers like Reservoir Dogs and Natural Born Killers. But in this more permissive time, with the advent of a new breed of horror pushing the boundaries of screen violence, and Asian masters of cinema such as Miike showing us just what it’s like to be on the edge of permissiveness, does Dobermann still hold the same power?
During the christening of Yann Le Pentrec, a Doberman scratches on the church door. One of his uncles has brought the baby a gun as a present. When the Doberman enters the church, and the gun goes flying into baby Yann’s pram after a collision, the family discover that he takes to the weapon like it was a new toy. And so Dobermann is born.
Years later, we meet the adult Dobermann and his girl, Nat, robbing an armoured car before going on to meet with the rest of his gang of lunatics and misfits for the heist of the century.
In broad daylight, the gang rob a succession of banks, throwing Paris into chaos. The police are in turmoil, unable to control the situation. Unfortunately, Dobermann’s plan has put him squarely on the radar of psychotic detective Christini, who will stop at nothing to get him.
As Christini closes in on Dobermann and his crew of reprehensible criminals, they find themselves trapped and prepare for a confrontation of epic proportions…
Dobermann is not an easy film to sit through. Apart from the violence, and there is more than enough to make the hardened viewer squirm, the soundtrack pumps with little consideration for the eardrums, and the pace and editing make for a literally breathtaking experience. It is not always pretty; in fact the majority of the film is an ugly mess of violence, loathsome characters and techno. That said, it’s hard not to like the film as a whole, if only for the way the filmmakers have chosen to batter the viewer repeatedly in nearly every scene and make no apologies for doing so. It’s a mesmeric experience, and one you’re not likely to forget, for better or worse.
The robberies that form the crux of the film are nothing especially inventive or daring. There is little spectacle to them when viewed alongside countless other heist movies, but the little touches, such as placing a grenade in the helmet of a pursuing police motorcyclist, make the whole affair seem so outlandish that you can forget the shortcomings. This is not Heat after all.
The characters on offer start at despicable and descend the scale to scum of the earth. There is not one redeeming feature to any of them. Dobermann himself is a violent and nasty criminal who delights in shooting and blowing things up, as well as humiliating the odd victim of his robberies. He isn’t a character that as a viewer we have any real sympathies with. But that’s ok, because as a villain (oh yes, Dobermann is not the villain of this piece) we are given the despicable Detective Christini, a man so utterly foul that he makes Dobermann look like a lovable rogue. After all, any policeman who thinks nothing of throwing a baby across a room or giving it a grenade to play with during an interrogation is going to make anyone sympathise with the criminal he’s chasing.
This is the main problem with the film. For all the flashy photography and breakneck pace, the characters are so impossible to relate to that we are never allowed to view the film as anything other than an excuse for violence. This leaves the whole film feeling like a bit of throwaway fun rather than a subversive experiment in what’s permissible. Unlike, say, Ichi the Killer, which had at its core a statement on the way we view screen violence, Dobermann seems content to throw brutal acts at us and never allows us to get over one before hurling another, without commenting on any of them. This could be Dobermann’s undoing, but the film has enough genuine adrenalin-fuelled fun in its arsenal that anyone looking for 100 minutes of action will not be disappointed.
Cassel is good as the titular lead, but his onscreen charisma has been better displayed in other, superior films. Monica Bellucci isn’t given much to do except look ridiculously gorgeous and shoot things, which she does effortlessly and with considerable style, stealing most scenes she appears in through sheer presence. Tcheky Karyo is creepy and disgusting as Christini and makes for a very believable monster. The rest of the performances are a great deal of fun, but no one stands out as being anything other than walking comic characters (this might even be a compliment as the film is based on a series of comics).
Director Kounen has loaded the frame with enough crazy images to make the eyes bleed. Some are visceral, some are sexual, some are beautiful, but all are loud and searing. The quiet hideout for the gang is contrasted to good effect with the chaotic Paris streets, which are rife with fodder for the array of weaponry on offer. The first shot of adult Dobermann centres on the barrel of his oversized gun and from there his and everyone else’s weapons are almost fetishised throughout. The climactic confrontation between the gang and the police takes place in a club that could easily be Hell. The music is deafening, the imagery gaudy, and the violence extreme. It’s a potent mix that will work for some, but will definitely not be to everyone’s taste.
While it would be easy to dismiss Dobermann as a gratuitous orgy of violence, it is hard not to fall for its charms, such as they are. It is a film that will definitely not appeal to everyone, but one which has retained the shock value that set it apart from an array of Tarantino-style rip-offs, despite some heavy competition over the years. You’ll know whether it’s to your taste before it’s even begun: if the sight of an animated dog urinating on the opening credits doesn’t do it for you then it’s probably best to avoid it. For the rest of us, it’s insane, violent, over-the-top, crass - and a lot of fun. RM
Film: The Whistleblower
Running time: 112 mins
Director: Larysa Kondracki
Starring: Rachel Weisz, David Strathairn, Vanessa Redgrave, Roxana Condurache, Monica Bellucci
Genre: Drama/Thriller
Country: Canada/France
This film (which is an English-language release) will be screened at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival, which takes place in London between 23rd March and 1st April, 2011. Find out more about this event by clicking here.
Larysa Kondracki’s issue-driven The Whistleblower emerges at an opportune time to raise public awareness, since the issue of sex trafficking has been particularly prevalent in the news lately. Kondracki’s directorial debut received its premiere in Toronto this past September, and will likely make its way into Western cinemas in the second half of 2011. It features Rachel Weisz in a role that resembles in nature her Oscar-winning performance as a humanitarian activist in 2005’s The Constant Gardener, and establishes an eminently happier ending for her character here.
The Whistleblower is the real-life account of Kathryn Bolkovac (Weisz), who encountered and exposed a large-scale cover-up of sex trafficking in post-war Bosnia.
Assigned to a peacekeeping role in 1999, Kathryn excels, successfully securing a domestic violence conviction, and attracting the attention of women’s rights advocate Madeleine Rees (Redgrave). Madeleine offers her a job heading a branch of the United Nations, which she accepts despite her keenness to move back closer to her ex-husband and teenage daughter.
When Kathryn’s position leads her to a raid on a local bar, she discovers two beaten girls, who later admit that they have been trafficked into the country under false pretences. Acting swiftly to assess the severity of the situation, Kathryn finds herself under pressure from senior figures, and her attempts to address this issue and enact justice are continually thwarted by internal conspiracies and community kingpins. The dawning conclusion is that this is a far bigger web of corruption than anticipated, which reaches beyond the confines of her department and involves many of her colleagues in the UN…
Aesthetically severe, The Whistleblower has elements which hark back to Lukas Moodysson’s alarming Lilya 4-Ever, concerning the ease at which young girls can be lured into the sex trade. The women are splayed across grubby scenery, presented in lewd images of torture, and engaged in particularly harrowing depictions of sexual abuse. Impassioned first-time director Kondracki has amped up the degradation well, but is far more competent at instigating shock through de-humanising imagery than developing insight into the underlying factors that have propelled the women into such a compromising position. Kondracki litters the film with confined close-ups of victimised souls (whether that be Weisz or one of her women) in dingy apartments, exercising a brand of sinkhole cinema that gives us little idea of the surrounding community or the network of criminality which governs it. External shots and neutral surrounding scenes would certainly aid this problem in providing scope, but the real problems lie in the muddled, wafer-thin script.
The Whistleblower has been written in the vein of a political disquisition; coursing through an unambitiously lineated narrative path to justice with few interesting dramatic shifts or relationships to speak of. It’s assumingly political, thematically brave, but seminally lacking in cinematic worth to justify existence beyond the duty of the documentarian. The attempts to branch off from the main strand are so terribly underdeveloped, featuring a back-story for one of the trafficked girls which tells us virtually nothing about their way of life other than “domestic violence is commonplace.” The film is constantly re-iterating this same theme without truly making these families accessible, reproaching their frayed relationships with pale single-mindedness.
The villains of the piece aren’t sketched with any more shade either, recalling the two-dimensional depictions of corporate and ego-centric opposition to justice as last year’s Green Zone - albeit without a performance quite as bad as Greg Kinnear’s. Even Kathryn’s allies, the chief of which comes in the form of political-humanist project stalwart Vanessa Redgrave, who waltzes into scenes in an array of dinky hats to dole out solemn advice, hardly convince us that they know what they’re talking about.
If nothing else, The Whistleblower at least places us firmly on the side of justice, and expresses the procedural difficulties encountered when facing corruption through emotive force rather than boardroom chatter. A scene where Kathryn is trying to persuade one of the girls to go into protective custody with her, while one of her corrupt colleagues is intimidating the girl in the same room, is a particular highlight in terms of rousing our emotion. Kathryn’s palpable frustration at being continually undermined in her profession is laid bare, and her fury at the dissolving degree of control she has over these women is one of the film’s more emotionally honest moments. Weisz, too, is good in this scene, and fine overall, despite being shoehorned into the Charlize Theron/North Country role of battling sexual discrimination and political injustice while simultaneously trying to rescue a relationship with her family.
Kathryn’s familial difficulties are outlined in three moments: where she clutches a letter of rejection to her state police transfer request; where she cries during a telephone conversation with her daughter; and when she’s asked by a diplomat why the courts gave custody of her child to the father because that’s “so unusual.” The final instance of this trio of unthinkably lame methods of lumping a murky history onto our professionally-compromised heroine asserts that Kondracki really doesn’t have a handle on who Bolkovac was at this time, apart from a troubled divorcee (for reasons unbeknownst to us) and a valiant crusader. At one point, Kathryn even cites her daughter as a reason for defending these young girls, as if the mere issue itself weren’t enough to capture all of her moralistic fibre.
As a political thriller of sorts, The Whistleblower is a tired venture, content to place its subject on a pedestal (like a documentary would) without endeavouring to make the story cinematic, or allude to the motivations of the characters involved on both sides. It feels strangely throttled as a conversation piece, with half-hearted attempts at generating interest beyond an historical timeline - all of which are rendered irrelevant anyway. There’s surely passion behind this project, but it’s made with such colourless labour that it’s difficult to care about what’s presented on screen, and almost impossible to recognise who Bolkovac was in the first place. Stick to the news. CR
Film: Brotherhood Of The Wolf
Release date: 19th February 2007
Certificate: 15
Running time: 137 mins
Director: Christophe Gans
Starring: Samuel Le Bihan, Mark Dacascos, Jeremie Renier, Vincent Cassel, Monica Bellucci
Genre: Action/Horror/Mystery
Studio: Optimum
Format: DVD
Country: France
Set in pre-revolutionary France, director Christophe Gans utilises the legendary tale of the Beast of Gévaudan to weave his multilayered and very loosely fact-based plot around.
Gregoire de Fronsac (Simon Le Bihan), artist, soldier and forward thinking man of science is dispatched to Gévaudan by his king in an attempt to accelerate the destruction of a murderous wolf-like beast that has been terrorizing his subjects. With the assistance of his Iroquois companion, Mani (Mark Dacascos), he swiftly concludes that rather than a demon set free from the depths of hell, due to the king’s favour of reason over religious teachings, he is in fact dealing with something manufactured, or at least influenced by man.
Shortly after arriving in the area, Fronsac meets the Morangias family and their circle of self-centred opinionated fair-weather friends. He immediately clashes mental swords with one armed adventurer, recently returned from Africa, Jean-François de Morangias (Vincent Cassel), while simultaneously falling for the charms of his younger sister Marianne (Emilie Dequenne).
As the first hour slowly progresses, going off at seemingly unrelated tangents, as Gans cleverly mimics Jaws by keeping the beast off camera, we are introduced via Fronsac’s investigation to more and more colourful characters. Femme fatale Sylvia (Monica Bellucci), clergyman Sardis and an epileptic mute girl, amongst others, become possible suspects, although, at this point, we are not quite sure what we are supposed to be suspecting them of.
The less is more approach of the first half, having served its purpose by building tension and offering clues, suddenly shifts up several gears as we cross over the hour mark to become an adrenaline fuelled fight fest that rarely slows down, yet still manages to pack emotional clout when it does pause briefly to come up for air…
Fronsac and Mani are joined by young idealistic nobleman Thomas d’Apcher as they set out on their journey to hunt the beast, a precursor to an almost Indiana Jones-style romp featuring numerous sprung traps and “close but no cigar” moments, with respect to the quarries capture. Following on from this, we have several exciting martial arts sequences, involving an array of brutal yet ingenious weaponry, before we take one final plot building breather - just before the exciting pay off scene. Gans, whether intentionally or not, may ape Steven Spielberg’s gift for tension building before rewarding the audience with exciting moments of peril, but it is when the action explodes across the screen that the directors veer off in different, yet equally effective, directions. Gans’ style is a hybrid of quirky European idiosyncrasies fused with Asian frenetic camera work, and speckled with well placed slow motion sequences thrown in for good measure.
The cinematography is simply stunning, from the mud-entrenched autumn slow-motion fight scene with individual droplets of rain mixed with blood, so vivid we can almost feel the spray, to the snowy winter search for lost children, and the lush forest wolf hunt where Gans utilises every vista to maximum effect.
Naturally, being a French film, we have the obligatory sex scene, but even then Gans shows his skill, allowing the camera to scan the length of Monica Bellucci’s naked body as she entertains her suitor, before seamlessly merging the curves of her thighs with the peaks and troughs of a scenic mountain region. While all the actors are well cast with Bellucci, her real life husband Cassel and Simon Le Bihan are particularly strong in their roles - and obviously relishing the opportunity to wear such elaborate costumes. However, it is the surprisingly good performance from Mark Dacascos that draws us in and demands our attention.
This is in a mainstream movie with artistic undertones. Placed in the skilful hands of Gans, it is in essence a piece of pure entertainment and something to enjoy time and time again. MG
Film: Irreversible
Release date: 4th December 2006
Certificate: 18
Running time: 97 mins
Director: Gaspar Noé
Starring: Vincent Cassel, Monica Bellucci, Albert Dupontel
Genre: Drama/Crime
Studio: Tartan
Format: DVD
Country: France
Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible comes with a fearsome reputation. On its release in 2002, reports from the Cannes Film Festival told of innumerable walkouts, oxygen being administered in the foyer to distressed patrons, and a rape scene which left even the most hardened critic reaching for a stiff drink. Lorded by some as groundbreaking, dismissed by others as cheap, vile exploitation. Now, eight years on, it’s a chance to return to this most polarising of works and take a fresh look at Irreversible without the controversy and hysteria that dogged its release.
The story takes place over the course of one night in Paris. Middle class couple Marcus (Vincent Cassel) and Alex (Monica Bellucci) spend an evening at a party accompanied by their friend Pierre (Albert Dupontel), who is also Alex’s ex. Alex leaves the party early, and in a nearby underpass she is assaulted, brutally raped and beaten in a fixed camera shot which lasts a full nine minutes. Then follows a frenzied race through the streets of Paris as Marcus and Pierre attempt to find and exact revenge on Alex’s attacker.
The film is told in reverse order, beginning at the club to where Marcus and Pierre track down the assailant and working backwards through the events of the evening...
To start by addressing the elephant in the room: yes, the rape is every bit as horrific as you have heard. Harrowing, relentless, savage - and totally justified. This isn’t cinema rape. There are no cuts, no clever angles and no sympathetic score. The scene is stark, ugly and brutal; everything a real rape is. We’re left reeling, utterly nauseated at the scene and at ourselves for watching it. We feel violated, but, unlike poor Alex, we asked to be there. Noé’s techniques aren’t as accusatory as Michael Haneke’s for example (who famously forced us to confront our own appetites for violence in Funny Games) but they’re every bit as confrontational.
Noé’s camerawork is extraordinary. Here the camera is not merely a passive viewfinder but an active participant – inquisitive, accusatory, snaking through the Parisian underbelly apparently unfettered by the limits of physics. We travel through the city like a ghost, passing effortlessly through walls and car windows, capable of travelling impossible distances in seconds. It’s a tribute to Noé that these extraordinary visual techniques never feel like trickery, rather like he’s tapped into our subconscious and somehow we’re one with the lens. The journey into the bowels of the gay club at the start feel like a descent into hell, like a Hieronymus Bosch painting come to life and is a genuinely unsettling experience. After almost ten minutes of constantly spinning and flashing images of degradation and a lurching atonal soundtrack, one feels physically uneasy, your skin crawling and heart in your throat. When we later arrive at the assault in the underpass, the screen locks completely to a fixed shot; oppressive and unforgiving - as if Noé is punishing us for our roving eyes.
Monica Bellucci does an incredible job as Alex especially in what must have been an exceptionally difficult scene to film, but this is really Vincent Cassel’s film. We’re used to seeing him now in big budget global features, but this performance reminds us why he rose to the top of the European scene. His performance is feral and explosive. Stalking the streets like an animal, he looks like the very embodiment of rage. That the action is played out in reverse order means that we are made the confused, terrified onlooker in every scene, reeling from Marcus’s escalating fury as he descends further and further into the depths of delirious, vengeful savagery. The reverse order also forces us to play detective like Marcus, so while he’s chasing up leads to find out where his hunt will take him next, we’re busy piecing together the chain of events which have led up to the situations currently taking place.
The story is told at a breakneck pace until the third act when everything slows down, Noé’s ferreting camera included. Seeing Marcus and Alex together at home, relaxed, in love and planning a future; these scenes are loaded with the knowledge of what’s about to happen and their blissful ignorance to it. While there are countless reminders of how the tragedy could have been averted (by circumstance, different decisions, or the heartbreaking silhouetted shape of a would-be saviour passerby who takes a fleeting glance at the rape before fleeing the scene), this is a film about the inevitability of things. Alex quotes from a book: “The future is already written, and the proof is in premonitory dreams,” and reveals her own such dream late on in the film. The sense of helplessness on our part to be able to intercede only compounds the sense that this is fate, unavoidable.
Irreversible is a monumental achievement. From its inspirational camerawork and truly unique soundscape to the depictions of violence and rage, the film leaves behind images burned indelibly on the brain. It’s not just the events of the story the title is referring to; the experience we have just sat through is one we will never completely be free of. If you have it in you, watch Irreversible. This is an exceptional, important film from one of the true visionaries of modern cinema. LB
