(Short) LONDON MOVIE JOURNAL, Oct. 2015

[Chris Knipp]

London Film Festival. Small sampling. Plus some more.

I'm in London for a week. It's exciting to be in this dynamic city, my first time since 2009. Will see a couple of LFF films, DESIERTO (Jonas Cuarón) and DHEEPAN (Jacques Audiard). DESIERTO is a Mexican immigration vs. racist US redneck thriller. DHEEPAN, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes though it doesn't sound like Audiard's best work, is about Tamil people immigrants in Paris living under the pretense of being a family.

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DESIERTO (Jonás Cuarón 2015). This is a borderline exploitation film, with its skimpy script of a based-on-fact but greatly exaggerated string of sniper killings of benighted Mexican border crossers dumped in a badlands by an unscrupulous "coyote (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coyotaje)" when his truck breaks down. The leader and survivor is Moises (Gael García Bernal), the evil, drunken redneck sniper with a vicious German Shepherd called Tracker is Sam by (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). This other Cuarón son, who coscripted Gravity, is pretty good with physical action, like his father, but, well, there is not much to this movie, even though its actors and its rocky, arid Mexican desert setting are authentic. Much time was spent with the special effects editors delivering a horrible end to poor Tracker. Lack of backstories and nihilistic finale do not confer a Beckettian profundity upon this simplistic tale. Morgan is good, but should a real baddie be this good-looking? García Bernal is, as always, appealing, handsome, and charismatic. Spicy Mexican Spanish dialogue is filtered clean in the subtitles. FIPRESCI Prize for Special Presentations at Toronto. At Odeon Leicester Square 15 Oct. 2015 (LFF).

[Chris Knipp]

CRIMSON PEAK (Guillermo del Toro 2015) (Metacritic rating 67%)

Review for the NY Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/16/movies/crimson-peak-a-guillermo-del-toro-gothic-romance-in-high-bloody-style.html?_r=0)by A.O. Scott, 15 Oct. 2015:

Crimson Peak, a Guillermo del Toro Gothic Romance in High Bloody Style

"Beware of Crimson Peak!" So goes the warning hissed by one of the skeletal, agitated ghosts appearing in the movie of the same title. It isn’t bad advice. Not that I’m saying you should avoid Crimson Peak the new film from Guillermo del Toro, modern cinema’s No. 1 genre geek. On the contrary: If you know what you’re getting into and you’re in the mood for blood, velvet and a director’s sincere commitment to excess, then this might be just the ticket.

In spite of the aforementioned ghosts, Crimson Peak isn’t really a horror film. The supernaturalism is, as it were, a red herring, and a chance for Mr. del Toro to indulge in some creepy effects and easy shocks. The specters are visible to Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska), a sensible young woman coming of age in Buffalo around the turn of the 20th century. She is periodically visited by the inky, anxious wraith of her dead mother, and she incorporates ghosts into a novel she’s writing. But otherwise her life seems to obey the conventions of late-Victorian realist fiction. “They’re really metaphors,” she explains of the apparitions in her book, and while Mr. del Toro’s are a bit more literal, they are also secondary to the main story.

Which might be described as a Henry James tale filtered through the lurid sensibilities of the Italian giallo maestro Mario Bava. Characters are swathed in rich dark cloth — except for Edith’s blazing yellow frocks — and lighted by candelabras. Wind howls, blood seems to ooze down walls and up from beneath floorboards, and coherence is sacrificed to sensation. Like one of James’s heroines, Edith, who lives with her doting industrialist father (Jim Beaver), is seduced by a penniless aristocrat — an English baronet who has come to Buffalo with his weird sister in search of venture capital and an innocent bride. Edith has another suitor, a bland ophthalmologist named Alan McMichael (Charlie Hunnam), but he is no match for Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston), who whisks her off to his ancestral estate, a crumbling pile that is sometimes referred to as (cue sinister music) Crimson Peak. (I thought it was going to turn out to be a brand of high-performance cinnamon sports gum, but that’s because I live in the cynical, seen-it-all, brand-conscious world that Mr. del Toro longs to escape.)

The Sharpe mansion sits on a clay mine that leaches lurid red goo into the pipes, the courtyard and the basement. The walls are festooned with fluttering moths, reminders of Mr. del Toro’s career-long preoccupation with insects of various sizes and dispositions. But the scariest thing in the house is not the crimson tide or the pre-modern plumbing, not the bugs or the screeching ghosts or the howling wind. It is Jessica Chastain, her hair as black as a raven’s wing, her eyes as mad as cracked marbles, her remarkable chin poised to trouble the sleep of the righteous.

Ms. Chastain plays Lucille Sharpe, Thomas’s sister, roommate and sharer of a Very Dark Secret. The nature of this secret is both hinted at and shrouded, but it does not take much of a sleuth to discern that some terrible things have happened in Crimson Peak. (Hence the warning issued by Edith’s ghostly mother.) Before Edith went off with Thomas — and before something else really awful happened — her father hired a private detective (Burn Gorman), who unearthed some alarming tidbits about the Sharpe siblings. Fearing the worst, Dr. McMichael sets out to rescue Edith, only to find …

But why spoil anything? Best to get lost in the tangle of the plot, to puzzle over loose ends and then wonder if this lush hothouse flower was really worth cultivating. Crimson Peak works hard to supply the kind of gothic, romantic, creepy-erotic mood that is not quite the staple of popular culture that it used to be. Mr. del Toro overdoes it, as is his habit, overselling his own enthusiasm for the material in a way that compromises the audience’s delight. The film is too busy, and in some ways too gross, to sustain an effective atmosphere of dread. It tumbles into pastiche just when it should be swooning and sighing with earnest emotion.

I did not get to watch this film because the nearby cinema (Odeon - Whitley's) was only showing it in their "Lounge" where the tickets cost £22 per person! That's $34.

[Chris Knipp]

Hitchcock/Truffaut (Kent Jones 2015). .

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A must for any Hitchcock-fancier's library

This is a celebration and discussion of François Truffaut's famous week-long series of interviews with Alfred Hitchcock and subsequent book, emphasizing reactions of some notable current directors and briefly noting the life-long friendship between Hitch and Truffaut that resulted. There are detailed discussions/analyses of Scottie's unnatural obsession with Judy in Vertigo and the intentional betrayal of audience expectation in Psycho. The filmmakers we hear from are:

Wes Anderson
Olivier Assayas
Peter Bogdonovitch
Arnaud Desplechin
David Fincher
James Gray
Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Richard Linklater
David Fincher
Martin Scorsese

Anyone must admit this is an impressive list, and as presented here they speak wisely and cogently. The narrator linking segments is Bob Balaban. A major purpose of the film of course is to illustrate visually everything that is said, whether by the subjects or the commentators, with clips of Hitch and Truffaut with the interpreter, Helen Scott, and of the techniques and specific films mentioned by them or the commentators.

So this is a very valuable little film, elegantly executed, that is both an opening up or visualization of the interviews/book and a demonstration of how important they have turned out to be to directors who came after, perhaps more so than you may have realized. The only "criticism" of the film is that it cannot replace but only supplement the book -- and, best of all, if you have the time, the actual interviews, recordings of which are accessible to us (I've linked to them on this site previously; find that HERE (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?2847-HITCHCOCK-TRUFFAUT-tapes)). Or consider this an appetizer, introduction, or reminder to go back and watch Hitchcock movies again (and study the book and the tapes again).

This film debuted at Cannes May 2015; also shown in nine other international festivals including Telluride, Toronto, Chicago, and London. Not shown at the New York Film Festival perhaps because that might seem inappropriately incestuous, since Kent Jones, the filmmaker, is the director of the NYFF. US theatrical release begins 2 Dec. 2015 (Film Forum and Lincoln Plaza NYC), 4 Dec. Los Angeles. Showing at major US markets and at Landmark theaters in the Bay Area briefly starting 11 Dec. Screened as part of the London Film Festival 17 Oct. 2015.

[Chris Knipp]

JACQUES AUDIARD: DHEEPAN (2015)

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CLAUDINE VINASITHAMBY AND JESUTHASAN ANTHONYTHASAN IN DHEEPAN

A difficult blend still shows Audiard's mastery

In Dheepan Audiard seeks to do something new -- focus on a major social problem -- but does it in much his usual way -- by a fusion of genres. He takes the plight of refugees of war, Tamil people fleeing Sri Lanka in a fake family unit of convenience (unrelated man, woman, and 9-year-old girl) escaping via traffickers to France, where they're put in the care of the social welfare system. Then, he plunks them down in a seedy Paris cité in the extra-peripheral banlieue. The man, the titular Dheepan (Jesuthasan Antonythasan), a former Tamil Tiger squadron leader, is made the new caretaker ("guardien"). The threatening presence of warring young drug dealers allows the filmmaker to consequently blend in elements of a gangster action movie. Insofar as the mix works, it's through our visceral identification with our exotic three lead characters and the phantasmagorical shocks and transformations they must naturally go through as they make the slow, painful adjustment to exile and a new life. The story doesn't completely work. But it's buttressed by Audiard's mature assurance and formidable cinematic invention and by very authentic actors. And it certainly escapes the clichés of more conventional French émigré movies like Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano's recent Samba (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4023-SAMBA-(Olivier-Nakache-Eric-Toledano-2014)). Dheepan won the top prize Palme d'Or at Cannes this year.

The actor Jesuthasan Antonythasan, who is more a writer, actually was a Tamil Tiger child soldier and political activist who fled to France with a fake passport and worked at many menial jobs; he says the role of Dheepan is 50% autobiographical. Kalieaswari Srinivasan, who plays Yalini, Dheepan's "wife," is a theater actress.

Besides the fusion of genres there is the fusion of the fake relationships into real ones as Dheepan, Yalini and their "daughter" Illayaal (Claudine Vinasithamby) become an emotionally-bonded unit. This begins when the adults take Illayaal to school and she begs them not to leave her: she thinks she is being abandoned again; she has no family. Living in close proximity at the cité, Dheepan and Yalini slowly begin to have real conversations and then later to feel some physical attraction to each other. Vinasithamby is a beautiful girl who is the story's first ray of hope. Immediately placed in an assimilation class like the one depicted in Julie Bertucelli's 2013 French documentary The School of Babel (R-V 2014 (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3681-Rendez-Vous-with-French-Cinema-at-Lincoln-Center-2014&p=31831#post31831)), she quickly begins learning French and can help the struggling Dheepan. He doesn't understand much of the instructions on his guardien duties (which he however soon performs more than well), or the talk of local cronies, or the key explanation of a young drug dealer operative who is part of a cadre of outsiders hired by the drug overlords expressly because they are indifferent to local loyalties, interests, and lives. Much of the middle of the film is focused on these half-understood French conversations, with the "family's" Tamil talk in the background in their little home unit as they fight and reconcile. Audard is skillful in communicating with sound, image, and editing the start-stop mixture of shock, dislocation, and adjustment the three refugees are experiencing.

Yalini, sullen and diissatisfied because she wants to join relatives in England, is the last to acquire any French. She is sent to work, against her will at first, caring in an apartment in the building (for a to her astronomical €500 per month) for a certain Monsieur Habib (Faouzi Bensaïdi) a listless, almost catatonic man. This job acquires linchpin significance in the developing drug lord tale when Habib's son Brahim arrives, fresh from jail, wearing an ankle monitor. Brahim is played by the charismatic (but not very Arab-looking) Belgian actor Vincent Rottiers, who likes Yalini's cooking and seems drawn to her.

When war breaks out between the local young drug gangsters and the outsider ones, things become almost as violent as the world the trio have left behind. But not quite. And anyway, there is nowhere to go. Ironic though it may be, this is where their hope lies. Here Dheepan plays a brave pivotal role that seems somewhat farfetched; and there is a finale that some may find too optimistic. But then such was the hopeful finale of Audiard's The Beat My Heart Skipped/De battre mon coeur s'est arrêté, his brilliant "remake" (as he called it, more a transformation) of James Toback's bleaker debut feature Fingers. One might also note that the director's earlier Read My Lips/Sur mes lèvres (starring Emmanuelle Devos and Vincent Cassel) was a foreshadowing of what he does here, because it's a bold fusion of two elements not unlike Dheepan's -- a romance with a handicapped person and a crime story.

Where I liked most in Dheepan apart from Audard's way with his Tamil actors is the manner in which he conveys a sense of dislocation through surreal transitions and slo-mo. I'm still debating the possibility that his screenwriting collaborations with Tonino Benaquista (on Read My Lips and The Beat might have been more successful than the subsequent more recent ones with Thomas Bidegain. But then, with Bidegain he did A Prophet, arguably his masterpiece (so far). But Audiard is just not fully in his element here. Cannes was partly rewarding past accomplishments and present good intentions.

Dheepan, 110 mins., debuted at Cannes, where it won the Palme d'Or. Over 15 other international festivals, including London, where it was screened for this review. Not the NYFF. French release 26 Aug. 2015, to good, but not rave, reviews (AlloCiné press rating 3.6). Bought for US release by IFC.

[Johann]

Enjoy London.

"Cuppa the old chai Sir?"
"No time, no time..."

[Chris Knipp]

I have not had a drop of tea or coffee here so far, but my friend had a glass or three of mint tea in an excellent Lebanese restaurant called Al Arez, 101 Edgware Rd, London W2 2HX. Recommended by some local boys when I asked them in Arabic, "Where's a good restaurant?" Best baklawa ever. Free with the meal.