Australian Gothic (Modern Love)

Australian filmmaker Alex Frayne's Modern Love hasn't been shown much love at home. Rejected by both the Sydney and Melbourne Film Festivals, the debut feature had its world premiere at the Moscow International Film Festival last year before securing a host of festival engagements worldwide. Though it's yet to land a domestic deal, the low-budget indie recently received a warm reception in the filmmaker's home town, as part of the Adelaide International Film Festival.

John (Mark Constable), Emily (Victoria Hill) and their young son Edward (Will Traeger) arrive in a small seaside village where John grew up, to attend his uncle's funeral and claim the inheritence. The circumstances of the older man's death are mysterious and the villagers don't seem to be very helpful. When John decides to stay a while and move into his uncle's shed, Emily and Edward seem reluctant. When John starts behaving strangely, speaking to his dead relative and even acquiring some of his character traits, they start to get thoroughly spooked.

Modern Love begins without a word, preferring to let the atmospheric locations do the talking. Gorgeously shot on super 16mm by Nick Matthews (who also penned the script), the film has a striking, bleached out look not often associated with traditional representations of rural Australia. The filmmaker's intimate knowledge of the South Australian locations are the film's major strength, giving the story a strong sense of place.

What could have been straight up haunted house horror evolves into a meditative psychological thriller. Like the counter-intuitive editing, the narrative keeps shifting tones and heading away from predictible genre elements. This leaves a lot of space for the actors to invest their characters with real dedication. The performances are all excellent but it's Mark Constable who really gets to shine here, getting the mix of vulnerability and emotional instability just right.

If this atmospheric rural thriller doesn't succeed entirely, it is perhaps because it lacks faith in its own screenplay, in that unconventional narrative's capacity to sustain our attention. The filmmakers seem to want to compensate for the sparse dialogue and deliberate pacing by giving us other things to sink out teeth into.

Striking cinematography, elaborate sound design, an evocative score and a hundred clever visual tricks add up to a rich and textured film which is easy to admire but harder to love. Alex Frayne is a very talented and inventive filmmaker indeed, and no one can blame him for wanting to prove it with this ambitious first feature. One can't help but feel the story and the performances were strong enough to stand on their own however, without the need for such sophisticated - and ocasionally distracting - stylisation.

These reservations substract nothing from the tremendous achievement of getting such a polished feature off the ground. Modern Love transcends the limitations of its budget and the boundaries of its genre. It's a unique gothic ghost story which re-imagines our relationship to the Australian landscape and taps into our collective fears without resorting to genre clichés. While the ending lacks the emotional payoff the film's first half promises, the journey is an engaging one for the viewer. For the filmmaker - clearly a talent to watch - the journey could be only just starting.

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Australian Gothic (Modern Love)

Behind the Shades (Scott Walker: 30 Century Man)

What do musicians Johnny Marr, Marc Almond, David Bowie, Brian Eno, Damon Albarn, Gavin Friday, Simon Raymonde and Richard Hawley have in common? A fervent admiration for the gifted and enigmatic Scott Walker, the subject of a new documentary by Stephen Kijak.

Scott Walker: 30 Century Man unfolds in three parts. The first is a primer on the reclusive musician's exstraordinary career, from 60's teen idol to Jacques Brel crooner, from 70's troubadour poet to avant-guarde experimentalist. The second part explores other musicians' fascination with Walker's ambitious music, and features the aforementioned artists, as well as fans such as Radiohead and collaborators such as Ute Lemper and Jarvis Cocker. It includes some truly wonderful, candid scenes of these musicians reacting to Walker's music as it is being played to them.

Finally comes the piece de resistance, a rare but extensive interview with the man himself interwoven with an insightful examination of his unique creative process (in a studio recording, he obtains irregular beats by asking his percussionist to hit a slab of meat with his fists).

A lot of Walker's music speaks for itself and the filmmaker seems aware that a portion of the audience won't be familiar with the work. Some musical passages are accompanied by distracting video graphics (which look like Windows Media Player animations though they are in fact designed by the talented Graham Wood). Throughout most of the film, however, the music is given the space it deserves and watching 30 Century Man feels a little like reading liner notes while a good friend plays Walker's LPs on the living room turntable.

Like Leonard Cohen, Lou Reed or Jeff Buckley, Scott Walker is a musician's musician, a charismatic man with a cult following. Many of his gushing celebrity fans are interviewed here thanks to David Bowie's address book (he acts as executive producer). They have elevated him to the rank of rock deity, which is all the more convincing since they, themselves, are rock royalty.

Walker comes across as a soft-spoken, intelligent and articulate man who is nonetheless very aware of the myth which surrounds his persona. He's only too happy to oblige, remaining enigmatic about his complex life story while feeding the personality cult with some great (tall) stories. In one scene for example, he smugly recalls "thousands of fans" pounding on the side of his van, turning the vehicle over. In another he claims that once a composition is finished, he never listens to it again... This portrait of the revered experimental artist flirts with self-parody, though there is never any doubt that the filmmaker's interest is sincere.

A secretive celebrity who lives like a recluse, constantly hidden behind dark shades and a baseball cap, Walker is an artist who refuses to make compromises in his exploration of the outer limits of musical composition. He's been known to disappear for years on end and his output is less than prolific. Walker explores the boundaries between chord and dischord, his work can be daunting, uncomfortable and disturbing. It is informed by classical composers and progressive jazz, the beat writers and the French existentialists, Ingmar Bergman and other European auteurs. It is both obscure and recognisable, if only thanks to Walker's unique crooner's wail.

He is the type of musician one discovers through the unconditional recommendation of another artist of critic. The walker myth has travelled through carriers and tastemakers such as cult filmmaker Leo Carax, punk icon Julian Cope or French music mag Les Inrockuptibles. In Kijak's insightful and substantial documentary, it has found a worthy vessel with which to continue its course through rock history.

Scott Walker: 30 Century Man is currently on release in the UK, it screens at the Seattle Film Festival June 10th and 12th, and at the Sydney Film Festival June 17th and 18th 2007.

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Behind the Shades (Scott Walker: 30 Century Man)

The Dreamlife of Angel (Angel)

François Ozon's first English-language feature was the closing film at the Berlin Film Festival, which perhaps explains why certain presumably exhausted critics failed to understand the romantic saga's tone and the filmmaker's intentions (according to Variety's Derek Elley, "arthouse aficionados of Ozon's earlier pics won't be amused"). Angel is a movie you either get or you don't - this response more or less dictates whether sitting through the film's 134 minutes is a wicked delight or a dreadful bore...

Adapted from Elizabeth Taylor's 1957 novel, Angel is set in England, between 1905 and 1919. Angel Deverell (Romola Garai) lives with her mother above the family grocery shop in a grim working class town. Like many of our contemporaries, she dreams of success, fame and love. Every moment of Angel's spare time is dedicated to writing epic romances in her notebooks, stories fueled by the adolescent's vivid imagination rather than true literary talent. Rejected by potential publishers, derided by her teachers and misunderstood by her mother, she begins to daydream about what her life could've been like...

As in Swimming Pool, it's hard to pinpoint the precise moment when reality is replaced by the narrative of the woman's imagination... (some in the audience won't even make the leap). Ozon delivers the rest of the story with a straight face, but the seasoned viewer knows better: Angel has become the fictitious heroin of her own romance novel.

What follows are the epic and romantic adventures of a successful young novelist's meteoric rise to fame, starting with an encouraging letter from an enthusiastic publisher (Sam Neill). Everything happens just as it should, her pulp romance novels are runaway best-sellers, she meets and marries Mr Right (Michael Fassbender) and buys the mansion of her dreams (aptly named Paradise House).

We are well and truly within the realm of artifice and heightened reality. Angel's universe is pure Douglas Sirk and vintage Hollywood melodrama (late 30's MGM?). A certain amount of camp sensibility on the part of the viewer compensates for the lack of irony, but there's no mistaking the actors' overblown delivery and fits of hysteria for bad acting. As in a cheesy romance everything is over the top, from the colour saturated gowns to the bombastic strings on the soundtrack, from the grandiose sets to the rear-projected backdrops of London. There are more subtle stylistic touches too, such as when the theme from Sleeping Beauty playing in the background ("Once Upon A Dream"?), reminding us to take reality with a grain of salt...

Paying a cheeky tribute to old Hollywood is fine but can't sustain interest in itself. In the second half however, Ozon's film really acquires depth. Angel's dreams soon turn awry as reality catches up with her imagination. The age-old adage asks the writer to "write what they know", but young Angel has hardly lived at all. Her dreamlife, told from the point of view of an inexperienced girl, soon reaches its own limitations.

Faced with the poor comprehension of adult themes such as war, manipulation and infidelity, Angel's revisionist narrative rewrites her experiences to fit her dreams. Ozon establishes a brilliant parallel between our capacity to suspend disbelief and Angel's own ability to believe her own lies. The result is not only a witty exposé of the manipulative nature of storytelling but an intelligent comment on our capacity for denial in the face of sour reality.

Angel will be released in 2007 in Australia through Dendy Films.

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The Dreamlife of Angel (Angel)

Empire Strikes Back (Inland Empire)

In Inland Empire, Laura Dern is Nikki Grace, an acress who's just landed the role of her career, opposite star Devon Berk (Justin Theroux). As rehearsals get under way, the director (Jeremy Irons) informs them the film is in fact a remake: the original was an unfinished, cursed project which saw the two leads meet a tragic death on set. An hour into the film, the story splinters into a variety of shards, each reflecting a different, hallucinogenic reality. These altered realities obey different narrative logics, distorted as they are by the power of cinema, dreams and memory.

From then on scenes follow each other according to a certain dream logic, free associations born out of the filmmaker's subconscious perhaps, with Laura Dern's brave and riveting performance the glue that (almost) holds it all together.

My first thought when I emerged from the three-hour nighmare that is David Lynch's opus: this is a fan film. You know the ones, feature-length youtube tributes to Raiders of the Lost Ark or Star Wars, shot by geeks utterly devoted to their Hollywood idols. Part remake, part parody, these amateur films usually suffer from terrible production values, rookie mistakes and caricatural tendencies.

At first glance, Inland Empire could be mistaken for such a film. It could be a badly shot, insufficiently lit and apparently shoddily scripted tribute to the iconoclastic filmmaker, one which appropriates his usual themes and even scores a Lynch regular for the lead (Laura Dern, whose career is otherwise flagging). Inland Empire comes across as an overlong parody of Lynch's surreal style and thematic obsessions, shot on a consumer-grade digital camera.

Yet when the credits eventually roll, David Lynch's name is up there across the screen. This is, despite appearances to the contrary, well and truly a third installment in Lynch's red curtain trilogy (Is Lynch Luhrmann's evil doppleganger?).

Gone are the slick, glossy images of Mulholland Drive and the relative narrative coherence of Lost Highway. What remains are women whose personalities split again and again as their dreams (and nightmares) become too big for their human incarnations to handle. When the earlier films could withstand a psycho-analytical reading, Inland Empire refuses to be so easily decyphered, despite incalculable symbolic echoes and metaphors.

It's a dark and rambling experimental film which only partially rewards the viewer determined to go with the flow. Some scenes feel superfluous, other narrative threads are dropped and forgotten. It's a frustrating experience which even die hard fans may struggle with.

And yet hours after the end credits, when the mind has processed some of the experience, Lynch's insolent scenes begin to add up. Though they don't reveal a hidden coherence or a retroactive emotional payoff, they start making cinematic sense. They begin to acquire meaning, even if that meaning is perhaps only something we project onto the film, informed by our own fears and aspirations, distorted memories and personal interpretations. Perhaps Lynch has made a film we're meant to dream about at night, a film which can only be interpreted once it seeps into our own subconscious.

In the end, a sense of awe remains, sheer admiration for the maverick director's bravado, the stupendous achievement of making and releasing a 3 hour American experimental epic, the giant "fuck you" that this film represents to the greedy dream machine that is Hollywood.

Inland Empire screens at the Sydney Film Festival on June 20th and 21st, before a release by Dendy Films. The R1 DVD is out August 14th.

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Empire Strikes Back (Inland Empire)

Look Higher (Sydney Film Festival preview)

Back in Sydney, I attended the swanky program launch for the 54th Sydney Film Festival at Customs House this morning. New artistic director Clare Stewart unveiled her ambitious line-up for the event, which runs June 8th-24th.

The Festival will open with the Australian premiere of the Edith Piaf biopic La Vie en Rose (La Môme) and close with the Russian fantasy sequel Day Watch (Dnevnoy Dozor). In between will be a beefed up program of some 290 films (including 90 Australian premieres) from 54 different countries, that's 28% more sessions than in 2006.

During the presentation, Advisory council chairman Peter Ivany spoke of "rebuilding and revitalising" the Sydney Film Festival, acknowledging the criticiscm levelled at the event in previous years. The new team led by Clare Stewart have taken on the challenge and there's a strong sense that they are aiming higher, that the Festival is moving in a new, exciting direction.

First and foremost is the confident, bold program which, if not full of world premieres, contains its share of discoveries. Even the program guide looks slicker, sturdier and more sure of itself (some might remember last year's pulp leaflet which desintegrated in your hand after the briefest of leaf-thrus) . Crowd pleasers are de rigueur and the choices for opening and closing are not likely to disappoint crowds in search of glamour and entertainment. But there's also some edgier programming moves likely to turn film buffs into cinephiles, and cinephiles into FlexiGolders (the new FlexiGold pass is an incredible 50 tickets for only $350).


The new Provocateur strand opens the festival up to experimentation, with new films from Lukas Moodysson (Container), David Lynch (Inland Empire) and György Palfi (Taxidermia) pushing the envelope of traditional, narrative cinema.

Most of the Australian premieres are concentrated in the World Views strand, which includes Manoel de Oliveira's Belle de Jour sequel Belle Toujours, Guy Maddin's expressionist horror Brand Upon the Brain!, Emmanuel Bourdieu's oh so French Poison Friends (Les Amitiés Maléfiques), Adrienne Shelly's posthumous hit Waitress and the new Rivette, a Balzac adaptation called Don't Touch the Axe (Ne Touchez pas à la Hache).

There's a special focus on Turkey (which includes Nuri Bilge Ceylan's award-winning Climates) and another on Brazil (featuring Karim Aïnouz's Madame Satã follow-up, Suely in the Sky).

Sounds on Screen is a hot line-up of flicks dealing with music, and features the Australian premiere of the Ian Curtis portrait Control, which opens Directors Fortnight in Cannes next week, as well as a doco I've been hearing good things about, Kurt Cobain About A Son.

International guests expected to attend include actress Joan Chen (The Home Song Stories), Dutch filmmaker Nanouk Leopold (Wolfsbergen leads a mini-retrospective of her work), Pixar animator Gini Santos, director Jeff Nichols (Shotgun Stories), Variety critic Eddie Cockrell and producer Jeremy Nathan (Bunny Chow).

Amongst the free talks and forum events will be the first SFF Film Parliament, which will see industry representatives debate the merits and relevance of the super film agency which will result from the merger of the Australian Film Commission, the Film Finance Corporation and Film Australia, announced in last night's federal budget.

There's heaps more, but you'll do better to skip over to the official website and have a proper read-through.

Other new features this year point to a hipper, younger-skewing festival. There's a new venue, The Metro, which offers cabaret-style screenings of music docos and dance sessions. Hopefully it will become a place for us to hang out and chat about the films we've seen over a beer or three - something that was badly missing in previous years. There's a stronger focus on Australian films, with 65 new titles showing (up 35% on 2006). And last but no least, it seems that ticket prices have come down slightly - unheard of in these inflationary times.


Many reasons, then, to be fiercely optimistic about the upcoming Sydney Film Festival. I'll be covering the event right here, and looking forward to your opinions in the comments. Until then, here are some personal recommendations, amongst the films I've already seen. Click on the link to read more.

• Still Life: China's best filmmaker takes you on a surprising journey to his drowned world.
• Woman on the Beach: No one deconstructs relationships like Hong Sang-Soo.
• I don't Want to Sleep Alone: The Taiwanese master goes to KL and finds more urban alienation!
• Syndromes and a Century: a meditative buddhist reverie that lingers in the mind.
• Away From Her: a tragic love story that's more complex than originally appears.
• The Home Song Stories: a flawed but entertaining coming-of-age sob-story of migration.
• 12:08 East of Bucharest: a deadpan comic gem about the fall of communism in Rumania.
• Rescue Dawn: Herzog's most commercial film is pure escapist entertainment.
• The Witnesses: an intelligent and urgent flashback to the first years of the AIDS epidemic.
• Inland Empire: Lynch's experimental opus disappoints... and yet...
• Flanders: An uncompromising work about the horror of war that's also the anti-anti-war film.

See my coverage of last year's festival here.

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Look Higher (Sydney Film Festival preview)

Paris Belongs To Us! (a week in the capital)

Updated May 24th 2007:

The CNC, France's film regulatory body, has just published its state of the nation report for 2006. It was a bumper year, with a healthy 188 million cinema tickets sold, but more importantly perhaps, 2006 was the first time in 20 years that French films beat American films at the domestic box-office. Local films achieved a 44.7% market share, compared with 44.2% for American cinema.

The report also points out that with 3.2 visits to the cinema per person per year, France is one of Europe's most filmgoing nations (averages are 2.8 for the Spanish, 2.6 for the British, 1.8 for the Italians and 1.7 for the Germans).

Posted May 4th 2007:

I spent last week in Paris, so I thought I'd take a snapshot and give an idea of what a typical week in the French capital looks like from a film exhibition perspective.

In the week of April 18th - 24th 2007, there were 190 first-run feature films playing in the city, as well as 67 re-releases, 193 films playing as part of festivals, seasons and retrospectives, 35 films shown at the Cinématheque Française and an additional 35 films screening in museums or cultural institutes.

In what is a pretty typical week, that's 520 different films from the four corners of the globe and a hundred years of cinema history to choose from. "There's nothing I wanna see" is not an excuse you hear very often in this city which cherishes diversity.

Festivals on that week included the 15th Jules Verne Adventure Film Festival and the Cinemathèque de la Danse: 25 years of dance on film. Entire seasons were devoted to Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant in the Quartier Latin. Directors' retrospectives honoured Lynch, Téchiné, Antonioni, Depardon, Fassbinder, Pasolini, Comencini, Preminger, Miyazaki, Morrissey & Warhol. You'll find these titles in 86 cinemas (most with mutiple screens) in the centre of Paris, and in a further 174 cinemas in the suburbs.

Of course Paris is a massive city of 8 million, in a rich country which can afford such luxuries. Comparisons with other world cities aren't easy. Nor is the tremendous diversity of Parisian screens necessarily reflected in the rest of the country. But the numbers still speak of a breadth and scope of available titles which put many other cultural capitals to shame.

This diversity, in my view, is made possible thanks to several factors: an education system which encourages cultural curiosity, critical thinking and the learning languages in school, and strong support from the State, for whom cultural diversity has been an undeniable priority, at least until now.

There are government subsidies in all three branches of the film industry: production, distribution and exhibition. This refusal to treat culture (and cinema in particular) as a commodity, to subject it to the merciless rule of free trade, is anchored in the belief that culture needs to be protected, nurtured and shared as widely as possible.

This allows for some players in the industry to operate with break-even points which are significantly lower than they would be without government support. Small independent producers, distributors and exhibitors are consequently able to not only survive, but compete with the big guys. That's not to stay there are no struggling independents... but the situation is arguably better than pretty much anywhere else on the planet.

Detractors will point to the plethora of titles which are released discreetly, seen only by a handful of viewers before vanishing forever, as proof that the system is wasteful. But that's beside the point, waste is an accepted by-product of a system which care more about diversity than it does about efficiency. Besides, true innovation and experimentation can only happen when a proportion of films is made without the pressure of attracting the widest audience possible.

Indeed, another by-broduct of a subsidised system is that it leaves room for producers, distributors, exhibitors and viewers to take risks. The government supports local production, a fact which has helped French films reach 45% of the domestic box-office last year (and climbing). In Australia, the share of Australian films at the box office was a meagre (but very typical) 4.6% in 2006.

Increasingly, this self-confidence has encouraged French investors to reach out beyond Gallic borders. Without the money put forward by French producers, recent British films by Nic Roeg, Ken Loach, Mike Leigh or Stephen Frears (The Queen, a quintessential British film, is a French co-production) might never have been made, for example.

Distributors can go out on a limb and pick up smaller foreign films at festivals, like this week's new release, We Feed The World, an Austrian documentary which premiered in Toronto and still doesn't have a US distributor, but which is out on an impressive 7 Parisian screens. They can also distribute controversial work such as the porn anthology Destricted, thanks to France's relatively premissive censorship laws.

Exhibitors too are able to innovate more freely. The French UGC chain was the first to introduce the all-you-can-see monthly passes (which retail for approximately 20 euros a month). They are now a fixture across the country. The arthouse chain MK2 is known for screening a short film before each feature, as are a number of independent cinemas...

Last but not least, it is viewers who are able to be more adventurous when they go to the cinema. It's this risk taking which has enabled foreign-language hits such as Volver and The Lives of Others to sell more then half a million tickets each in the capital, placing then in the end-of-year top 10 (beating X-Men 3 and Mission Impossible 3 respectively). By contrast (though a direct comparison is meaningless), the Almodovar film ranked 143rd in the 2006 US box-office, while the German Oscar-winner might not even break the top 150 by the year's end.

In Australia, the UK or the US, liberal economies ruled by free trade, most industry representatives are resigned to the lack of real government support. Efforts to promote independent and foreign films are focused on increased marketing, print runs and commercial appeal. While this works for some films (usually the ones likely to reach a wide audience on their own merit), it does nothing to improve the quality, variety and diversity of the cinematic landscape.

The public, by and large, is also resigned to this sad state of affairs. Cities across the West, from Melbourne to Chicago, from Toronto to Rome, could be cities in which a vibrant film culture is part of the very fabric of society. We get the films we deserve, after all.

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Paris Belongs To Us! (a week in the capital)

Superhero Fatigue (the week in review)

I spent the last week between Paris and Lyon, enjoying the unusually warm spring weather, and catching a film or two in the evenings. Yesterday I took my younger brother to see a preview of Spiderman 3, Sam Raimi's third instalment in the lucrative superhero franchise, starring Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst.

We'd both greatly enjoyed the first two films, great examples of what big-bucks Hollywood films can achieve when special effects are put at the service of good, multi-layered storytelling, so we were looking forward to what promised to be a darker, more existential Spidey (just look at that poster...).

Alas, Raimi and co. have gone into overdrive, turning up the dial on the special effects and the violence without the support of a convincing screenplay. Spiderman is up against a few too many villains this time, the Sandman, Venom, Son of Green Goblin, and even a darker, meaner version of himself. Only that last conflict is of any narrative interest, fitting as it does into the young man's constant struggle to define his identity and responsibilities. The other villains are here strictly to justify the spectacular visual effects and repetitive fight sequences. They seem to be the product of a creative meeting where every good (visual) idea was added to the script, irrespective of coherence or relevance. The result is tiresome overkill, and a film which is at least 30 minutes too long.

As for Spiderman's internal conflict, it was full of promises. Is the black Spiderman a comment on our irrational thirst for vengence against terrorist attacks? If superheroics are like fame, is black Spidey the irresponsible celebrity? Could Peter Parker, in fact, be Spiderman's superhero suit?

Unfortunately the narrative is too scattered to explore any of these themes successfully, always in a hurry to reach the next big action sequence. Worst, we feel insulted by the lame screenplay and cease to care. If a student in Screenwriting 101 introduced conflict by writing "black evil goo falls from the sky and out of all of Earth's inhabitants, latches onto our hero by chance and turns him into an evil person", they'd get an F. That the costliest film ever satisfies itself with such cheap narrative tricks is testament to Hollywood's inverted value system, which says it's harder to make a good, cheap film than it is a bad, expensive one.

It's as if Raimi and co. had stopped believing in Spidey. The film ceases to take itself seriously - like in that long, overblown sequence where Peter Parker becomes John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever - and starts parodying itsef. There's nothing wrong with a film which doesn't take itself too seriously, witness the hilarious moments featuring a scene-stealing Bruce Campbell as a zealous Maîre d', but don't be surprised if we laugh when MJ rejects a tearful Peter Parker. We know how she feels.


The other superhero film I saw this week was Zhang Yimou's Curse of the Golden Flower (in French, La Cité Interdite), starring action star Chow Yun-Fat and moody diva Gong Li.

Set in the Forbidden City during the 10th century, this lavish production charts the Shakespearean power plays which tear the imperial family apart when the King must choose an heir. Since the members of this dysfunctional family have entire armies at their disposal, we're not talking about mere kitchen table arguments.

Overkill and self-parody are also the name of the game in this mannered Chinese blockbuster, where in the tradition of modern wuxia, characters have the powers of superheroes with none of the responsibilities. What this long, loud spectacle suffers from most is a total lack of contrast.

The sets and costumes are gorgeous but so over-the-top they overwhelm the people they're meant to frame. Unlike the inspired Hero, also directed by Zhang Yimou, there's no harmony in the colours, no nuance in the lighting - Chris Doyle would never have allowed those garish psychaedelic colours which make the Forbidden City look like Pee-Wee's Playhouse. The battle sequences are beautifully staged but the soldiers too dehumanized to infuse the struggle with any real sense of drama. The plot is preposterous and the characters one-dimensional and too prone to hysteria to be sympathetic.


My third film this week sits at the other end of the spectrum. Matthias Luthardt's Pingpong is a confident first feature from Germany, one which got quite a bit of positive attention when it premiered in Cannes last year.

The premise is simple enough, a bereaved 16- year-old comes to spend the summer with his uncle following his father's suicide. The uncle's wife and her teenaged son will both find themselves drawn to this sensual, unpredictible young man, revealing in themselves a need for freedom and self-actualisation stifled by bourgeois values and emotional complacency.

Like in Pasolini's masterful Teorema, the arrival will shatter the fragile balance in a bourgeois family, but unlike the revolutionary Italian filmmaker, Luthardt goes only so far, keeping the action within the framework of a minimalistic psychological drama.

The film takes its time leading to its inevitable conclusion: Luthardt knows the process is more interesting here than the somewhat predictible end product. Served by excellent performances (not least by the luminous Marion Mitterhammer), he paints a vitriolic portrait of the German middle-class tainted with black humour, using precise strokes and subdued tones. While the film could've been more ambitious, it's also wise for a novice filmmaker to have chosen such a small canvas. It'll be years perhaps before Matthias Luthardt paints his masterpiece, but his is definitely a talent to watch.

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Superhero Fatigue (the week in review)