Taking the Broad View

'White Material'

Why are there so few female film directors? That’s a question that’s long been chewed over by critics, academics and the viewing public alike. Does the film industry, consciously or otherwise, marginalise female talent? Is it hopelessly macho and sexist? Or is the very act of film-making – arranging people, lights and cameras, ordering and categorising the world – one that speaks to male needs and neuroses much more deeply than it does to those of most women?

Beats me. But in a way, a more interesting question is: what kind of films do female directors make when they get the chance to do so? And are the stories that they choose to tell qualitatively different from those of their male contemporaries?

The Woody Blues

Prettay, prettay bad... 'Whatever Works'

There was a time when, like many other dedicated cinema-goers I suppose, I considered myself to be a fan of Woody Allen’s work. Not so much the ‘early, funny’ films of the Seventies – although Annie Hall and Sleeper and Play It Again Sam certainly have their place – but more the fully-fledged, gloomier Allen of the Eighties; the Allen of Husbands and Wives, Hannah and Her Sisters and Broadway Danny Rose. Even when sailing dangerously close to self-parody (with the Bergman-esque Another Woman), or to rose-tinted nostalgia (Radio Days), Woody was always interesting, and you always had the sense that here was an artist pushing against the boundaries set for him by others, whether as a comedian, a writer or an increasingly implausible romantic lead.

Well, sad to report, it seems that Woody gave up pushing a long time ago now. For the best part of the last two decades, the director has struggled along, producing films at a phenomenal rate (around one per year) but with increasingly fluctuating returns, both artistic and commercial.

That 2008’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona was seen by many as a triumphant return-to-form is an indication in itself of just how low Allen’s stock had fallen. In the wake of such poorly-reviewed and little-seen work as Small Time Crooks (2000), Hollywood Ending (2002) and Anything Else (2003), even his long-term financiers pulled the plug, and Allen was left to find new ways to pursue his doggedly single-minded career as a writer-director.

The Happiest Girl in the World – A Review

At first glance, The Happiest Girl in the World couldn’t be more different from other Romanian films that have made it onto British screens in recent years. While 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007) took backstreet abortion as its subject matter, and The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005) the final hours of a complaining alcoholic everyman, director Radu Jude’s debut feature focuses instead on the apparently much happier story of a teenage girl who has won a competition.

The girl in question is Delia (Andreea Bosneag), a 14-year-old from the provinces who has won a new car in a competition organised by a fruit juice company. We follow Delia over the course of a day, as she travels to Bucharest with her parents to collect her prize, before which she must appear in a promotional advert for the fruit drink.

Sex & The City – Port of Call: New Orleans

Bad cop, erm... bad cop. 'Bad Lieutenant'

In the last week, I’ve been to see two films at the cinema. The first was the rather cumbersomely-titled The Bad Lieutenant – Port of Call: New Orleans; the second, the less confusingly-named Sex and the City 2.

At first glance it might seem that these two Hollywood movies have very little in common. One is a story of crime and addiction set in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the other a tale of ladies who lunch, buy shoes and have romantic adventures in New York and Abu Dhabi .

Look beyond the obvious differences between the two however, and it soon becomes clear that they have a surprising amount in common. For a start, they’re both sequels, of a sort. Bad Lieutenant is a re-imagining of Abel Ferrara’s 1992 study of Catholic guilt and redemption, and Sex and the City 2 an extension of the TV and movie franchise that has brought such joy to womankind (and such bum-numbing misery to their menfolk) over the last ten years.

May to September

 

 

'Milou en mai'

When I was fifteen

It was a very good year

A very good year for foreign films on Channel 4…

 

In The Wasteland TS Eliot famously wrote that ‘April is the cruellest month’. Well, I have to say, I’ve never really much agreed with him. Perhaps its the sight of the first butterflies and housemartins of the year, perhaps its the budding and blossoming of the trees, or perhaps its just that my birthday falls on the 28^th of the month, but for me April’s always seemed to be a time of year full of hope; a time to start looking forward to the long hot summer ahead, or, if you’re not going away to the Med., at least to bank holiday weekends and fresh strawberries in the supermarkets.

But if April is a time of renewal then May is doubly so. May is bluebells in shady woodland groves and tentative visits to the seaside. May is fresh asparagus and cherries and that first barbecue of the year. For cinéastes May is also the month of the Cannes Film Festival: a time to be intrigued and excited by a whole new batch of fresh, nutritious world cinema.

Chris Morris – The Movie

'Four Lions'

It’s no exaggeration to say that Four Lions, released in UK cinemas today, is one of the most eagerly-anticipated films of the year. For a whole generation of twenty- and thirty-something viewers, its director Chris Morris is something of a counter-culture hero, the aggressively playful satire of Brass Eye, Nathan Barley and The Day Today still representing a high watermark for television comedy, much imitated but never bettered.

No less impressive is the pedigree of Morris’ co-writers Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain, best known for their work on Peep Show, Channel 4′s exquisitely uncomfortable and very funny exploration of modern social mores. And the subject matter of Four Lions promises great things too. The story of a group of blundering British-born jihadis who hatch a plot to bomb the London Marathon, it tackles a subject that has long been ripe for darkly comic treatment.

Everything seems to augur well then for a rip-roaring, taboo-busting satirical storm. And yet still, as I wait nervously in line to buy my ticket, I find myself strangely worried that what should be an important and entertaining British film might turn out to be, in the end, not actually that good.

Jia Zhangke and the Spiders From Mars

'24 City'

Most serious film-makers have their own pet theme to which they return time and again in their work. For some it’s the eternally difficult relationship between men and women. For others it’s the lone individual on a mission. But for Jia Zhangke, whose new film 24 City is released this week, it’s nothing less than the history of modern China, and the lives of the billion plus people caught up in its upheavals over the last forty years.

Jia started to make films in the 1990s and quickly established himself as an artist interested most of all in the very real changes that were going on in the world around him. While older Chinese film-makers like Chen Kaige (Farewell My Concubine) and Zhang Yimou (Raise The Red Lantern) increasingly retreated into the distant past, Jia set his sights resolutely on China’s present and on the effects of the country’s rapid economic growth and social change. 

The Ghost – A Review

Kim Cattrall, Olivia Williams and Pierce Brosnan in 'The Ghost'

Much has already been written about the uncanny coincidence that sees The Ghost go on general release while its director, Roman Polanski, languishes under house arrest in his Swiss chalet. The film, which deals with a similarly-encumbered ex-British-Prime-Minister, is based on Robert Harris’ novel and was conceived, in large part, as a comment on the legacy of Tony Blair. In the wake of Polanski’s unexpected arrest in September however, The Ghost now also seems eerily prescient of the fate that may await its director, who has long lived with the threat of extradition to the US, having fled from unresolved rape charges in 1978.

The ‘ghost’ of the title is Ewan McGregor, a London-based author hired to ghost-write the autobiography of ex-PM Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan). He arrives on the New England island where Lang is now based to find a man living virtually under siege, holed up in his high-security compound with only his wife (Olivia Williams) and his personal staff for company. When an international arrest warrant is issued against Lang on charges that he handed over detainees to the CIA for torture, the ex-PM is further isolated. Besieged by protestors and media helicopters, he is advised by his lawyers not to leave the US for fear of being prosecuted elsewhere.

East of Cannes, West of Wagga Wagga

'Samson and Delilah'

Around this time last year, I spent a couple of days in Alice Springs, the Australian town to which the young heroes of Warwick Thornton’s Samson and Delilah flee midway through the film. With a population of just 27 000, Alice would, by most people’s standards, be considered a small or medium-sized town. By Outback standards though, it’s a metropolis, and a focal point for cattle stations and Aboriginal communities for thousands of kilometres around.

As a visitor to the town, one of the first things that you notice is just how polarised the lives of its inhabitants are. While the non-Aboriginal population shops and sips lattès in the busy town centre, Aborigines can, by and large, be seen on the margin of things, wandering along the dried-up bed of the Todd River or sitting apart, under trees in small groups.

The Other Psycho

Carl Boehm in 'Peeping Tom'

Two films are released this week to mark the 50^th anniversary of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. The first is Psycho itself, re-released in all of its stab-happy, monochrome glory just in time for the Easter holidays. The second is Johan Grimonprez’s Double Take, a sly and elusive piece about the place of doubles both in Hitchcock’s work and in wider American culture during the Cold War.

But if Hitchcock’s most famous film is justly fêted for its innovative and visceral impact, then the work of another British director has, it seems, been overlooked. Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom was released just three months before Psycho, and covered much the same ground as the American shocker. Starring Carl Boehm and Anna Massey, it tells the story of a lonely, voyeuristic cameraman, who is obsessed with murdering women so that he can film their last moments. 

The reception that the two films received couldn’t have been more different. Hitchcock’s film played to packed houses and took a healthy 11 million dollars at the box office, while Peeping Tom was pulled from UK cinemas after just a week, in the wake of an unprecedented critical backlash.