Capo-idFilm Reviews

The Social Network (2010)

Engaging but not profound

[29 October 2010]

The Social Network's promotional tag line reads, "You don't get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies". As a matter of fact, the narrative seems to suggest, you don't get a site as global or profitable as Facebook without some serious big-money investment. Indeed, without the flashy business bluffing of Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), thefacebook.com remains the popular but unendurable dream-that-never-was of Havard friends and co-founders Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield).

This point is significant: the raison d'être for the film, both in story and narrative terms has its very seeds in the gem of Facebook itself. The very nature of this story is governed by its necessary pace: it's arguable that Facebook could only become the site that it now is by expanding so rapidly that it could beat any other would-be competitors and meeting the profit demands of short-term capital. This would preclude Saverin and Zuckerberg making it alone, and thus in turn making it at all – and so, since their final decision to sue is because of Facebook's international success, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (both played by Armie Hammer) would never have sought compensation from Zuckerberg for violations of their intellectual property.

This is the quiet tragedy at the heart of Fincher's film. But if this is inherent in the material, the director doesn't stress it. From the outset, there's that contradiction familiar to all of Fincher's films: a certain level of interest in the material as it presents itself to him, but a careful, deliberate detachment from it on his own part. This means that even if Fincher knows how to stage a scene and his directorial style is consistently immaculate, his work as a whole is uneven; when the script is formidable, you get something like Zodiac (2007), when patchy, something like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008).

Fincher's latest film presents its world in a matter-of-fact manner, and in doing so creates an apparently authentic sense of life at one of the world's most elitist institutions. In having events unfold mostly through Zuckerberg's viewpoint, though, Sorkin's script lacks the critical emphasis required of Fincher to make a genuinely provocative film that reaches beyond the betrayal of friendship between Zuckerberg and Saverin.

More at idfilm.blogspot.com

This Is England '86 (2010)

Vacant drama

[29 September 2010]

The father/son element took on contemporary resonance in the earlier work: its exposition made clear that Shaun was fatherless due to his father being killed whilst serving in the Falklands War, and though grossly misguided, Combo's anti-war rant to Shaun provokes a great anger and frustration in the youngster because of its essential truths – that the war itself was being fought under false pretences, fed to tame the same working classes that Margaret Thatcher had openly waged war on. The film's release, at a time in which the UK was once again involved in an escalating imperialist war – this time in both Iraq and Afghanistan – gave it an extra political edge.

This material, even in the hands of a limited cinematic storyteller such as Shane Meadows, proved quite powerful at points. Meadows himself apparently saw much further potential in the work: "When I finished This Is England, I had a wealth of material and unused ideas that I felt very keen to take further," he said in August 2009. "Not only did I want to take the story of the gang broader and deeper, I also saw in the experiences of the young in 1986 many resonances to now – recession, lack of jobs, sense of the world at a turning point. Whereas the film told part of the story, the TV serial will tell the rest." Though these sentiments ring true for the film, the mini-series, we should say before anything else, is a mostly vacant work, with no significant attention paid to a recession, to unemployment, to a sense of political and social upheaval. If the central relationship between Combo and Shaun offered a potentially rich examination of political disillusionment amongst the young in both the England of the Eighties and of the present day, its television follow-up, co-scripted with Meadows by Jack Thorne, makes an industry out of fashionable miserablism, forced humour and a moral viewpoint that can only be described as confused at best.

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The Town (2010)

Good ol' cops and robbers no-nonsense genre film

[24 September 2010]

A fast, post-HEAT genre vehicle that substitutes the glossy sea-view apartments and wide highways common to this sort of thriller with a more downbeat, old neighbourhood feel (bank robbing is a 'profession' passed down through generations), with narrow one-way streets that hinder any getaway truck and community buildings long in need of grants and refurbishment. If it's heart is in the right place – one can see its intentions firmly written on its sleeve – it settles too often on old-fashioned motion-turning: even the 'moral ambiguity' of the cops and robbers dynamic has point-of-view on its side, and Affleck is too keen on playing the good-guy villain. Scenes between him and Rebecca Hall are driven by shorthand superficiality: personal past parental problems stand in for genuine character depth; John Hamm seems to be on board only to test his big-screen potential. That said, it's an often involving entry into the heist genre that handles its material with much commitment and not much pretension.

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Still Life (1974)

Stark and absorbing examination of social alienation

[24 September 2010]

Stark and absorbing minimalist examination of alienation and the daily ritual of working life. It works on both a literal and symbolic level: its unfurnished aesthetic grounds its subject matter in a sparse, gruelling existence wherein the railway track brings both daily sustenance and contact from the wider region; but there is a point at which the narrative casually, unexpectedly folds back on itself, makes us aware of a continuity error, of a flashback after the fact, so that time itself becomes the subject of the camera's observant gaze (another moment sees a conversation repeated from earlier drowned out by the sound of a ticking clock). Quiet and demanding, but devastating by its end.

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Winter's Bone (2010)

Remarkable drama with thriller charge

[24 September 2010]

Set against the backdrop of a bleak landscape and driven by a vivid sense of community, WINTER'S BONE is a remarkable portrait of an underclass often neglected and misrepresented in film culture.

From its outset, the film has a patience and confidence quite rare in contemporary American cinema. Integrating professional actors with locals, it has an air of seeming authenticity carried through with an artistic seriousness. Working, as on her previous films, with cinematographer Michael McDonough, Granik directs with a quietly absorbing, understated visual style; there is a fine balance between invisible storytelling and more picturesque moments. The authors of the film are apparently aware that the finest character studies are those in which people emerge as natural products of their environment: here, even if at times the local dialect is difficult to discern, the research and sensitivity to the local milieu is evident throughout.

The film maintains its moral neutrality even through the dark, horrifying final reel. Granik never seems to lose focus in her script or vision, and in Jennifer Lawrence she has brought to attention a capable actor who is both charming and tough. As a thriller, WINTER'S BONE is a quiet, accumulative work grounded in a deep sense of what for many at present constitutes the drama of everyday life. As such, it might be the best film of 2010 so far.

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The Girl Who Played with Fire (2009)

More by-the-numbers adaptationism

[18 September 2010]

As far as thrillers go, this has the feeling of limp faithfulness to a popular fluff novel, which is essentially what it is – a trimmed down version of a made-for-TV adaptation. But while Stieg Larsson's writing style relied on a hyperbole to exposit characters and plots ranging from silly to gratuitous, a straight enough adaptation can afford to paint by broader numbers and still get away with its general hysteria (the films are more watchable than the novels are readable, but paradoxically they don't have the cinematic appeal of the 'page-turner'). As a result, you've got an aesthetically subtle direction (some might prefer 'indifferent') of cartoonish material; plenty of suspension of disbelief required here. There's little in the way of intrigue as well, save for a moment or two when several strands of the plot seem to be connected, and even less in the dramatic stakes – which is strangely telling of a story involving the protagonist's relationship to her ex-Soviet spy misogynist father. Saying that, it's quite watchable, a risibly exploitative scene of lesbianism notwithstanding.

The Cow (1969)

Absurdism grounded by vivid sense of community

[18 September 2010]

What was already, from the outset, a village life tale carrying some atmosphere and menace in the form of the three silhouetted figures of thieves from a neighbouring village, becomes a genuinely unsettling film when we begin to view events not through the protagonist but through those around him. This shift in point-of-view is done so matter-of-factly so as to invoke a vague anticipation of something more supernatural that is constantly at odds with the film's overall realism: suddenly denied internal access, we're never quite sure whether or not Hassan genuinely believes he is a cow, for instance, or whether the cow is even dead, even though we've seen the narrative events leading to this... At one point, there's a genuinely disturbing visual suggestion that Hassan has indeed begun to transmogrify into cattle, when the three neighbouring thieves come to steal the cow in the night, only to find it is its owner, lying in weird lighting. Events unfold against a vivid sense of community and what this livestock means.

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Mother and Son (1997)

Visually impressive but vacuous

[18 September 2010]

If this is not essentialist, utopian film-making, then it is at best simply implausible. Whilst its fundamental lack of content allows the viewer to substitute in their own fantasies and views – neither of which the film precludes – when stripped of these, what you have is 'blank canvas' film-making at its most obvious.

If Sokurov wished to make a piece on rural Russia in a cinematically unique visual language, he needn't have gone to the trouble of hiring these two actors to flesh out such landscapes. As it is, the characters are actually distracting: Mother is an irksome shell of nothing, Son borders on the autistic; without a conscious engagement with reality, all we're left with is the tenuous would-be bond between the two, which can be read as perverse as it can natural.

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Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010)

Confident in its 'aesthetic overload'

[18 September 2010]

Exhausting and hilarious in the same way that 'I Heart Huckabees' was exhausting and hilarious, and resembling 'Eternal Sunshine' in its mix between naturalism and a liberated sense of visual surrealism, borrowing for the latter from a vast range of videogaming and comics culture, this is an inventive romantic comedy confident in its own 'aesthetic overload'. It's difficult to see how Wright wrote this without the editing stage already in mind – like a lot of the invisible wipes in 'Pan's Labyrinth', it feels like almost every transition from one scene to the next here has been designed to draw our attention to its rhythmic wit and technical complexity, which brings with it an inevitably tiring effect as the film goes on (the fights become increasingly intrusive to the central romance), though if the facial muscles cannot accommodate any more laughter by the final third, they'll at least be in awe of the effort and sincerity of the film's makers.

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Toy Story 3 (2010)

Pixar's most openly adult film

[9 August 2010]

If 1999's Toy Story 2 presented to Pixar the novelty of creating its first sequel, and an opportunity to both extend a world and expand upon characters already familiar to us, its follow-up brings to a fitting close the narrative cycle first begun in 1995.

Each of the Toy Story films have dealt with an established order, of sorts, which is abruptly upset or invaded. The first film saw Woody, a toy cowboy, having to deal with and overcome personal jealousy of new addition and possible favourite, spaceman Buzz Lightyear; the second film, fresh from the resolution of the first, has Buzz and the rest of the gang embark upon the dangerous mission to rescue their cowboy leader from an opportunistic collector; now, the third instalment's central narrative premise is altogether more grave: the toys, excluding Woody, are to be abandoned by their owner Andy, who has now outgrown them and is about to leave home for college.

The dilemma is immediately existential, and perhaps marks Toy Story 3 as Pixar's most overtly adult film yet. Here we have a gang of characters requiring no introduction, whose history and evolution are already known to us, and the entire concept of their newest adventure is openly traumatic: the long-deferred reality of rejection – not only rejection, but an entire loss of purpose.

If mortality is writ large here, though, it's in quotation marks. As in Pixar's other statement of enviro-happy conscientiousness WALL·E (2008), there's a strong case for preservation and recycling here. Just as the first film had Andy accept both his new hi-tech astronaut and his dustier ranchman, here the toys' initial dismay at being deemed outmoded is replaced by joyous anticipation that they are to be donated to a local daycare centre where they will be played with again – for the first time in years.

From here, the plot splits in two. Woody, Andy's sole selection for the trip to college, finds himself wrongly placed in the donation box with the rest of the gang and vows to make the trip back to his lifelong residence at all costs; the others, meanwhile, are happy to have found themselves in a daycare that looks infinitely more promising than the horror stories suggested.

That early promise is quickly thwarted. There's a delightful moment when Buzz notices all too late that the toys' collective excitement is in deep contrast to the other daycare veterans, who are hiding themselves away on, beneath and behind shelves, as a bell rings and riotous children re-enter the play-den to attack anything in sight. As a staccato of ghastly discord sounds relentless alarm, there's a dark, sinister edge to this humour that is magnified by Woody's naivety unfolding elsewhere.

There is an obvious self-reflexivity at the centre of the film. Absolutely distraught by the violence they've had to endure on their first day at daycare, Buzz and the gang insist these children are "too young" to know how to respect toys of their ilk. It's a statement that quite easily applies to the film itself, the third in what is now a 15-year old trilogy. Indeed, if the second Toy Story film came soon enough after its predecessor for fans to be young enough to remember the original and enjoy the sequel in equal measure, the third is some eleven years in the making, so to speak.

In this respect, the film has allowed the Pixar collective to return to their roots if only to mark, perhaps, a more open and accessible confirmation of what many already knew after the brave and subtle excellence of Ratatouille (2007), WALL·E and Up (2009): these are children's films for advertisement purposes only; in all others, there's a sincere artistic seriousness at work.

Similarly, perhaps because of our familiarity with this world and its characters (whereas the same strengths in more novel pieces may get overlooked), Toy Story 3 demonstrates why Pixar are at present the leading storytellers in mainstream animation bar none. Not only does the film show the usual fine attention to visual nuance – note the marks of dirt on seasoned daycare vet Lotso – there's a careful and thorough approach to set-piece invention.

What should be a fairly obvious part of the film-making process, such as how a shot is framed or when a scene should be cut, seems to be made effortlessly simple by Pixar to the point at which you realise just where a lot of the competition goes wrong. The rhythm and relative brevity with which the toys execute their escape from daycare, for instance, is a delight to watch. Or note the self-damning observations of the toy soldiers who unquestionably accept their early fate as the "first ones to go" whenever an ominous trash bag appears. Or the simple but seemingly inherent hilarity of juxtaposing glum clown Mr. Chuckles with a happier memory of himself. Or the quiet satisfaction of Mrs. Potato Head finally being re-acquainted with her lost eye. All three Toy Story films show a relish in such amusing detail and character investment.

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Eyes Wide Open (2009)

Affected Bressonianism?

[24 May 2010]

Understated, impressionist drama in which the two central performances and the effective, naturally-lit photography are let down by too many scenes of stilted silence; it's quite alright to make a point of people not understanding one another, but too much contemporary art cinema seems to rely on an affected Bressonianism that doesn't quite gel with surrounding authenticity. The starkest example here is a scene in which a character tries to explain the excitement he feels from an adulterous affair: "I was dead," he says. "Now I feel alive." Even excusing the trite phrasing, the line doesn't quite ring true given how flat, lifeless and unchanged the character has previously seemed. Perhaps, of course, that's the point; but that doesn't make the film any stronger.

Four Lions (2010)

Pretty one-note comedy

[15 May 2010]

In his Sight & Sound review of the film (it's Film of the Month in their June issue), Ben Walters notes that "it's hard to take entirely seriously radical guerrillas who communicate via cartoon avatars on a website called PuffinParty". We may also say that it's hard to take entirely seriously a filmmaker whose message is how stupid we all are when the majority of his film relies on in-joke exclusivity. Indeed, if the berks in the cinema aren't laughing directly at what they (wrongly) assume is racial stereotypes, then they're laughing at... their own stupidity? The comedy of Four Lions is cynical. For all the research carried out on his subject, Morris's film is largely one-note. Many of the physical and visual gags – the obvious one being that in which Faisal accidentally blows himself up ("one sheep was killed in the making of this film", we're told at the end credits) – are meant to shock, but there is no emotional anchor to make their apparently inherent hilarity rich enough to linger.

You can read a fuller review of this film here: http://www.idfilm.blogspot.com The verbal gags, meanwhile, are hit-and-miss. Most of them are again one-note: a pattern emerges quite early on, in which Morris's largely unsympathetic, beyond-stupid cretins fire off a string of long-winded, unusually-worded insults that take on a why-use-three-words-when-thirty-will-do verbosity and velocity. Whether people find this funny or not – and many do – it's quite predictable. Over the course of a feature film, it becomes dull. Having characters occasionally mouth their vulgarities in Urdu with subtitles does little to disguise the creative transparency.

It's impossible to take anything in this film seriously. None of the humour is grounded or nuanced; no amount of loud cacophonies can hide its lack of spontaneity. Just because the film is a comedy does not mean it gets a pass for neglecting the essentially serious subject matter at hand. In this sense, the film is a contradiction, given the Morris quotes already mentioned here.

To his credit, Philip French of The Observer has offered a more sober assessment of the film: "Like that other fashionable movie comedian, Sacha Baron Cohen, who also made his name exposing the gullibility of both the kindly disposed and the deeply prejudiced, Morris's TV hoaxes have confirmed his low opinion of humanity." His latest work does nothing to change this view.

Comedy isn't an illegitimate or lower form of art. It does have the potential and purpose to highlight the absurd aspects of life's darker moments. But Four Lions, as Philip French rightly notes, offers a low opinion of not only everyday people, it deliberately does not offer any truthful analysis or way out of such idiocy. Morris plays everything for laughs here, to the point where even a more somber denouement seems merely perfunctory, to combat all of the criticisms already by that point applicable to the film.

Read more at idfilm.blogspot.com

Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962)

Fleeting, modernist, deceptively subtle

[29 April 2010]

The plot of Cleo from 5 to 7 centres around a successful pop singer, Cléo (Corinne Marchand). While waiting until she can collect the results of a medical examination that will reveal whether or not she has terminal cancer, she meets with her friend Angèle, a lover, fellow musicians and wanders the streets of Paris. Feeling a great deal of anxiety about the way she is perceived by people and society, she retreats to the quiet of a park, where she has an unexpected encounter with a young soldier on leave, named Antoine.

Early on in the film there is extensive use made of mirrors. If Cléo is not reassuring herself of her own external beauty by staring half-quizzically, half-admiringly at herself in a mirror, she is surrounded entirely by the walled mirror of a restaurant. Sometimes, Jean Rabier's camera films Cléo entirely in reflection, her actual body out of frame.

Cléo's superficial image of herself – and the staleness that stems from it – is a by-product of a rapidly-changing society. At the beginning of the 1960s, after much post-war stagnation, Paris was finally evolving into a truly modern city. Major plans were being implemented for the city's motorways, infrastructure, its international airports and tourist industry.

The freshness of this newly urbanised metropolis and its rejuvenated economy is captured very well. We often follow Cléo from an inexpressively high angle on the Paris streets, evoking perhaps a feeling of observation, the novelty of casual surveillance; the camera keeps her central to the unstaged, bustling frame.

Several scenes unfold on vehicles of modern transport. Early in the film, Cléo is chauffeured around the city by her friend Angèle, who has just learned to drive. Angèle indicates each turn by holding out her appropriate arm, as if on a bicycle. Much later in the film, Cléo travels via bus (it's "more exciting" than a taxi) to see her doctor and find the results of her test; Antoine accompanies her. The pair share a lengthy, intimate silence amidst the otherwise chaos of public transport. It is an affecting scene; charming, too: by camera trickery, Antoine leans out of the bus and snatches a flower from a passing floral cart to give to Cléo. It is both artsy and romantic; cinematic, Parisian.

Read my full review here: http://idfilm.blogspot.com

The Ghost Writer (2010)

Superior genre piece

[8/10 · 26 April 2010]

As a film about a rather ordinary case leading deeper and deeper into dangerous turf, The Ghost in many ways resembles Chinatown. It may not be as rich as that masterpiece, but Polanski's latest film shows the film-maker has lost none of his sensitivity to human situations and genre brush-strokes.

The film has much going for it. From the outset, its metallic visual pallet is subdued and intriguing. There's a naturalism here that stems from Polanski's general artistic approach, one which is classically trained but in tune with what ingredients make a thriller both suspenseful and authentic. Alexandre Desplat's score, for instance, might seem incongruous or jarring under others' direction, but here it becomes a fitting compliment to the unfolding events, which are both strange and bleak.

As in previous work, Polanski keeps to telling events strictly (and deftly) from his ghost writer's point-of-view, which places much responsibility not only on the character's appeal, but also on Ewan McGregor's acting skills.

McGregor's been largely overlooked as a serious performer, I think, but here he's brilliant. As the proficient but morally flawed professional, he gives a performance of such effortless subtlety that I'm frustrated he hasn't worked with more talented directors over the years.

Given that he's in every scene here, McGregor effectively carries the film. Though much of his time is spent alone, he's at his best with others – and like any well-written character, he's different depending on the company. Opposite Brosnan's Adam Lang, he's the polite, patient professional-cum-adviser. With Olivia Williams's Ruth, he's more confident, perhaps because he's a single attractive male outsider whose reluctance to take up this job means he has nothing to lose but his contract, and because Ruth herself is clearly and curiously a league above her husband in intelligence, charm and wit.

As Lang's wife, Williams is magnificent. Midway through the film, there's a brief 'romance' between Ruth and the ghost writer. McGregor perhaps foresees it but does little to stop it other than whispering "bad idea" to himself in the mirror. Williams is ambiguous, complex: her attraction to the ghost seems half-genuine, half-calculated; if she's emotionally vulnerable, she's sexually manipulative.

Read my full review here: http://idfilm.blogspot.com

Cemetery Junction (2010)

Sincere but problematic

[5/10 · 18 April 2010]

Though it remains fundamentally sensitive to social and historical forces – with a conscious effort to reconstruct the look and feel of 1970s Reading – CEMETERY JUNCTION paints its humour in crude, broad strokes.

The casual ironic racism of Freddie's parents and grandmother comes immediately to mind. These scenes are painful to watch. It simply isn't enough to place a racist character somewhat incongruously into a narrative without accounting for such an outlook in more depth. There's no attempt on the writers' parts to explore the roots of racism, or to fully understand or explain it.

While I understand that might be an unreasonable request of a 90-minute film, especially one with a formulaic script that pulls no new punches, I'd counter by questioning why the racism is included at all. Whether we're in on the irony or not, the racial slurs are played out for laughs here, something made more obvious by the fact Gervais himself plays Freddie's father Len.

It's worth commenting on this because Gervais and Merchant are not bigots. Part of the frustration of Cemetery Junction is that its makers presume their audiences are in on the joke. But such confidence is naïve. Firstly, if they are in on the joke, that doesn't make the humour any funnier; secondly, though, and more alarming, is that I fear this is irony gone too far: in the current social climate, in which immigration policies are a key part of a pre-UK election debating arena, the racism of Cemetery Junction may well be championed without irony by a great number of people.

Freddie himself is the voice against this. In a scene later in the film, he highlights the contradiction of his father's logic. How, Freddie asks, can immigrants be "lazy" and "take our jobs" at the same time? The issue isn't pushed, but even so it's a rare moment in which the writers allow themselves to say something meaningful through dialogue. It's this area at which Gervais and Merchant prevail with an observational sharpness.

Read my full review here: http://idfilm.blogspot.com

I Am Love (2009)

Sensuous, sumptuous, cine-literate complexity

[8/10 · 18 April 2010]

I AM LOVE is a powerful film that seems to take much pleasure in seducing an audience it assumes must share an interest in narrative intricacy and emotional subtlety; though the finale seems silly, the whole thing is aesthetically polished, and contains enough substance to reward a revisit. It begins as a deliberately disorienting portrait of a family business in transition, before making way for a more Sirkian examination of an oppressed woman whose place within both her social class and her family comes under threat due to her relationship with an outsider - even before the relationship is fully consummated it is frowned upon. Everything seems to be moving here, both externally - in familial interrelations, captured confidently by DoP Yorick Le Saux - and internally, as captured by a committed and nuanced Tilda Swinton.

I wrote a full review here: http://idfilm.blogspot.com

Mister Lonely (2007)

Edited into hit-and-miss territory?

[4/10 · 8 July 2008]

Korine's established himself, by now, as a talented and impressive image-maker. The promotional posters for Mister Lonely all include the film's most impressive compositions (though there's one in particular I've yet to see in promo material: that of a blue-clad nun teasing a dog with a stick, surrounded by green forest with torrential rain pouring down). The opening images of this film, of Michael Jackson lookalike (Diego Luna) riding a small motorbike round a track, is strangely compelling and beautiful: Roy Orbison's "Mister Lonely" plays on the soundtrack, and the images unfold in slow-motion. There's also a funny and terrific sequence in which the same character mimes a dance, without music (though a radio sits like a silent dog next to him), in the middle of a Paris street; Korine splices in sound effects and jump-cuts that evoke both a feeling of futility and dogged liberation in the character's dance routine.

The first instance of the segment dealing with the nuns is also strangely poignant; Father Umbrillo (Werner Herzog) is an autocratic priest about to fly with some nuns over, and drop food into, impoverished areas nearby. In a scene that is both light-hearted and affecting, Herzog must deal with a stubbornly enthusiastic local who wishes to make the plane trip with them in order to see his wife in San Francisco. As the exchange develops, Herzog draws out of the man a confession: he has sinned, and his frequent infidelity is the cause of his wife having left him in the first place. This scene, short and sweet, gains particular weight after one learns its improvised origins: the sinner is played by a non-actor who was on set when Korine and co. were filming - and his adulterous ways had given him, in real life, a lasting, overwhelming guilt.

Henceforth, the film is hit-and-miss; a succession of intrinsically interesting moments that add to a frivolous, muddled narrative. Whereas Gummo and Julien Donkey-Boy maintain their aesthetic and emotional weight via coherent structural frameworks, Mister Lonely feels like a victim of editing room ruthlessness. A few scenes were cut from the film, which would have otherwise painted fuller pictures of certain characters, due to continuity errors in costume - a result, no doubt, due to the absence of a shooting script and Korine's tendency for improvisation. One deleted scene in particular - in which 'Charlie Chaplin' (Denis Lavant) and 'Madonna' (Melita Morgan) have sex - would have added much more emotional conflict to a scene later on in the film (I won't spoil it, but it's there to deflate any feeling of warmth or celebration, and, as it is, only half-succeeds).

The two strands of the narrative, unconnected literally, are best approached as two entirely different stories with the same allegorical meaning; one compliments the other and vice versa. (It's something to do with the conflict between one's ambitions and the reality of the current situation.) But there's not enough of the Herzog scenes to merit their place in the film, and so any connection between these two allegorically-connected threads is inevitably strained - and the inclusion is, in retrospect, tedious.

This is an ambitious step forward from Julien Donkey-Boy that suffers mostly, at least in the lookalike segments, from having far too many characters for the film's running length, a flaw that would have been even worse had big star names played everyone (as was originally planned).

With many of the imagery's self-contained beauty, and moments of real, genuine connection with the soundtrack, this feels like it'd be much more suited to an art installation or photo exhibition. As an exploration of mimesis and the nature of impersonation, it'd lose none of its power - indeed, for me, it would perhaps be more impressive. The loneliness attached to iconic performativity (such as that encountered by both the icons themselves and those who aspire to be like them) is well-captured in images such as that wherein 'Marilyn Monroe' (a gorgeous Samantha Morton) seduces the camera with a Seven Year Itch pose in the middle of a forest, or when 'Sammy Davis, Jr.' (Jason Pennycooke) settles, post-dance rehearsal, with his back to the camera overlooking an incredible, tranquil lake.

As it is, moments like these, and all those where the titles of randomly-chosen Michael Jackson songs crawl across the scene, are married to one another in a film narrative far less affecting than it should be.

(For those who see it, I lost all faith during the egg-singing scene, late on. You'll know which scene I mean because it sticks out like a sore thumb, as some sort of gimmicky attempt at the new cinematic language for which Korine has previously been hailed.)

Lost Highway (1997)

A teasing, complex mystery on identity; told as an inescapable nightmare.

[8/10 · 30 November 2005]

Ignore the rating and read on; to reduce thoughts on a film to mere mathematical weighting is inconsistent and unfair...

In the early days of narrative cinema, there was a problem with even the most simple of edits: the cut away, wherein one shot is replaced with another shot, which at first appears to be unrelated. It is only in the context of this transition that these separate shots form a meaning intelligible to the audience. In Lost Highway, however, precisely the opposite is true. When, a third into the movie, Fred Madison transforms into an entirely different character Pete Dayton, it confuses the viewer. Proceedings are given even more complexity when Pete, our new protagonist in the narrative's discourse, meets Alice Wakefield, played by the same actress as Fred's wife Renee, Patricia Arquette. When the cops, who have just released an innocent Pete from jail, reveal that his gangster associate Mr. Eddie is in fact Dick Laurent, things become even more confusing. And when, by the end of the film, Pete has transformed back to Fred, and Mr. Eddie into Dick Laurent (not to mention an appearance by Andy in both parallel narratives), viewers could well be throwing in the towel.

This is, then, no conventional work. Lynch employs Brechtian techniques in a meandering plot which deals, essentially, with questions of identity and character crises. When trying to justify the over-elaborate, dense narrative of his Mulholland Dr. (2001) on the Region 2 DVD, Lynch hints that questions of identity are part of everyday life, and we all have to deal with it. This contemporary noir, with its convoluted character-switching and circular narrative, may be taken as a film which labours a point which could easily be dealt with in less tortuous circumstances. But there is a fitting quote from one of Lynch's influences, to counter this point, and the director may even have paraphrased it himself at one point or another. "In order to convey fact, you can only ever so do through distortion," so painter Francis Bacon was announced. Here, in Lost Highway, the distortion becomes, oddly, the only way to get Lynch's message across.

Told, as ever, as a brooding Lynchian nightmare, with Peter Deming's camera accentuating the alarming reds and stark Baconesque yellows and pinks of the characters' spacious, minimalist apartments, Highway starts as a conventional film noir before turning into a disturbing, often frightening mystery, slowly unfolding itself into an even deeper, denser world of mistrust and suspicion. The opening third, in which Fred and wife Renee receive a series of mysterious videos of footage of themselves sleeping in their bedroom, comprises a succession of short, disjointed scenes made all the more strained by the editing: a slow train of fade to blacks, as if to suggest falling in and out of consciousness, dreaminess, a state of nightmare. Lynch's camera lingers on the dark corners of rooms, wanting, but scared to, explore them further. In contrast, the part in the film dealing with Pete's decline into lustful desire for mistress Alice is more wordy and, to perhaps seem as far away from Fred's opening character arc as possible, told with more purpose.

That Fred and Pete are the same characters has widely been argued, and to valid extent. But what if we, as an audience by now used almost too used to the language of film, and immune to its potential to create new, innovative sparks in its mechanics, are taking it for granted that, as the same characters crop up in each of the film's parallel narratives, they must belong in the same world? What if, when we cut away to Pete's story, we have been taken to a whole new world which only looks the same as that in which Fred was jailed? Looking at the film in this way, taking one world as some kind of reality and the other as a dream, each separate story, even when morphing into one, as it seems to do in the latter stages, can now be enjoyed for what it is. Or indeed, the two narratives could well be two cogs on the same wheel, and the film itself is, in true Lynch fashion, an inescapable nightmare for all, with characters taking on the names of others. Or rather, this is a kaleidoscopic precursor for Cronenberg's A History of Violence (2005), a film which deals with masculine wish-fulfilment to transform into an alter-ego in order to cope with the boredom of life. Here we have the predominant characters all with their own alter egos; Fred and Pete, Renee and Alice, Mr. Eddie and Dick Laurent, and, it could even be argued, the Mystery Man and Andy.

From whose point, then, is this nightmare told? An obvious answer would be Fred's. It has been debated that the second half of the film is merely Fred convincing himself, through an extended fantasy in which he is Pete Dayton, of his own innocence in his wife's murder. But the film could equally be regarded as from Pete's point of view, with Fred the fictional character. But to ask these questions is to not necessarily seek an answer; indeed, when watching Lost Highway, you get the feeling that Lynch is simply exploring ideas here: masculine doubt (both Fred and Pete have problems finishing during sex), identity crises and, to study the haunting surface level of the film, nightmares and their connection to memory and the unconscious.