Ok, first of all, let m admit something: this is actually the second time I've seen Antichrist. The first time around I didn't really know what to make of it (which is a polite way of saying that I thought it was a pretentious pile of shite) but now, I get it. This film is a masterpeice.
It' not without its weaknesses. Charlotte Gainsbourg's acting is rather weak at times (someone really needs to tell her that there are ways of talking other than a whisper) and her dialogue sounds like it was written by someone who has only recently learnt English. Despite that, though, this film is incredible. When I finished watching it, I felt physically drained - it's an emotional and visceral ordeal, particularly the last half hour. The plot of the film is deceptively simple: a greiving couple go to a cabin in the woods, where psychologist Willem Defoe tries to cure his wife of her psychological problems. Much like Melancholia though, Antichrist's true themes are far larger and more complex. First off, it is - like Melancholia - an allegory for depression. Charlotte Gainsbourg is Lars von Trier, Willem Defoe is everyone who's asked him what he's so sad about. Secondly - and this is the big one - it is, like Melancholia, a film about what happens when a rational man (Keifer Sutherland's scientist, Defoe's psychologist) is confronted with something utterly irrational - in this case, the idea that the world is inherently evil. Not in some vague, it's-a-hard-life way, but actively malign. In this way, the film has parallels with the stories of HP Lovecraft - it is, fundamentally, a horror film. Von Trier clearly intended this to be the case, and he makes use of a fair few horror tropes. There is the scene where Charlotte Gainsbourg's character hears the crying of a baby, a sound which seems to come from nowhere, and the acorns that fall onto the roof of the cabin are reminiscent of the showers of stones said to accompany hauntings.
Defoe plays a character who is defined by his rational outlook on life; it is this outlook which first destroys his marriage, and then destroys him. When his wife begins to exhibit symptoms of mental illness, he decides to treat her himself. From that moment on, he is unable to relate to her as a human being, but rather sees her purely as a patient. It is this coldness, this detatchment, that begins to drive the two apart. Once they get to the forest, this rationality begins to fray at the edges, as Gainsbourg's character is gradually proved right; the world is evil, and it does want to make you suffer and then kill you. And that, really, is a very frightening idea.
This film was one of the most intense that I have ever seen, and I cannot recommend it enough.
Wednesday 16 April 2014
Tuesday 15 April 2014
Lars von Trier Part 1: Melancholia
I've heard a lot about von Trier - he's a filmmaker who inspires adoration and vitriol in equal measure, one who delights in confounding the expectations of his fans. Some think he's an iconoclastic genius, who follows his muse whereever it may take him; to others, he's a novelty act, the cinematic troll extraodinaire. So I recently decided (recently means this morning) to watch all of his films. At first, I wanted to start at the beginning, but Kirsten Dunst was naked in his last film, so I watched that one first. I guess I'll work from end to beginning.
Melancholia
This film is many things. It's a refutation of cynicism; it's an allegory for depresion; it's a poetic disaster movie; but most importantly, and most fundamentally, it's a story. A story about people's lives, the unravelling of them, and a big fuck-off planet that's going to kill the crap out of everything.
Melancholia is a hell of a film. It's got a stellar cast - Kirsten Dunst, John Hurt, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Keifer Sutherland all turn in excellent perforances. Lines that could have sounded overwrought or cheesy in the hands of less talented actors come out sounding exactly right. The cineatography is also top notch; the lush, almost aggressively opulent colours should be terrible,digital at its worst, but somehow von Trier makes it work, so that the film looks like a Caravaggio portrait, though rendered in far colder colours. The story is great - it starts out as a Pinteresque account of a wedding gone disastrously wrong, but what I love about it is the complete lack of attention paid to the conventions of stortelling. Standard filmmaking logic tells us that if a film starts out as a moving account of marital and familial strife should end the same way, whereas von Trier logic says that if a film starts out as a moving account of marital and familial strife LETS THROW A PLANET AT EVERONE. Seriously, this is a great film. Watch it.
Melancholia
This film is many things. It's a refutation of cynicism; it's an allegory for depresion; it's a poetic disaster movie; but most importantly, and most fundamentally, it's a story. A story about people's lives, the unravelling of them, and a big fuck-off planet that's going to kill the crap out of everything.
Melancholia is a hell of a film. It's got a stellar cast - Kirsten Dunst, John Hurt, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Keifer Sutherland all turn in excellent perforances. Lines that could have sounded overwrought or cheesy in the hands of less talented actors come out sounding exactly right. The cineatography is also top notch; the lush, almost aggressively opulent colours should be terrible,digital at its worst, but somehow von Trier makes it work, so that the film looks like a Caravaggio portrait, though rendered in far colder colours. The story is great - it starts out as a Pinteresque account of a wedding gone disastrously wrong, but what I love about it is the complete lack of attention paid to the conventions of stortelling. Standard filmmaking logic tells us that if a film starts out as a moving account of marital and familial strife should end the same way, whereas von Trier logic says that if a film starts out as a moving account of marital and familial strife LETS THROW A PLANET AT EVERONE. Seriously, this is a great film. Watch it.
Film Review - 12 Years A Slave
So yesterday, I finally got around to seeing 12 Years A Slave, the film that's so great you don't even need to see it to give it an Oscar. And....it's not that great. Don't get me wrong - there are some really good things about it. The performances are uniformly fantastic, the sound mixing is perfect - diegetic sounds are amplified and the music is loud and intense, reminiscent of The Excorcist and old fashioned film scores - and it's pretty well shot. But overall...well, first things first.
It starts out very well. It's genuinely affecting when Northup (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, whose name I copied and pasted from IMDb, because fuck trying to spell that) is kidnapped and sold into slavery, and the first hour or so of the film is very well made. The soundtrack is the real star of the film - the combination of amplified diegetic sound and non-diegetic music that is far more intrusive than in most modern films creates a rich atmosphere, enveloping and uncomfortable, like a really humid summer day. The cinematography is great as well - less stark than in Hunger, McQueen's first film, and closer to the opulent textures of Les Miserables. By the looks of this film, directors are finally learning how to make digital look good.
The problem comes about an hour in (I think it was an hour - it's the first quarter of a film that seems about four hours long). Basically, what happens is...nothing. Nothing at all. There's been a fantastic build-up - characters established, horrors of slavery presented in a way that is just realistic enough to be disturbing, but not realistic enough that Guardian readers won't like it - and then it just...keeps going. Northup keeps having a hard time, the slave-owners keep being dicks (as slave-owners tend to do), things keep being generally awful for the slaves, but there's nothing else there. No drama, no tension, no reason to keep watching. Now don;t get me wrong - I love slow cinema. Hunger is a masterpeice, I loved Drive, and The American is one of my favourite films. But this doesn't have the great writing of Hunger, the meditative beauty of Drive or the emotional drive of Papillion, which I think is the best film to compare it to (and not just because it has the other Steve McQueen in it). Like Papillion, 12 Years A Slave is long; like Papillion, there is no defining plot, just story - the actions of characters, as opposed to the problem-solution line of Hollywood; like Papillion, the film focuses around a free man (McQueen is free in spirit; Ejiofor is literally a free man sold into slavery) trying to escape from a brutal situation (a penal colony in the former, slavery in the latter) and the aproach to sound is very similar. Thing is though, in Papillion, there's some substance - I genuinely want Steve McQueen's character to escape, because the film has an emotional efect on me; I want Northup to escape so that the film will be over. 12 Years A Slave is not some slow-burning, brutal masterpeice of the kind that one might expect from the director of the masterful Hunger. Instead, it's dull, self-indulgent, and really not that shocking. There's a flogging scene that's pretty nasty, but compared to what happened to slaves in real life, it seems like a lot of the horrors have been toned down to appeal to the tastes of white liberals.
Basically, watch Papillion - it's much, much better.
It starts out very well. It's genuinely affecting when Northup (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, whose name I copied and pasted from IMDb, because fuck trying to spell that) is kidnapped and sold into slavery, and the first hour or so of the film is very well made. The soundtrack is the real star of the film - the combination of amplified diegetic sound and non-diegetic music that is far more intrusive than in most modern films creates a rich atmosphere, enveloping and uncomfortable, like a really humid summer day. The cinematography is great as well - less stark than in Hunger, McQueen's first film, and closer to the opulent textures of Les Miserables. By the looks of this film, directors are finally learning how to make digital look good.
The problem comes about an hour in (I think it was an hour - it's the first quarter of a film that seems about four hours long). Basically, what happens is...nothing. Nothing at all. There's been a fantastic build-up - characters established, horrors of slavery presented in a way that is just realistic enough to be disturbing, but not realistic enough that Guardian readers won't like it - and then it just...keeps going. Northup keeps having a hard time, the slave-owners keep being dicks (as slave-owners tend to do), things keep being generally awful for the slaves, but there's nothing else there. No drama, no tension, no reason to keep watching. Now don;t get me wrong - I love slow cinema. Hunger is a masterpeice, I loved Drive, and The American is one of my favourite films. But this doesn't have the great writing of Hunger, the meditative beauty of Drive or the emotional drive of Papillion, which I think is the best film to compare it to (and not just because it has the other Steve McQueen in it). Like Papillion, 12 Years A Slave is long; like Papillion, there is no defining plot, just story - the actions of characters, as opposed to the problem-solution line of Hollywood; like Papillion, the film focuses around a free man (McQueen is free in spirit; Ejiofor is literally a free man sold into slavery) trying to escape from a brutal situation (a penal colony in the former, slavery in the latter) and the aproach to sound is very similar. Thing is though, in Papillion, there's some substance - I genuinely want Steve McQueen's character to escape, because the film has an emotional efect on me; I want Northup to escape so that the film will be over. 12 Years A Slave is not some slow-burning, brutal masterpeice of the kind that one might expect from the director of the masterful Hunger. Instead, it's dull, self-indulgent, and really not that shocking. There's a flogging scene that's pretty nasty, but compared to what happened to slaves in real life, it seems like a lot of the horrors have been toned down to appeal to the tastes of white liberals.
Basically, watch Papillion - it's much, much better.
Saturday 12 April 2014
Theatre review - The Forty (Howard Barker)
Howard Barker
The Forty
Lurking Truth
So, today was a big day for me - I saw my first Howard Barker play. Unfortunately, I came on the wrong night to meet the man himself (he came to the first night, yesterday), but still - I got to see one of his plays at least. I've read dozens of Barkers plays, most of his poetry and all of his theoretical works, and it was a great experience to see what was the first professional production of The Forty. The most recent of Barker's compendia, The Forty is made up of forty self-contained scenes. There is no overarching narrative, but the scenes share certain characteristics. They each focus on a moment of intense emotion, and present it either wordlessly, or through very minimal language - the wordiest of them has two sentences in it. The Forty really is an actor's play - the script requires tremendous attention to the details of speech; a single phrase might be repeated five times, each time with a completely different meaning. The cast of this production were more than up to the task, and they each gave bravura performances. Devon Baur was exactly what I thought a Barker actor would be - her every move seemed perfectly calculated, and she had a certain poise that seemed like the physical equivalent of Barker's intense, pared-down language. Sam Harris and Richard Lynch also deserve a mention - it is difficult to imagine any actor delivering those lines better.
David Ian Rabey's direction was excellent, and the lighting was something really special (it never occurred to me that one could use lights at the side of the stage like that). All in all, this was a fantastic evening, and I'm glad my first experience of Barker on stage was tonight.
The Forty
Lurking Truth
So, today was a big day for me - I saw my first Howard Barker play. Unfortunately, I came on the wrong night to meet the man himself (he came to the first night, yesterday), but still - I got to see one of his plays at least. I've read dozens of Barkers plays, most of his poetry and all of his theoretical works, and it was a great experience to see what was the first professional production of The Forty. The most recent of Barker's compendia, The Forty is made up of forty self-contained scenes. There is no overarching narrative, but the scenes share certain characteristics. They each focus on a moment of intense emotion, and present it either wordlessly, or through very minimal language - the wordiest of them has two sentences in it. The Forty really is an actor's play - the script requires tremendous attention to the details of speech; a single phrase might be repeated five times, each time with a completely different meaning. The cast of this production were more than up to the task, and they each gave bravura performances. Devon Baur was exactly what I thought a Barker actor would be - her every move seemed perfectly calculated, and she had a certain poise that seemed like the physical equivalent of Barker's intense, pared-down language. Sam Harris and Richard Lynch also deserve a mention - it is difficult to imagine any actor delivering those lines better.
David Ian Rabey's direction was excellent, and the lighting was something really special (it never occurred to me that one could use lights at the side of the stage like that). All in all, this was a fantastic evening, and I'm glad my first experience of Barker on stage was tonight.
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