Out in the UK This Week
Her (EV, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD)
The film about the guy who falls in love with his computer’s operating system. Yes, that one, with Joaquin Phoenix as the guy, Scarlett Johansson as the voice of the OS. Spike Jonze takes this premise and has quite a lot of fun with it, working through logically how a man might fall in love with a machine: because he’s lonely, because phone sex with a computer is like phone sex with a human, because computers, like, rule our lives. And he also brilliantly details a world where this sort of event might not instantly book you a place at the funny farm. Best of all he constructs the film just like a rom-com – boy meets operating system, boy loses operating system etc. But alongside this story he runs a shadow plot, another familiar romantic trope from Hollywood, of the guy who can’t see that the girl right under his nose (Amy Adams, as the girl next door) might be the one for him. Much has been made of Scarlett Johansson as the voice, and she is as husky and sexy as Scar-Jo might be nuzzled up next to you. Irresistible, in other words. Less has been made of the fact that the whole film was made with Samantha Morton as the OS, the entire thing being revoiced in post production. No idea why. Either way the film is 40 minutes too long.
Exhibition (Artificial Eye, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD)
Joanna Hogg’s third film is working in the same territory as the last two, Archipelago and Unrelated. In other words not much happens but it feels like something is about to kick off at any moment. It’s a remarkable dramatic trick to be able to pull off, and interesting how good female directors are at it (see Claire Denis or, in different territory, Kathryn Bigelow). Here we’re following a rich boho couple – he’s something like an architect, she’s an artist of some sort, they live in one of those modernist London houses everyone covets, they have no children, and a yellow Smart car. They have few friends but life is on the whole peachy. Except they’re just about to put the house on the market and we suspect that she (Viv Albertine, formerly of the Slits) isn’t quite as happy about it as he (Liam Gillick) is. And that’s it, for plot. Would you feel sorry for them? Most likely not. But using plenty of long static shots, and ambient sound from outside in “happening London” – scaffolders, sirens, car doors slamming – Hogg manages to suggest a world behind the world we’re watching, where every small encounter we see has enormous weight. Not one for exposition junkies.
Exhibition – Watch it at Amazon
The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears (Metrodome, cert 18, DVD)
Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s Amer was a strange fever-dream homage to Italian horror of the early 1970s. This is another “neo giallo”, a bravura display of stylisation and astonishing technique – split screens, extreme close-up, symmetrical composition, expressionist angles, zooms, rotates, lurid filtration, deep and shallow focus, negative images, stop-frame animation, and on it goes. This makes for a film that is really amazing to watch but almost impossible to get involved in. And considering that we’re following a man who has lost his wife in a big old Art Deco house and doesn’t know where to find her, that’s either the entire point of the piece (and it does feel like an artwork more than a movie) or its big failing. All the music is from films of the period, so there’s Ennio Morricone in there alongside Riz Ortolani and Bruno Nicolai. If you know who those last two are, you’ll go a bundle on this film. If you enjoy films where a doll’s head, a woman’s nipple and a pair of gloved arms holding a dagger could flash up on the screen at seemingly any moment, you’ll enjoy it even more.
The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears – Watch it at Amazon
Gagarin: First in Space (E One, cert 12, DVD)
A couple of years ago we had Christopher Riley’s almost arthouse First Orbit, which was a real-time recreation of Yuri Gagarin’s first flight into space. This Russian film gives us the full biopic of this brave man, though crucially seems more interested in the society he came from than the actual and frankly rather amazing space flight – made only a scant few years after the end of the Second World War. It’s a fatal mistake, and suggests that the film has been conceived as some Putin-ordained hymn to Russia’s Soviet glory years. Selfless cosmonauts, brave collective effort, looming industrial structures, a solid and avuncular leader in the shape of space-maestro Sergey Korolev (excellent Mikhail Filippov), heroic landscapes, massed choirs, the simple yet clean and pure life of the peasantry (sorry, collective farm workers), it’s all here. Leaving the details of the flight itself to fight for room. What a terrible shame, because whenever we are in the tiny capsule with Yuri (the facially similar and entirely well cast Yaroslav Zhalnin), the film abandons its propaganda and throws its script – seemingly written by the Politburo – out the window and goes into warp drive. If only it did it more often.
Gagarin: First in Space – Watch it at Amazon
Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (Second Sight, cert 18, Blu-ray)
Like a lot of films from the 1970s, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot is now staking a claim to some kind of classic status. No chance. There’s a lot of good things about it – iconic Clint Eastwood and still-young Jeff Bridges as knockabout heisters planning a big job. Writer/director Michael Cimino’s use of wide widescreen to its full advantage. The brilliant support playing by an unusually nasty George Kennedy and a very funny Geoffrey Lewis film as our guys’ second bananas. The way the film wallows in Americana – landscapes, cars, diners, good ol’ boys – entirely without any self-consciousness (surely 1974 was the end of this era). Also, the tiny touches of absurdity which seem to have been lifted from Jodorowsky’s El Topo, such as Eastwood and Bridges hitching a lift with a guy whose trunk is full of white rabbits. All very flavoursome. But the jokey tone of the comedy undermines what is meant to be a thrilling heist, which in any case simply moves far too slowly. Thunderbolt and Lightfoot is often held up as the film that Cimino got right. But in the glacial pace of the heist (hey, who needs something as mundane as a plotline when you’ve got majestic sweep?) we can see in embryo everything that was wrong with Heaven’s Gate.
Thunderbolt and Lightfoot – Watch it at Amazon
As I Lay Dying (Lionsgate, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD)
James Franco’s adaptation of William Faulkner’s stream-of-consciousness novel set inside the heads of a family of hick mourners taking their matriarch to her final rest. The book has been called unfilmable, most likely because it is an exercise in novel form. But Franco has a go anyway, possibly because he wants to be taken seriously, having unimpeachable cheekbones not being enough for some people. He also stars as one of the family, though it’s Tim Blake Nelson who makes the most impact, as a patriarch so dumb that there must be generations of inbreeding in there. And are those plywood teeth? Egads. The stylistics Franco uses, including relentless split screen and frequent addresses to camera by various members of the family, none of these work. But the cast give it their best shot, with Ahna O’Reilly particularly good as the secretly pregnant daughter, and Tim O’Keefe’s vibey country-twangy soundtrack helping reinforce Franco’s easy-going directorial pace. A for effort.
As I Lay Dying – Watch it at Amazon
The Sea (Independent, cert 12, DVD)
Another example of a book being able to do things that films can’t, The Sea is an adaptation of John Banville’s novel about a widower (Ciarán Hinds) going back to the Irish seaside town where, decades earlier, as a child, “something happened”. What it is isn’t revealed till the end of the film. And until that point we’ve been entertained by Hinds’s memories of a summer of enchantment with a bohemian family (headed by Rufus Sewell and Natascha McElhone) and by his current-day reality, testing the patience of the owner (Charlotte Rampling) of the guest house where he’s staying of and her only other guest, a mysterious retired military man (the slyly excellent Karl Johnson). Hold on to those performances, because the film simply does not connect to the inner turmoil of its central character. Result: nothing, nothing at all.
The Sea – Watch it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2014