TOMMORROWLAND (2015) – REVIEW

Yes, hidden inside that most public of penis envy structures is a rocket ready to escape.

It’s not personal.  It’s just programming.

Athena responds to adult Frank’s bitterness at the way his childish love for her was thwarted. 

Tommorrowland is a much stranger film than it may first appear. Brad Bird, director of The Incredibles and Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, has seamlessly blended together state of the art CGI animation and live action. Personally, not since I was a child have I sat and marveled at action sequences in the way I have here. Sequences such as the rocket launch depicted above seem to operate within a digital-era upgrade of Todd-AO, pushing at the vertiginous vision of Cinerama technology – which would have been state-of-the-art cinematic gimmickry back in the 1950s origin points of Disneyland’s original Tommorrowland. There may be periods of talking heads plot development spread throughout the film’s 130mins running time, but the opening hour flies by at a fearsome pace, and the Tommorrowland myth is a rather awesome and otherworldly experience, laden with plenty of discrete visual detailing and unnerving ebullience. As much as I found myself increasingly unsettled by the brightly-lit positivist agenda of the film, the spectacle, the energy and the dynamism nonetheless sucked me in. We’re not in Kansas anymore, but we might well be in Nazi Germany.

Bird clearly believes his material and wants an audience to embrace the uber-positive message of not giving up on a dream, as well as realising our innate capacity to find solutions to problems through community and teamwork. At times the films geekish glee is all a little too saccharine, particularly within the closing stages of the film, where Bird seems to be mainlining a slightly more humane version of Randian positivism in the guise of a technology cult. Yet bolstering this belief are the nascent myths of yesteryear: American exceptionalism, technological progress as a positive force for change, the grand tradition of the American Dream, an unquestioning belief that the future can be written and rewritten by our individual actions (whether collectivised or not). As much as Bird’s futuristic fantasia is about what may yet come, it is also embedded within a very nostalgic reactionism for a period in history where things seemed much simpler and innocent. This is the to-and-fro at the core of the film. Do we turn backwards and bury our head in a play park Tomorrowland, or do we reach forward and forge something better from those past failures and smallscale divertissements?

The film also scores highly by being supremely well cast. Clooney is a past master at grouchy and put-upon and his adult Frank Walker has just the right degree of hurt defensiveness and disillusionment. His character is very much a love-scarred little boy trapped in a failing adult body, his emotions stunted in their growth and buried deep beneath the skin, which still remains tender to verbal attack. The young performers, Britt Robertson and Raffey Cassidy, play Casey and Athena, and both of them are excellent. Cassidy has the more obviously awkward and demanding role, having to play an impish young girl with a disturbing secret. The power of her performance creates a particularly awkward tension in the middle third of the film when the thwarted romance between herself and Clooney’s adult Frank is played out as a long-deteriorating relationship. Clooney is so good at unlocking his narrow-minded, selfish little boy and Cassidy has such archness and poise, that the absurd age gap between the two performers falls away creating an incredibly intricate and unusual soured romance. Robertson’s Casey is yet another young teenage schoolgirl becoming progressively more empowered, although here that empowerment is realised through her blithe optimism and can-do attitude. Casey is an elect figure, very much in the tradition of other contemporary sci-fi sagas, but her qualifications for heroism seem to be much more grounded in the unbridled enthusiasms of youth, than any fantastical powers. Unlike Katniss in The Hunger Games, Casey isn’t on a quest to grow up and set aside her childish things, but rather to remake the world with the undimmed optimism of childhood. Ultimately, it is this desire to remain grounded in the child’s enraptured experiences of ‘newness’ and wonder that makes the film such an unusual proposition. Casey, as the film’s heroine, is likely its secondary character, as it is really a story about the reintegration of Clooney’s disenchanted Frank, back into the enthusiasms and optimism of childhood, when the world promised to be so much more.

Oddly, Bird never once makes Tomorrowland actually look like the appealing dreamworld that he seems to wish the audience to be intoxicated by. First of all Tomorrowland is a bizarrely upbeat place of benign niceties and hollow spectacle. Then it becomes the anodyne and cloistered cocoon of Nix’s (a beyond hammy performance from Hugh Laurie) paranoid self-righteousness. Before finally becoming a singularly driven place of creative ambitions, bathed in permanently golden sunlight and wreathed in an equally brilliant agrarian corn-belt of contentment. The positive future projection that Bird has constantly talked up as being the divergence point between Tomorrowland and so many other cinematic futureworld science fictions of recent years, still contains within it a palpably unhinged and disturbing sense of dystopia, even whilst zealously endeavouring to imbue us all with entrepreneurial spirit. Looking at that closing scene what Tomorrowland are we actually seeing? The glorious, halycon step into the light, the vital spark? Or are we looking at a new fascism of the ‘gifted’, an elect of the can-do?

Skin I Live In, The (2011) – The Vaults: Review

La piel que habito (2011) – The Skin I Live In

The following review was originally posted on July 25, 2012 at one of my previous blogs https://apercucinephilia.wordpress.com/2012/07/25/la-piel-que-habito-2011-the-skin-i-live-in/

Dir:- Pedro Almodóvar

Starr:- Antonio Banderas, Elena Anaya, Marisa Paredes

Scr:- Pedro Almodóvar adapted from the novel ‘Mygale’ by Thierry Jonquet

DOP:- José Luis Alcaine

Producer(s):- Agustin Almodóvar, Pedro Almodóvar

About thirty minutes in to Almodóvar’s latest film I was ready to do that most dreaded of things for a cinephile, I was ready to turn the thing off. Yet Almodóvar, being the expert tease that he is, had planted just enough in those languorous opening sequences to keep my finger off of the stop button. The genius of the film’s slow start only becomes apparent once you make it through to the final third. The seeds are planted in those opening moments, but they come to fruition towards the end of the film, resulting in one of the most satisfying cinematic climaxes (this is Almodóvar afterall) of the year. Much like Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the film operates in and around obsession and manages to foreground a seduction of the audience, by offering up just enough information to make the question as to who this mysterious woman called Vera is of primary importance to the narrative – whilst being very far from the crux of the narrative. I don’t doubt there will be those who do not embrace the absurdities of La piel que habito’s plotting, but isn’t the absurd – or at least the superficially so – exactly where Almodóvar’s best works are always positioned?

La piel que habito is based upon a hardcore French crime novel, by the late Thierry Jonquet, called Mygale (or Tarantula in its English-language Serpent’s Tail publication). Like Carne Trémula before it, the film is a loose adaptation of the source material, keeping the broad outline of the plot in place, but carefully adjusting elements to allow for Almodóvar’s eccentric vision to come to the fore. Robert Ledgard (Banderas) is an eminent surgeon, who has participated in various successful face transplantations and has recently developed a new form of laboratory grown skin that is more durable than natural skin. He lives within a gated villa complex that also houses his clinic. Marilla (Paredes) is his housekeeper, who spends most of her time looking after the needs of a woman called Vera (Anaya), who appears to be one of Ledgard’s patients and has clearly suffered some kind of serious trauma. One of the key plot elements in the novel revolves around the character of Zeca, a criminal on the lam who kidnaps Vera to blackmail Ledgard into giving him reconstructive facial surgery. Almodóvar incorporates Zeca in a deranged blackly comic sequence, but ditches most of this part of the novel’s plotting in favour of exploring a much more twisted aspect of vengeance.

As ever when in thriller mode, Almodóvar falls back on his love of Hitchcock and in this instance Vertigo is the film that is obliquely providing a thematic template (alongside Georges Franju’s ethereal and haunting Les yeux sans visage). The key to Vertigo’s power was Hitchcock’s absolute understanding of obsession and how it relates to control. There has rarely been anything quite as frightening in cinema as Stewart’s countenance when he remakes Novak in the image of the woman he had loved and lost, and who has continued to haunt him ever since. In that intense hotel sequence Hitchcock’s own obsessions are allowed to run amok, as he channels colour, lighting and score into powerfully serving this moment of explicit control-freakery – the director’s direction laid bare. In La piel que habito Almodóvar takes things a step further. Unlike inVertigo Ledgard’s obsessive actions are not fuelled by what is in plain sight. Ledgard is not returning someone to the state in which he remembered and loved them – a disturbing element of Vertigo is how Stewart’s obsession is controlled by Tom Helmore’s stage managing of the Madeleine character – instead he is remaking a love out of the compacted fury of vengeance.

Banderas is scintillating throughout La piel que habito; a laconic, voyeuristic presence, very much in keeping with Eastwood’s vengeful strangers of the 60s and 70s, only with the addition of sexual charm and perversity. It is regrettable that a man so obviously talented at portraying the perverse has been so criminally underused, or ill-served, in his English-language film career. Back in Almodóvar’s fold, Banderas exudes a suffocating degree of arrogance, alongside a carefully suppressed rage, that makes his portrayal of surgeon, husband and father satisfyingly subtle and textured, with a particularly dangerous malignancy in and around the eyes (a vital image motif throughout the film). There is a haughty entitlement at work in Ledgard, which is to some degree explained by Marilla’s mid-film revelations. Banderas’s role could have so easily been that of another Frankenstein, or Vincent Price-inspired mad doctor, yet instead he comes across as multi-faceted and driven by an unyielding desire to control and dominate. Ledgard has been wronged in his life, but there is a real sense that the degree of hurt he has been exposed to is magnified by his own capacities for cruelty and torment. Furthermore, he has the surgeon/scientist’s propensity to seek out new challenges against which his excellence can be tested. In many ways Vera is not only an expression of Ledgard’s capacity for hatred and love, but also a living, breathing example of his skills as a surgeon and artist.

Throughout the film Almodóvar meticulously overloads his scenes, sets and costumes. The sheer amount of artwork in Ledgard’s coolly stylised house is at first distracting, without necessarily being comprehensible. Vera’s body suit and preference for yoga are flagrantly thrust in the viewers face, yet resolutely refuse to yield up any deeper significance until much later in the film. The absurdities of Zeca’s tiger outfit and the disguise that Ledgard wears at a crucial stage in the movie, are utterly OTT, but this extravagance helps to mask Almodóvar’s more intriguing thematic concerns until they coalesce in the films closing sequences. The final horrors of the movie are straight out of Franju and Fowles and yet Almodóvar makes a moment of transcendent virtue out of them, once more involving his beloved trinity of women, in which so many subtextual gender issues can be read. Vera is a creation of obsession and revenge. She is someone made to look like a perfect simulacrum of someone else. Her body is manipulated and reconstructed in much the same way as we later see Ledgard applying the controlled restraints to a bonsai tree. In Vera we have the surgeon’s attempts at perfection allied to a intense desire for retribution. Vera’s body becomes at once an alien site, a site of exotic recalibration, the body as malleable source material and the location of an atrocity. Ledgard recreates the wife he lost, whilst punishing her and the perceived tormentor of his daughter, and thus simultaneously melding together love and hate seamlessly. Never has a film found an image as powerful reflexive as Anaya’s adaptation to her new skin. This image disinters, in concentrated form, the twisted psychology of the central character.

Anaya’s performance is also a powerful and robust one. Initially her role is inscrutable, nearly silent and filtered through the lens within a lens of Ledgard’s CCTV setup. I’m unaware of any other cinematic character that has been so cryptically presented to an audience. For much of the opening sections of the movie Anaya is seen performing various yoga stretches in her body suit, whilst reading Alice Munro and working on some Louise Bourgeois mimicking sculptures. Almodóvar’s camera roves over her lycra-clad body, cleaving into the space between her thighs, describing the curvature of her buttocks, mapping out the femininity of her hips, stomach, chest and breasts. Anaya’s eyes are a repeat motif in the film, as their caramel brown colouring are a direct link with the hidden character of Vicente. Later, as Vera’s true nature is revealed, it is the eyes that once again haunt the imagination, with those wide-eyed appeals to the CCTV camera lens appearing more like a challenge. Anaya’s performance, although not quite the equal of Banderas’s still manages to fascinate. In the midsection of the film her physicality is palpably masculine and the gradual growth into her new skin, feels well thought out and realised.

Almodóvar’s film may be retreading familiar ground in terms of his love of Hitchcock and his use of intriguing crime-thriller material, but there is a sense, as with Hitchcock inVertigo and Marnie, that he is engaging in a more dangerous, direct and immediate apprehension of psychological fixation and obsession. There is also the omnipresent cheekiness of Almodóvar’s rather madcap humour, which helps to avoid or regulate any overt passages of sentimentality or fetishism. That said La piel que habito feels like a film that is thoroughly uninhibited by any degree of restraint on the part of the director, which goes so thoroughly against the controlled crafting of its narrative. Director and lead actor are engaged in a deadly dance, focused around their mutual appreciation of the depths of obsessive behaviour. It’s a hard movie to warm to at first, but once it gets past the deliberate vagaries of the present, it becomes a seething cauldron of explicit and implicit desires, played out against the maniacal psychology of Banderas’s Ledgard.

Pros

• Banderas turns in one of his career best performances in the lead role, reminding all of what a neglected talent he is.
• The accretion of visual details throughout the movie makes it a film that demands and rewards repeat viewings.
• It goes into terrain that only Almodóvar could go into without the film devolving into the shambolic mess of something like The Human Centipede.

Cons

• It’s  Almodóvar directing (a cinematic brand identity if ever there was one) and this immediately places an undue degree of expectation on proceedings that the film, initially, struggles to contend with.
• Almodóvar’s lengthy and prolific career means that he is almost certainly going to fall into certain clichéd ways of storytelling, and their are undoubtedly elements of the film that feel refried.
• The plotting requires an imaginative leap from the audience, but then isn’t that what the best cinema demands?

Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, A (2014) – Review

A moment of surreal horror as a British Army regiment herd African slaves into a Borowczykian torture device, to make sweet music out of death and suffering.

Roy Andersson works slowly and his films are entirely disinterested in speed. After nearly fifty years within the Swedish film industry he has only fourteen directorial credits to his name. Since 2000 he has worked upon a trilogy of films that share a similarly austere aesthetic and droll humour. They also utilise hefty amounts of CGI to digitally enhance the sets and soundstages that proliferate within them, given each of the complex deep focus compositions a true painterly quality. A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence follows on from You, the Living (2007) and Songs from the Second Floor (2000). As with both of those films it is a sketch work, more interested in sophisticated visual gags, comic ambiguities and surreal flights of fancy, than with anything as structured as a narrative. What distinguishes this final chapter of the trilogy, however, is the bleakly pessimistic quality of some of these vignettes.

Andersson is perilously close to both self-parody and audience critique. There are sequences in the film that seem to be calibrated for the purpose of deliberately challenging audience members who have laughed through the downbeat humour of the previous entries. How to make comic sense of scenes such as the mentally handicapped girl being coaxed through a poetry recitation by her teacher, or the monkey receiving electro-shock therapy whilst a scientist gossips on the phone to her friend, or – most audaciously – the African slave sequence featuring a torture device that seems to have crept out of the perversely moral imagination of Walerian Borowczyk? There has always been a bleakness to Andersson’s observations about his ghoulish characters, but that bleakness has invariably been tempered by a genuine affection for their struggles, and an empathy within the human comedy this creates. In A Pigeon… that has been replaced with a muted desperation and existential anxiety about the modern human condition that forces one character to repeatedly ask himself “Is it right for me to use others for my own fun?”.

The film actually begins with three curious deaths. The first is of a man straining to uncork a bottle of wine, and having a heart attack in the process. The second is of a woman who lies in a hospital bed clinging to a purse filled with jewellery and money – that her adult children are desperate to get their hands on – as death approaches. While the third is about a man who has dropped dead on a boat having just ordered a shrimp sandwich and a glass of beer. Each of these vignettes depicts a certain amount of human callousness and neglect. The wife of the man opening the wine is too busy singing in the kitchen to notice her husband’s predicament. The children of the old woman literally try to tear the bag out of the her hands. On board the boat the captain asks anyone if they would like a free beer or shrimp sandwich; to which query one gentleman passenger opts to take the beer. This heartlessness seems to predominate throughout the film, with people revealing a cruel selfishness in their behaviour that is both alienating and stultifying. In the same way that ambition and thwarted desire were motivators of much of the character action in You, the Living, here the characters are seemingly driven by a death-drive, an impulse toward annihilation.

In the opening pre-credit scene a harassed looking man wanders around the display cabinets of a museum. Two of the three casements display birds of prey in the process of preying upon a creature. The other casement has a tree in it, with the eponymous pigeon perched upon one of its branches. From the centre of this museum space, it looks as if the haunted human figure is being preyed upon and the pigeon looks on, musing. The humble pigeon is outside of the ridiculous cruelties and predations of human interaction and can appraise with due detachment the deranged, and deranging, human comedy that unfolds. Furthermore, this opening sequence introduces a key visual motif, namely the role of stasis within life. There may be human beings present in this film, but very few of them are either being human or are imbued with a sense of life.

There are some impressive vignettes that showcase Andersson’s stubborn adherence to the entrapping fixed frame. A flamenco class provides Andersson with the opportunity to explore a troubling relationship from an unusual angle. In this sequence a rotund female flamenco instructor leads a class through a dance routine, whilst occasionally physically groping and molesting the most agile and balletic of the male dancers, who is clearly discomfited by this physical attention. It is a direct gender reversal of the most commonly perceived predatory behaviour, namely the powerful male physically abusing a weaker female subordinate. The blatant nature of the molestation serves to complement this gender reversal and highlight how deeply disturbing such unwanted sexual advances actually are. Andersson doesn’t just leave the sequence there however, as he reinserts the flamenco instructor and her male muse into a later coffee shop/street sequence, in which a desperate attempt to reconcile or rekindle a love seems to be what is passing between them. This sly shift in context from the disturbing and horrendous to the despairing and heartbreaking is a frequent Andersson trope throughout the trilogy.

Ultimately, this feels like a harsher and less humane work than either of the preceding films. The recurring salesman characters do not have the same balance between ingratiating and pathetic qualities as say the alcoholic woman in You, the Living. Their desires and impulses are more ambiguous and, as a result, less compelling. One scene that does return to the well of fellow feeling that is so deep and rich in the earlier films is a delightful timeshift sequence, in which a deaf old man remembers the seductions of a bar owner back in 1943, that made a loyal patron of him. This is buried amongst the horrors that torment Andersson’s Gothenburg populace, who seem forever upon the brink of giving up, but, much like the frame, find a way to move on, no matter what.

Edited on 16/05/2015 at 17:58 (GMT): The review had originally claimed that the dance scene was a tango class, when in actual fact it is a flamenco class.

Rover, The (2014) – Review

The Rover (2014) features a coolly desaturated palette of arid browns, sickly sodium-light greens and blanched flesh tones.

 

I was a farmer and now I am here.

Eric (Guy Pearce) to Reynolds (Robert Pattinson) in answer to a question about his occupation.

Not everything has to be about soming.

Reynolds responding to Eric’s inquiry as to why he has chosen to share a memory with him.

A threat means there’s still something left to happen.

Eric’s response to a Soldier’s (Anthony Hayes) remark about being threatened.

The Rover is an enticing addition to Australia’s ‘weird’ cinema traditions, directed with some confidence by David Michod, whose last film was the critically-lauded Animal Kingdom. It is essentially a post-apocalyptic revenge movie set, as a brief screen note cryptically confirms, “Ten years after the collapse”. There is also a liberal helping of Southern Gothic at work, as evidenced by Robert Pattinson’s striking turn as a retarded American criminal lost in the Australian outback. Michod’s sense of direction is so assured that the film manages to subtly background its own lack of narrative by making it comparable to the lack of meaning to be found in this nightmarish near-future. The metatextuality carries on in sequences such as when Pattinson’s Reynolds listens to a pop song about being beautiful and successful – things that the actor is all too aware of from his early Twilight franchise success. This is a wild west Australia, where life is grim, brutish and invariably short. It is hard to think of any other recent film in which human life has been dispatched with such atrocious immediacy. Perhaps, the closest comparable work might be John Boorman’s hitman death dream Point Blank (1967), another film that uses intense sunlight and a coolly desaturated palette to create a cinematic ‘otherness’ to a landscape.

The film’s plot is unbearably slight. However, this masks a quietly effective realisation of a future landscape where American dollars are everything, Asian communities seem to predominate, food is scarce, security even scarcer and recognisable humanity the rarest commodity of all. Guy Pearce’s Eric is the central figure in this wasteland. Introduced as a drifter in possession of a car, it is through the theft of this vehicle by Henry (Scoot McNairy) and his band of multi-ethnic criminals, that the film jump-starts its narrative. From the moment the car is stolen Eric is in pursuit of the criminals. A degree of crazed hopelessness seems to mark Eric out as a particularly dangerous individual. When Henry’s crew choose not to kill Eric early on in the film, the stage is effectively set for a final act of bloody vengeance.

Pearce plays this laconic role with an air of fatalism hanging constantly over his character. Seething with incomprehensible rage against the state of humanity, and perhaps his own soul, Pearce’s dogged pursuit plays out like a gnomic act of redemption. Reynolds somehow insinuates himself into what is left of Eric’s affections. As Henry’s younger brother, Reynolds has been left behind at the scene of a shoot-out with the police. Seemingly the rest of Henry’s crew have given Reynolds up for dead, but Henry feels some remorse for leaving his kid brother behind. Pattinson’s rendering of this difficult character makes for an intriguingly modern interpretation of the Dostoevskian innocent fool, in the Myshkin mode. Reynolds is all stutter and overbite, vacillating between blank incomprehension and garbled mysticism. Ultimately, it is Reynolds who rekindles a slight flame of fellow feeling in Eric, only to snuff that out at the film’s close.

It is Henry’s perceived act of desertion, by leaving his brother at the scene of a bloody crime, that brings about the vendetta logic of the closing shootout. At this moment Eric seems to become the wrathful exacting agent of sibling betrayal, the violent means through which Reynolds will confront and kill his brother. In the demented bushlands and arid tundra of this near lawless future Australia revenge is very much a contagion. There are at least three sources for this disease in the film, all of them converging upon Eric: the military police, the criminal crew and a nameless assailant.

The film’s aesthetics and narrative concerns are very much those of an earlier period of US cinema, from the late-1960s and early-1970s. Two more touchstone films would be the Clint Eastwood double-header of The Beguiled (1971) and High Planes Drifter (1973). Both of these films feature wounds, a Southern Gothic ambience, drifters and deferred vengeance. Whereas both of those films had a fever dream of haunting eroticism and powerful sexuality at their core, The Rover never lets such a clamorous and hysterical atmosphere be fully felt. It is a film almost entirely devoid of the sexual impulse and all the more chilling and detached for it. When the sexual does find some form of expression it is as deformed and warped as the society that it inhabits.

What is highly impressive throughout the film is the manner in which Eric’s humanity incongruously pierce’s through the taut and angular features of Pearce’s face, particularly at moments when they are riven with hatred and loathing. Pearce’s performance in close-up is as good as he has yet realised on screen, with so much being conveyed by the slightest shift in muscle tension. Michod’s measured direction helps to maintain the ambiguity of these expressions, showing an innate confidence in both his material and how his audience will be able to make sense of it. Once again Australian cinema embraces the hauntingly primeval and compromised qualities of the country’s landscape, creating a tonal poem of desolation that stuns.