Our whispered rainbow

Almost a haiku

A marmalade wink a honey smile
Eggs umbrellas of tears
Our whispered rainbow always worn.

for my remarkable Mother (8/1/1927-2/9/2007)


"Men everywhere have vied for her heart since the beginning of time. From our ancestor Adam, right up to Adam Smith [The Wealth of Nations]...Everyone thinks their version is the [true story]." So begins Garin Nugroho's Opera Jawa from Indonesia- the village elders able to read everyone's fate in a pig's liver. Inspired by the story from the epic Sanskrit poem Ramayana, the film is sung in Javanese gamelan style throughout and propelled by raw, beautiful choreography - think of impassioned Martha Graham dance but much slower. Commissioned as one of Peter Sellars' New Crowned Hope Festival films marking Mozart's 250th birth anniversary, it's the story of Dewi Sinta, a beautiful girl who marries a potter but is tempted by a malevolent male butcher. Every scene looks absolutely amazing (shot in only 2 weeks!) and some almost surreal as in the Edward Hopper bar room with flamenco dancing to the Javanese equivalent of legendary freedom folk guitarist Robert Johnson. Dewi Sinta's story is at heart a parable about the innocent earth being ravaged by the evils of mankind.

Lady Chatterley, a French adaptation of a DH Lawrence story by Pascale Ferran, does a pretty good job of evoking Lawrence's erotic blend of Mother Nature and sexual desire. Lady of the manor Constance Chatterley (Marina Hands) discovers their gamekeeper Parkin (Jean-Louis Coulloc'h) at the bottom of her garden, so to speak, and for the next three hours of cinema has her jonquils tended to. Does the film itself need pruning? Well, distributor Artificial Eye, whose normal haunt is the art house circuit, tried a wider release here. And seeing this picture on a huge Cineplex screen does hold your interest. There's little chemistry between Chatterley and Parkin apart from the obvious but that's also the point of the film. Coulloc'h has none of the swashbuckling machismo of an Oliver Reed or Alan Bates but he is very simple, strong and earthy for Marina Hands' peahen. And thankfully there's very little music score to guild their passion.

Small DVD outfit Bluebell (no website) gives us more French passion. Camille (Karin Viard) is no peahen more skewer bird as she seeks her male sustenance in Paris. After many one-night stands, she encounters married Socialist Party organiser Alexis (Pierre-Loup Rajot) and keeps after him. Catherine Corsini's La Nouvelle Eve (The New Eve - 1999) is another of producer Paulo Branco's soulful character studies with absolutely no music (except for the parties) to distract you from the performances. With understated cinematography from genius Agnès Godard, it's not an art house shattering experience by any means, but nor does it set out to be.

Last month, Bluebell DVD also re-issued Pascal Bonitzer's Rien sur Robert and Christopher Frank's Love in the Strangest Way. The latter is a decent French femme fatale revenge thriller in which Nadia Fares worms her way into Thierry L'Hermitte's happy family life and his affections to wreck havoc. Rien sur Robert (Nothing on Robert) has a number of neurotic women upsetting the world of mid-life film journalist Didier (Fabrice Luchini). His young girlfriend Juliette (Sandrine Kiberlain) says she loves only him while openly sleeping with another. Didier is thence drawn into the web of the very cute but neurotic Valentina Cervi. It's all a bit French but very watchable.

Another Bluebell (all are mid-price, no extras) is Korean director Jae-eun Jeong's Take Care of My Cat about five former schoolfriends trying to find excitement in the lifeless port of Inchon. The cat in question is 'tee-tee' a birthday present for Ji-young who lives in a shanty home where the roof always threatens to collapse and finally does. Hee-joo, meanwhile, left to work in Seoul's financial services. This isn't a surprising script but it's a charmingly observed one.

The friendship in Joachim Trier's Norwegian Reprise (out in cinemas this week) is a 'what if' scenario. My Norwegian grammar stops at the echoing past of the noun fjord so I'm not quite sure of the correct tense, but it's a good trivia question to ask how many films begin with 'He would have done x, if y had had that'. Reprise begins with this past conditional and 23-year-old friends Erik (Espen Kloumann Høiner) and Philip (Anders Danielsen Lie), novelists both posting off their initial opus. Their milieu is Oslo Bataille/Barthes reading bourgeois youth but their creativity is the existentialism of a novel like Knut Hamsun's Hunger (1899) about a starving young writer. Like Hunger, Reprise is less concerned about milieu and more about the growth of soul and self. I first saw Reprise at last year's London Film Festival and was a touch perplexed by the narrative. On a recent second viewing you realise that that's exactly the point. There's a taste of Godard rustled up by Olivier Bugge Coutte's editing and indeed, Philip's girlfriend Kari (Victoria Winge) has the captivating screen presence of Godard's muse Anna Karina. Both Philip and Kari love The Ramones and dislike The Clash. There's also a subtle bitter flavour of Hamsun's Nazi sympathies in the mix. This is a very impressive debut for director and co-writer Joachim Trier. And it's the third and equally impressive release from new Brit indie distributor Diffusion. Trier's also a Norwegian skateboard champion and distant relative of Lars von Trier.

Is Col Spector's Brit debut film Someone Else existential or just plain solipsistic? Set in London, thirtysomething photographer David (Stephen Mangan) ditches loyal gal Lisa (Susan Lynch) for dipsy Nina (Lara Belmont) and finds that he can't go back and reprise or even appease Lisa. And would you really trust a guy who thought you liked Jethro Tull? Lisa didn't. Though Spector's co-written dialogue is very sharp and witty, the story ain't much. And it's a film easy to dismiss because of the latter. Interestingly, Spector signed up to RSA Films as a commercials director but the film is almost entirely filmed in mid-shot without any camera choreographic antics. Given the film's short 78 minutes it leads you to think that Spector knows exactly what he wants and that he's conveying that sense of observed urban alienation, particularly a London one, where everybody appears to be happy in the bars and dinner parties but in reality just isn't. Mangan hasn't got that Clive Owen lone prowler's face, more a hangdog likability that gets adopted from the cold and curls up at the foot of a female's bed. And the performances Spector elicits from the rest of his actors are uniformly first-rate. I wish he'd not used music at the end,though,instead of just letting the images speak for themselves.

Helping to lure or keep your significant other half, The Speciality and Fine Food Fair this week in London had some tantalising hand-made morsels from young independent companies. The Wicked Fruit Company has a great logo, hot chilli chocs and some very fetching new lavender ones. A young, seductive Frenchman in Brighton started The Chocolate Empire two years ago and has wondrous choc concoctions. Last year it was dark choc basil, this year poor relation white chocolate leapt forward with subtle lemongrass and poppy seed, cranberries and ylang ylang. Some alluring and very knowledgeable girls from Raw Intent sung a mermaid's song to woo me away from red meat and into their healthier chocolate cove of Aphrodesia Luxury Chocolate spread, ancient Taoist and Tibetan longevity wolfberries, and their range of superfood powders including protein punch. Their luxury raw chocolate pie is so good you only need tiny portions to partake in Raw Intent's siren song that definitely wont send you to your death. The husband and wife team of The Perfectly Delicious Company quit their city finance jobs and after a year now produce handmade natural biscuits that they sell back to the boardrooms they once sat in. Now that's what I call jammy job satisfaction.

Interesting also to chat to the coffee roasters around the issues of Fairtrade products. Unbeknownst to most people, just because your coffee doesn't have a Fairtrade label doesn't mean the farmers aren't necessarily getting a fair deal as the man from the wonderfully named Grumpy Mule pointed out. The same goes for Union Hand Roasted. But you do have to do your homework and find companies you can trust. The coffee exploitation debate was well promulgated in the recent doco Black Gold helping enormously to raise awareness. For Fairtrade spices try Steenbergs Organic, the first UK business to introduce Fairtrade spices and this year they have a fully certified Vanilla essence.

And if all that healthy eating has got you into planet-saving mode, you could try adopting an olive tree in Italy from Nudo, a company set up by an ex-TV producer Brit couple. For £65 a year you not only get your tree but all its produce which, when you do your math, is a really good deal. 970 of their 1200 trees have so far been adopted. It's such a good idea that Selfridges included an adoption in each of their Christmas hampers last year.

If you needed to give your alien friend from another galaxy, or indeed a non-Brit, an educational Christmas present on contemporary British life, this week has your answer. Sixteen Films have two volumes of Ken Loach, Optimum has its Shane Meadows set (with their usual copious extras) giving a Northern perspective, and Fabulous Films have Mike Leigh's High Hopes set in London. I haven't been able to view the DVD's but these films are all fantastic and many of them quite funny, albeit bleakly. BBC TV screens its last episode in their splendid British Film Forever series tonight Comedy. Matthew Sweet's hip script is cheekily voice-overed but the footage will enthrall everyone.

The laugh outloud comedies of the past couple of weeks couldn't have been more diverse. Knocked Up hails from Hollywood and writer/director/producer Judd (The 40-Year-Old Virgin) Apatow. TV entertainment journo Alison (Katherine Heigl- Grey's Anatomy) has a one night stand with 'boy's own' reefer couch potato Ben (Seth Rogen) and to her horror falls pregnant. They agree to differ on their differences and go ahead with the birth. Brit crits have uncharacteristically enthused about Knocked Up. Perhaps it was Loudon Wainwright III's (who also plays Alson's doctor) final ironic song track Grey in LA, bemoaning the city's endless blue skies. Maybe that swayed the critics into thinking it wasn't really a Hollywood film at all. And don't get me wrong, it is actually funny with some great scripting and performances, and for Hollywood, quite risqué in language (Cert. 15 here). A good date movie with Heigl particularly watchable in the 'not-as-easy-as-it-looks' tall, willowy blonde stock role. I just wasn't moved to laugh aloud.

2 Days in Paris had me chuckling all the way, though. Well-known French actress Julie Delpy has written, directed, co-produced, edited, scored as well as sings a track in this Woody Allenesque couple flic. She even cast her own parents as Marion's (Julie Delpy!) Paris old hippie folks. Marion now lives in New York, is very loyal, but a bit flirty and this Paris trip is to placate her laconic NYC boyfriend (Adam Goldberg) after a less than successful one to Venice. Delpy's mission was not an easy one to pull off but this film goes way beyond expectations and will no doubt have producers battering down her door for future projects. Actors are very good at internalising their observations of human minutia but often not so good at manifesting them into words. Delpy cast herself as stooge to the wry, politically incorrect humour she's written for Goldberg. And the 'translation' jokes (Adam has no French) that can fall so flat, soar with Delpy's expertise.

No much humour to be found in this week's London Tube strike that cost the capital an estimated £50 million (3 day strike reduced to 2 day), a "pointless strike" said Chamber of Commerce's Colin Stanbridge. Prospective business will think, "London isn't the place we thought to set up." Well, I think readers will know my feelings on that one. Interesting interview with the RMT union's honcho Bob Crow on ITV Local (Wednesday 5/9/07), and against popular opinion, I do think he has a very important point. After the plethora of failed delivery promises from Metronet, now in receivership, Crow is probably right not to trust any of them. I feel much the same about my Housing Association landlords (don't believe the website!). Bob Crow wants cast-iron assurances for his members on the issues of pensions and redundancies. Cast-iron with no cryptonite! And he's absolutely right when he says "the public own the railways and they were stolen from us". I do take issue with some slightly anti-American comments he made though such as "the MD was sitting in the room for 9 hours yesterday [!], was he singing American folklore to him or something?” I think you'll find that the democratic ideals of American folklore are on your side Bob, rather than the multi-nationals. What was so galling about the strike was the absence of any extra buses to ease the strain and the lack of information for passengers transferring on unfamiliar routes, "absolutely dreadful" to quote one train passenger.

Grayrigg Derailment
Train crash points not inspected

Maybe the last word should go to Alan Weisman whose new book The World Without Us, about what will inherit the earth when us humans are defunked, was featured on Jon Stewart's The Daily Show. No, actually. The last word really should go to my remarkable mother, who even in her worst pain always managed a smile. There wasn't a single morning when she didn't awake and feel that the world was a beautiful place. Her prophecies, intimated to only a few, may have seemed strange. But she knew in her bountiful goodness, that there are indeed forces in the world that don't always wish us well. And she always managed never to let down one single person in her entire life. If London transport were like my mother, you'd never have need of a union or a sleeping pill in the first place.


Almost a haiku is Copyright 2007 Andrew Lucre