Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations (Metropolitan Museum, New York)

Last day of London's Sci-Fi Film Festival tomorrow (Monday May 7). Go HERE for an interview with the creative team behind Journey to Planet X (Tribeca Film Festival).

As the world starts thinking about descending on London for the Olympics, LucresLondon is now going global! Life is never quite where you expect it to be ;)

Go HERE for coverage of New York's Tribeca Film Festival 2012

.. ..deep order...

We always try to put on a good show don't we? A good spread. Don't let the side down. Make an appearance but don't outstay one's welcome. Not so always, of course. Not so much so that we do not dare do throw ourselves off the nearest parapet in fear of landing on an adjacent ledge. "Once we had anarchy in the UK. Now all we have is monarchy in the UK" is the title of Julie Burchill's latest Observer article. Yet there was almost the Spanish Armada on the Chiswick Thames when a lone protestant swimmer propelled himself into the path of the annual Oxford-Cambridge boat race. Oars were broken, tears spilled and David Beckham's peg-leg was no where in sight;)
Jerry Rothwell's documentary Town of Runners (April 20) has its world premier at New York's downtown Tribeca Fest (April 19th) charting the course of two teenage Olympic hopefuls. The rural Ethiopian town of Bekoji having a track record in champions.

Was the Thames rowing incident some sort of sign? A premonition of a 2012 Olympics to come? Helas. Non. That event's greatest worry is that a purely pragmatic problem of logistically challenged infrastructure just may rear its head if one ailing cog falls out of place. What the boat race intervention did presage is precisely what all but those who were socially antennae challenged didn't catch onto in the recent London riots. That many people don't have what you have and want it! It has bugger all to do with elitism or political agenda. Why else would citizens burn down their own neighbourhood if not out of some Freudian trauma of the Fatherland not delivering even a whiff of the Garden of Eden?

Is the Fourth plinth rocking horse in Trafalgar Sqare's regression to childhood security/ uncertainty a gateway back to the future? How one human can catch the attention, if not of the world, then at least the world of England. Very easily. “England,” declares German artist (Serpentine Gallery) Hans-Peter Feldman, “is the biggest kitsch country in the world,” in a recent Financial Times interview. Gilbert and George seem to be making their v challenging work in recent memory at the White Cube gallery elevating ordinary faux extraordinary newspaper headlines into iconic status. Eureka DVD has just re-issued The Gospel According to Matthew(Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1964) where 'ordinary' people rather than actors prove that what happened all those millenia ago was in fact possible of being extraordinary. Meanwhile filmmaker Patrick Keiller (Tate Britain) rattles the bones of our being with what lies beneath in our fair British isle. And Dexter Fletcher's impressive Wild Bill is a tale truer than most about surviving and finally being eaten by London reality. Even more impressive as a debut is Breathing (April 20) with a slightly more happier outcome relative to the road it must first travel.
Joachim Trier's Oslo, August 31 is out on DVD.

What British cinema has always done best is show how resourceful under fire can be the little cogs in that un-oiled greater wheel of fire - Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (April 20)being an example in the vein of Bill Forsythe's Local Hero. It's unashamedly Hollywoody in many regards, and all the better for that yet never sacrificing dialogue (Simon Beaufoy) and character detail. Its politics are more In the Loop vein and damn close to how the game of Westminster is really played. Money talks and if a Yemen sheik wants to throw 50 million pounds into UK government coffers to make salmon fishing a reality in the desert it's no slap in the face with a wet one! The sheik's foe miss the bigger picture and his vision of a very modest Garden of Eden. So too the Brits. Ewan McGregor and Emily Blunt's roles are pawns in the sheik's chess game but as if a fairy tale they blossom into a king and queen on their very modest stage.

If onlyMirror Mirror had half the tongue in cheek wit and sophistication of Whit Stillman's Damsels in Distress. Tarsem Singh owes his Hollywood directing career to creating wondrous production design to spin a tensile web around his often less than resilient plots. And while Mirror is an enjoyable 110min it is certainly no Enchanted. The dwarfs have edgy comic bite, Nathan Lane's enormous talents are never allowed to make the prince very memorable beyond his sculptured torso. Julia Roberts sends her (not so) aging image up rotten with comic nuance, while Lily Collins acts as a delightful jejeune foil to all of them.

Damsels in Distress (April 27), however, (New York director Whit Stillman's first movie in a well-over a decade) is - like all his films- a fairy tale much closer to the world of Grimm. Suicide is a plot line, anal (consenting?) rape is as calmly declenshed as a Latin verb."What the world needs is a large mass of normal people," opines Violet (Greta Gerwig) the film's lynch-pin among the university students of Seven Oakes College. Violet together with her dorm-mates rather than carelessly watching Rome burn fervently believe that they can be a United Nations ameliorator to the rather uncouth smelly soap- challenged boys who will make a boozy attempt at the Ides of March. What's fascinating about Mr Stillman's world is that it could be easily equated to an honest-to-goodness bourgeoisie in any country not just America. Violet and her friends may superficially eek of noblesse oblige (which in a very true sense are their actions) but, ironically, it stems from a deep rooted concern for the common good. Not so much 'let them eat cake' rather 5-star cooking classes are free and available to all who enter in.
Minnell's The Bad and the Beautiful gets re-released April 20. Violet would no doubt have cried buckets when she would later in years probably see Some Came Runnning.
US indy hit Tiny Furniture just had a UK release. It's creator Lena Dunham has her new series Girls out soon on HBO in the States.

What's so worrying about a very British coup is that the rabble rouses (from all classes as seen from the riot post-mortem) only know to break in and ransack the larder in favour of sweets and a big Mac. Stillman's film is where so many of us would like to be: problems that are real to us rather than those that crash through our roof like some aerial invasion, completely alien to us. Those of us who have so much higher an aspiration of what a popular culture could be. Doug Emmett's hi-def cinematography gives everything the rose-tinted look of a chocolat ad making every glint of sunshine sparkle all the more and giving Ciera Wells' costumes the look of an Upper East Side New York kasbah!

They almost outshine Ray Aghayan's costumes (CinemaScope) in Caprice a late career (1967) Doris Day vehicle and one that she readily disowned. It's not a bad film by any means and very well suited to director Frank Tashlin's comedic prowess (before working with Jerry Lewis he cut his teeth in Warner Brothers animation department. What's more there's loads of other great talent here. Aside from Richard Harris in his prime, Ray Walston plays an obsessed industrial chemist (a household name in American TV after playing the extraterrestrial Uncle Martin in My Favorite Martian. Lilia Skala as the Swiss perfume chemist - an actress who'd worked with theatre maestro Max Reinhardt, fled the Nazis to New York and penniless, rose the ladder again from menial jobs to Broadway.

Adorning Violet's wall in Damsels in Distress is a poster for Jean Renoir's classic La Grand Illusion (1937 and given a great Blu-ray treatment by Studio Canal this week). Inspired by British economist Norman Angell's book - which argued that war is futile because of the common economic interests of all European nations - Renoir (a bourgeois by dint of his father being the great painter August Renoir) paints a cinematic canvas (in B/W) where the colour of C20th reality keeps bleeding into the characters' thoughts during WW1 officer POW internment. Renoir stated that the film was 'a story about human relationships. I am confident that such a question is so important today that if we don’t solve it, we will just have to say ‘goodbye’ to our beautiful world." Jean Gabin plays the working-class character and it's an illuminating comparison with Marel Carne's 1938 Quai des Brumes (Port of Shadows, re-issued by the BFI May 4) in which Gabin also represents an underdog, the army deserter. "If I see a swimmer, I immediately think he’ll drown, so I paint a drowned man,” says the Le Havre artist in Quai des Brumes. Does he presage his own suicide and is it a fulfillment of fate?

La Grande Illusion could so easily be Stillman's characters a generation on. The youngsters idealism is yet to betray decay. Violet feels it but doesn't know that that is exactly what it is. She loses (to one of her 'gang') her boyfriend who isn't even worthy of the name underdog and goes into what she euphemistically calls "tail-spin" rather than suicide mode. Deep down beneath all her calm cardigans what she desperately seeks is a Jean Gabin to secretly keep alive. Someone to challenge her pre-conceptions. But of course it would only really work in one of her dance sequences. And all would prove futile outside the world of bodily freedom and conform. The real 'Gabin' boy would always be a 'catcher in the rye'. Would always rebel against Violet's philosophical comport. And as much as he truly may end up loving such as her, his yearn for the sea would always prevail. Or just maybe they'd cross the mountains in Sound of Music style.
Aki Kaurismäki's Le Havre is on release as well as Curzon (and the UK art-house circuit) new very good value 'on demand' service for first-run releases.

Does Mondrian Nicholson in Parallel makes us think about the real world or do we remain wandering abstractly? The Courtauld makes a great case for the former in another of its small but beautifully formed gallery shows. Nicholson (Mondrian's junior by 20 years) was blown away by his visit to the then little known Mondrian's Paris studio. The latter then became a Hampstead neighbour of Nicholson's in London. And in so many ways they saw the world in the same vein though on parallel paths. They both sculpted out of the paint with Nicholson going so far as to make minimalist "white reliefs" whose shadows were (very arguably amongst art historians) the equal of Mondrian's vibrant expressways. A conference last month at the Courtauld Institute made one even more fascinated by how these two artists confluenced or challenged each other. Student Vanja V. Malloy delivered an intriguing paper on the physics rife at the time that would have influenced these artists while another student gave what on paper seemed would be a somewhat boring presentation (far from it) on re-creating in 3D the interiors of Mondrian's various studios. Some first hand memories varied very, very widely indeed causing one to consider just how reliable are all those primary source citations in our art history gathering. Moreover, another lecture initiated debate over just how much Nicholson was part of any avant-garde artistic circle in spite of sources claiming that he definitely was.
Gift to Courtauld will make London a world centre of Buddhist art studies.


Somerset House has a spring offering from London-based Chilean Fernando Casasempere who's filled the freshly-grassed courtyard of the Fountain Court with 10,000 rhythmically-spaced ceramic flowers. It's an oasis of calm compared to the dull thudding of real life, crazy traffic, people, cyclists on the Strand. Ah - "to sit upon a hill as I do now" and escape life's battles as Shakespeare's Henry VI did. What drives people to do so many horrible things? They do them even in the quietest of places. 'Crazy' maverick director Werner Herzog goes in search of those on death row - Into The Abyss: A Tale Of Death, A Tale Of Life . He observes, questions, never judges and is openely an opponent of the death penalty. Why do people kill? It's not so much an answer as a meditation on this question in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. Nothing much happens in this film and yet, of course everything does. One memorable moment is when the police with their suspect in tow, have a break from finding where he buried in the bleak Turkish landscape and at 3am in the morning pop into the local Mayor's house for a bite to eat. The Mayor uses the opportunity to politically lever a request that they get funding for a morgue - for a village in the middle of nowhere.

In Paolo Sorrentino's first English language film This Must Be the Place Sean Penn is an ageing Goth (akin The Cure) who traverses America to avenge his father. It's a beautifully shot film and Penn is tremendous. Yet what made Sorrentino such a fascinating Italian director of this new century was the way in which he harked back to an almost operatic view of history, politics and the personal. His latest film feels like Wim Wenders in America when it really longs to be more in the realm of Puccini's opera La fanciulla del West (The Girl of the West). There's always something cool, detached, inevitable in Sorrentino and the film's final scene is that and operatic. There's never a round of applause at the end of a Wenders movie. But with Sorrentino it's almost as if the whole cinemascape is a show for an unseen hand. An Althussian dialectic perhaps with a cut-away to an imagined audience. There's a finality to life in This Must Be the Place whereas in other Sorrentino the wheel of life trundles on regardless even though the curtain has fallen.

Another prism through which to view life: The Hourglass Sanatorium and the Polish sensibility under censure. So much so that the print had to be smuggled out of the country to make it to the Cannes Fest and win a prize. Jafar Panahi was banned form making any films in Iran and his This is Not a Film was secreted to the West on a memory stick. (Palisades Tartan)

The Deep Blue Sea (Blu-ray) a parallel world perhaps to
Las Acacias [Blu-ray] (Pablo Giorgelli, 2011)
And on BBC Radio 4's Start the Week Peter Carey discusses his new novel The Chemistry of Tears in the context of the world's future past.

..the physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living
Damien Hirst at the Tate Modern

a book of disquiet

What is it to be obsessed/obsessive? Is it synonymous with egoism? Clearly not in so many causes as it has more to do with the object rather than the id. And indeed can be either a force for good or ill? I think we all really wanted to like Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Stephen 'Billy Elliot' Daldry's) new film about a kid dealing (or not) with the trauma of losing his dad in the 9/11 Twin Towers collapse. But the film engenders anger rather than consolation/hope/imagination. Should the source novel be read? I almost did but at the end of the day thought better of it. A film becomes its own entity. And don't get me wrong. It is very much a film worth seeing if only to discover why so many people are still so very angry about 9/11. Not so much the event. The loss. But about the verboten unspoken. It's worth the ticket price alone to see Max von Sydow's silent performance - an entire film in itself: the 'renter' of the boy's aunt's apartment who lives across the street and who Oskar walkie-talkie's.

The 'renter' lived through an even greater trauma - that of the Dresden bombing and the holocaust. And my instinct tells me that Mr. Daldry made (inadvertently) a great film about not being able to make a sublime film that kissed the horrible flaws of what could have been THAT movie. We know Sandra Bullock and Tom Hanks can ACT (as they exhibit here as ever consummately) and that they're constantly ridiculed for sorta not ever being considered as real actors. But they are so peripheral to this movie whose real star is Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn). And probably Mr. Daldry's great skill is in directing young talent/artists. But we sense that Oskar is screaming. Mr Daldry puts the kid on cinematic Prozac instead! Should he have gone further with the adults? It's difficult to say. But you almost feel that Sydow dared Mr. Daldry to force him to speak and that that dare was never taken up.

So much was unsaid about 9/11. To the extent that the prevailing winds couldn't even admit that loyal American citizens could possibly consider jumping out of a window in the face of adverse horror. To the point where film makers were demanded by government to erase images of 'the towers' from their movies to avoid...ahhhh...ummmm what exactly? If that's your starting point you have one helluva a climb to the pinnacle of any truth whatsoever. Does Oskar have Asperger's Syndrome or, moreover, does everybody else in their desperate longing to hug and 'reach out' to this child. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close attempts magic but plumets whimsy. And that makes one angry. How dare you tell me to move on, reach out to me when you've never experienced THAT kind of loss. It makes Oskar furious to the point where he 'steals' the answaphone with his Dad's last messages an places it with a facsimile machine so his Mum (nor anyone else but him) will ever hear them. And the child has finally convinced himself (rightly or wrongly) that the 'you' in that final message relates solely to him. And as we seethe with fury at how his Dad has been told to trust in the 'stay where you are and all will be fine' advise messages. Oskar will see/find the 'missing borough' of Manhattan on the far off hillside (that so oft his Dad mischievously had wafted about his child), traversed the valley, and summitted the mountain only to find that the golden windows of escape were a refection of whence he'd travelled.

In many ways Roman Polanski's Carnage (adapted from Yasmina Reza's play) is a far superior film in depicting the underbelly of Manhattan and yet in so many ways insubstantial compared to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close's soul of seeking enlightenment. It is very funny and very incredibly too close for comfort. The parents of two kids meet at one of their abodes (ultimately disintegrating) after the event of one 'sprog' assaulting the other in a playground. If either parents are anything to go by, the kids had little or none of the sense of life's wonder that Oskar's dad had instilled in him. For all Extremely Loud's frenetic New York actualite, Polanski's studio recreation of those denizen's inner lives breathes a far truer spark.

It's not easy to enjoy Bruno Dumont's films. But if one perseveres, you do feel as if you've touched the hand of some higher power. The real 'reaching out'. Twentysomething Céline (Julie Sokolowski) escaped the bourgeois claustrophobia of her parents, became Hadewijch (after a C13th mystic poet) in a nunnery but was so self-obsessed and devout that she was ostracised back to normality. A kindred spirit to Oskar in many ways in that they both think they see the light but it is merely a reflection of their own obsession. Céline attends a discussion group on “the notion of the invisible” incrementally magnetised to the 'boys' of a Islam group. Sokolowski's face is inescapable on the screen almost succeeding in convincing you that there is something irresistibly beyond. What results is somewhat of a profound understanding of how easy fundamentalism is incubated. Céline is more than a moth around a flame: she succumbs to the gravitational pull of her own reflection. The polar opposite of Simone Weil's philosophical writings/teachings of Gravity and Grace whereby one must empty oneself of the ego to be drawn to the centrifugal light.

a great synthesis of the great body of small partial truths

world enough and time
Copyright 2009 Andrew Lucre (with obvious free sources)

Do we really? Ever. Want to be where we are? Always hankering for somewhere/something at least once removed? Isn't the Christmas/New Year season a time where we inhabit that limbo or libidiness of just once in a lifetime? Do we take what seems such an innocent step into the shallow tide only to fall flat on our face in the countenance of a higher something. Curtis in Take Shelter (UK distributed by The Works) is perhaps the Everyman of our civilisation. He doesn't want to say 'I told you so' in post-self congratulation, rather, 'I think it is so' in celebration of what it is to behold our planet. Such is the magnetic truth of Jeff Nichols' film (also a Sundance 2011 hit) that any cavils are out-anchored by such a dictum. Particularly in America where normality is projected as so much of a given. After Lars von Trier's typical laser dissection of family-hiss in the face of Melancholia and Earth's extinction in all its Medusa beautification, Another Earth (opener for this year's Raindance Film Fest and this year's Sundance Fest hit and on general release by Fox Searchlight, Dec 9) proved an elegaic tale of how otherness ain't necessarily so. While there are many similarities to the 1969 Journey to the Far Side of the Sun (where everything is an earth but in reverse) Another Earth is more akin to the Philip K. Dick world of how everyday mundanity strangely proves the thing itself.

Fox Searchlight are proving to be a frontrunner for studio indie product: who'd have thought they'd ever take on a film for US distribution such as Shame (the latest from artist Steve McQueen)- Momentum releases in the UK. Like all McQueen's work to say it is 'about' something reduces the work to that only. Shame isn't just about sex addiction. It reeks of people trapped and embrassing architecture both of high-rise and its low-rise people. Of predicaments that are as unruly as the elements. And you'd have thought that the story of We Were Here had been recounted before but no. Sentiment that far outways sentimentality.

Terence Davies' adaption of Rattigan's play The Deep Blue Sea is another case in point. Anyone who knows their Rattigan knows that he was truly a dramatist precursor of John Osbourne's 'kitchen-sink' drama (reference the recent Royal National Theatre revivals) and not merely a slate to be wiped clean. Davies' film is a ballet of looks, desires, felled emotions in silent corridors that outweigh any historical context. Davies pushes the use of extant music to its exteme cinematic ends in his films - no less here than with Samuel Barber's Violin Concerto. Any film director who can match that lithe intensity let alone dance with its music of time should surely be allowed carte blanche to create whatever they wish in the future.

It's an interesting double-bill with Anthony Kimmins' My Own Executioner (B/W,1947) that had a rare showing (all that's available is a scratchy VHS copy) at Andrea Sabbadini's bi-ennial 6th European Psychoanalytic Film Festival this November. Conference delegate opinions were divided about the effectiveness of Kimmins Hollywood tropes e.g music, the trad romantic storyline but few were left unfascinated by the film's rare exploration of the analyst's daily practice and sometime dilemma in treating patients. Migration, the theme of this year's conference, also divided delegates. Some thought that the festival should have focusssed more on literal pycho-geographical films rather than those more to do with border crossings within the mind such as My Own Executioner, Hotel Sahara (Bettina Haasen, Germany, 2009) or the stories of steam room men in Steam of Life (Joonas Berghall and Mika Hotakainen, Finland, 2010).

Yet Sabbadini's choices made for lively discussion and dissent foregrounding the important issue that the pain and trauma of displacement is relative only to the patient's own boundaries that may be even more destructive than anything literally geographic. How a film such as The Reverse (Borys Lankosz, Poland, 2009) couldn't obtain a wider release outside its native audience is tantamount to the fickle politics of world film distribution. It's use of poignancy and wit alleviating the burden of historical guilt crosses the divide of art-house and mainstream so very easily. And the denouement of mother/son reunification is a fascinating masochistic/sado-masochism. Should she have told her son who his father was really? Did she survive through denying her son knowledge? Is delaying the inevitable unearthing of history's walls preferable to its more immediate traumatic opposite? (One is reminded of one of this year's most provocative films Jim Loach's Oranges and Sunshine.) The festival opened with Charlie Chaplin's classic 1917 short The Immigrant and closed with Stefan Le Lay's 2009 short The Postcard about a seaside postcard come to life - its male figure falling (literally) for a girl on the opposite kiosk rack. Even with the transgression of boundaries a happy life is possible - and with the help of analysis it need not be just a sugar pill/rush alternative. A totally apposite way of ending the festival.

And if you fancied that paragraph:
Surviving Life -Jan Svankmajer
Ashes and Diamonds
Zelig
Hannah and Her Sisters
Midnight in Paris (out soon on DVD and Blu-ray)
and The Artist

Film and art aren't an escape from reality - in so many ways they ARE the reality. As actor Morgan Freeman said in a recent CNN interview, god resides in ourselves. In our actions. And it's sad that films are seen less and less in communal picture palace gatherings and so more often on a computer screen. The birth of cinema was a monadic epiphany - the one in many and the many in one as humans gathered to be personally awed and collectively challenged. Martin Scorsese's Hugo 3D (and the 3D is pin-point stunning) bear-hugs the beauty of cinema experience urging us to move on in our lives but not at the expense of forgetting and erasing the past. Adapted by John Logan from Brian Selznick’s 2007 illustrated childrens' book The Invention of Hugo Cabret it's about lost hearts and newfound happiness. And in that regard some may find it all just a wee unchallenging. Yet the film's innocence, grace and minutai of detail trick one into thinking you've seen more than you have. It isn't clever like Christopher Nolan or with the Jean-Pierre Jeunet's (Delicatessen) belligerent, bizarre joy. It is quite simply holding out a hand to feel the wind. Of dipping toes gingerly into the sea even though one senses there is no immediate danger. The film's biographical truth is Georges Méliès (Ben Kingsley) an extraordinary chap who, inspired by the Lumière Brothers, unsuccessfully tried to buy a camera from them and instead made his own, made his own films, directing, acting, supervising the sets, hand colouring the negatives - 531 films between 1896 and 1914 . Only to see WWI and most of the celluloid melted down into heels for ladies' shoes (200 films survived). A more depressing tale just could not be told.
A Trip to the Moon (Le voyage dans la Lune) made in 1902 was restored in colour for the 2011 Cannes Film Festival and the London Film Festival of this year screened before Roberto Rossellini's restored rarely seen 1952 comedy about morals, corruption and a magical camera that kills The Machine That Kills People.

And there's more than a sense at the end of the movie that the kids have have had a jolly good nourishing time but that the adults must close the book and get on with grown-up chores. It doesn't feel that this is inadvertent on Scorsese's part. One couldn't have hoped for better casting in Sacha Baron Cohen's dour railway station cop who relentlessly tries ridding the station of the pesky orphan kids. And one wonders whether his bitterness of life has only temporarily disappeared so scared both physically and mentally was he by a war. Kids will leave this film feeling rather smarter than their adults. Yet in that truth lies responsible on their part not to squander that youthful intelligence on manipulative techno frippery. Rather, to harness that observation for detail, their agility of thought, and not so much to create a better world but be cognoscent that they have that power first and foremost within themselves.
Pipilotti Rist's Eyeball Massage and George Condo at the Hayward Gallery (look out for the tiny surreal 'dolls house' twinkling the Internationale
and Gerhard Richter at the Tate Modern

With much the same message, Aardman, the wacky Wallace & Gromit animation Brit company, have teamed up with Sony for Arthur Christmas. It's a tour de force of technical wizardry and character detail that's unlikely to leave anyone disgruntled (except maybe an old fogey of a reindeer).

Make Someone Happy (Performed by Bill Nighy)
Arthur Christmas (Suite) - Harry Gregson Williams
Tony Bennett/Bill Evans - Make Someone Happy
vintage (that only youth will provide) 1963 Stevie Wonder:

Doris Day
Judy Garland performed live at the Russel Hotel in London, 29 November, 1964. Judy was appearing for her fan-club, and was accompanied by future husband Mark Herron at the event.
Barbra Streisand (2009).
and the version that inspired them:
And just because they were such an adorable pair of songwriters some Comden and Green: Comes once in a Lifetime from their musical Subways are for Sleeping- Judy Garland's version
Doris Day: Who Knows What Might Have Been recorded on Nov. 21, 1961
Mary Martin - Never Never Land fromPeter Pan)

it never is like a story

Perhaps a clarification is needed. Far from criticising the annual BFI London Film Festival this blog has nothing but applause for its ability to muster 150 odd films into a coherent force of cinema appreciation. Having managed to see about 75% of those this year I can speak from experience. Yet like any large organisation factions will always form fostering single agendas. One I've heard verbalised over the years is "we're not interested in entertainment". All that can be voiced in response to that is, one man's poison is another man's socialism. To even think that the woes of a nation's people are galvanised around an 'art house' film is of course ridiculous. On a weekend they are off watching a Hollywood movie rather than seeing themselves cavort on screen and would be doing so even without the marketing strategies of a major studio. There are of course exceptions like Brazil's police corruption Elite Squad now in its sequel release.

That's not to say that the likes of Ken Loach exposing moral and political hypocrisy have had their day. By no means true. But I felt this year at the London Film Festival, and have always felt, that the Festival continues to survive and succeed not through offering an alternative cinematic politics, rather, by celebrating the diversity of cinema's possibilities: one man's 'entertainment' is another man's 'watching paint dry'.

Such musing congealed this week through watching 4 DVD re-issues of Francis Ford Coppola's work: The Outsiders (1983), The Conversation (1974), One from the Heart (1982) and Hammett (1982, directed by Wim Wenders at Coppola's Zoetrope Studios in California). And the irony of much good work born out of Hollywood is that it would only have had a life in the first place thanks to the independents in film production. A point often missed by Tinseltown's critics. Paramount, for example, only agreed to make The Conversation because of Coppola's The Godfather success - keeping him happy until he made Part 2. Warner Brothers turned down most of Coppola's early scripts such as American Graffiti (George Lucas, 1973) and cut roughly 22 minutes from The Outsiders in order to liven the pace and focus on one character - all restored in this DVD version from 2003. Yet it's those very two qualities that make The Outsiders what it is: a sweeping 'Gone With the Wind' story of three brothers. Not the childhood survival story of just one kid.

Opinions have always been divided about Coppola's work but undeniable is his love of cinema - paraded upon the big screen. I confess to have always been smitten with that parade. The Outsiders romantic theme (composed by Coppola's father Carmine and sung by Stevie Wonder) oughta seem smaltzy. But it fits the cinemascope camera work like a glove (Coppola, as always, trying new techniques in this movie such as split diopters). This isn't and was never meant to be like a Dardennes brothers movie of human 'reality' (for want of a better word). Coppola was begged to make a film of S.E. Hinton's 1967 novel by a school class in his local town of Fresno who even signed a petition. This was post Apocalypse Now and Coppola was working on a relatively low budget. And from an audition of around 1,000 unknowns, he and his casting director/producer Fred Roos launched the careers of Tom Cruise (pre Risky Business), Matt Dillon, Partick Swayze, Diane Lane, Emilio Estevez and Rob Lowe. The 2-disc DVD is loaded with extras including a commentary from Coppola and one from the 2003 cast reunion for the new cut. "After you everyone in my life was a bozo," laments Patrick Swayze of Coppola.

Listening to Coppola's commentary on The Conversation you see why such an accolade is heartfelt and not just shootin' some breeze. The DVD extras of Coppola's original script dictation tapes (to be typed up by his assistant) at a local cafe are just fascinating. This is all further enhanced by Walter Murch's separate commentary - being his first editing job and non-union he was credited with sound montage. For a general audience both commentaries will be intriguing. For the die hard cineastes Murch has some great editing and art direction tips, we learn that the first cut was 5 hours, that Haskell Wexler was originally DP but there was a falling out, and that Harry's dream sequence was supposed to end the film (Coppola's dictated ending was different again). Composer David Shire had hoped for a big orchestral score but it was Coppola who persuaded him to write the solo piano score (Shire reveals in his interview extra that it was this score that generated most of his work ever since): a score cleverly sound mixed by Murch as the film progresses.

No extras (alas) on One from the Heart and Hammett but what CINEMA. At one point you wish Coppola had just gone the whole hog and made the former a musical. But then you realise that's precisely the point: that it isn't. It is all real or rather sur-real. And wow, remember the great Raul Julia, looks to kill and a dancer/singer. And oh, Nastassja Kinsky as a lonely, errant circus performer. This IS about the ordinary lives of people struggling to be someplace else in their head. And who better to bring the tattered glitter of our imaginations to town than Tom Waits. "The most highly implausible thing I've ever seen in my life."

Pierre Thoretton's documentary on fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent L'Amour Fou may seem a strange segue. But what is different here is that Pierre Bergé's (his partner in business and love) reflections aren't simply a bio-pic of the man. The details of his art and antique collecting, his houses - the Normandy 'Proustian' dacha, the grand auction after his death, aren't just celebrations of dead objects. As Bergé put it they are like birds flying away to a new life rather than a coffin. And he creates an image of Yves Saint Laurent as a man in constant search of escape. His couture would take flight giving women "confidence and allowing them to assert themselves". He was 2 years ahead of the student occupation of the Odeon theater by creating ready to wear (prêt-à-porter) clothes reflecting the needs of the street. "He was never fooled by haute couture," notes Bergé. Like most artists, perhaps, he achieved in his art what he couldn't in life "an absolute purity...a kind of [musical] harmony...the more you simplify, the more you risk boring people". Screening at the ICA Nov 7 (DVD Nov 21).

So much of this year's BFI London Film Festival had films of escape, the road, of a past that would never be hence - the staples of cinema. What price fame in Miss Bala (general release, Oct 28) where a young Mexican girl, by accident, is caught up in a drug cartel war. She has no choice but to win the beauty pageant (rigged in her favour) and co-operate with the government coup. Perhaps a scenario not as far away from one's doorstep as we'd like to believe.

The protagonist in Americano (debut directed by Mathieu son of Agnès Varda and Jacques Demy) travels to Mexico in a strange search for his dead mother's friend. The strands wrap together maybe a little too neatly in pursuing Lola (some of life does!) but it's an inventive, stylised journey recommended worth the taking if or when it's ever released. Las Acacias (released by Verve, Dec 2) won director Pablo Giorgelli this year's prestigious Sutherland Award. Nothing happens on this lumber truck trek from Paraguay to Buenos Aires but of course we watch the man and his 'hitchhiker' with baby in lap. And by simply watching maybe we remember more about the world around us. Raindance offered attention holding parallel road trips either side of the Pacific in All That Remains while Spanish director Alberto Morais's 80 year old widower begins inhabiting his Spanish Civil war past on his road trip, The Waves (Las Olas) (LFF).

Still yet to be UK released is Julia Loktev's Day Night Day Night (2006) from last year's LFF. She obviously has a fan base here 'cause the Saturday matinee of her latest The Loneliest Planet (in one of the larger Vue cinemas) was 'technically' sold out and in reality certainly near that. If you hadn't read Loktev's festival catalogue entry, "how do you forgive someone that does not want to be forgiven?" you'd be asking similar questions anyway after seeing this film. It mirrors the intensity of Day Night Day Night but revolves around two hikers, their guide and a wilderness. Is HERE from American music video director Branden King any less focussed than Loktev as he follows two trekkers - a satellite mapper and a photographer to Armenia? An unfair comparison perhaps but an interesting one in discussing the power of cinema.

Brit debut Junkhearts falls far short of most of the aforementioned films -it did, however, earn Candese Reid Best Actress at this year's Fest Awards. Actor Dexter Fletcher's Wild Bill (LFF) was an extremely accurate depiction of a London ex-crim trying to go straight and be an initially reluctant single dad. It ain't a happy nor contrived ending. Sparks fly from the dialogue of gay themed Weekend (opening this week), and though it's well worn territory there's much that's sizzlingly fresh from the cast and director in early 'Godard-ian' mode Andrew Haigh. Or was it Rohmer? I'm not sure he was thinking of either;) Another Brit debut Broken Lines (from last year's LFF) has been out a month plus, so catch the DVD. Strong performances (including Paul Bettany against type as a beleaguered boxer) and a keen sense of screen sculpting from director Sallie Aprahamian.

Award for Best Brit feature at Raindance this year went to Ron Eyal and Eleanor Burke's Stranger Things. A grieving young Oona returns to her deceased mother's house striking up a rapport with the resident tramp. Many will find it more engaging than Junkhearts and Eyal and Burke are well on top of their actors and concept. Whether Johnny Daukes' Acts of Godfrey will ever get a release is anyone's guess! But it's one of the funniest, most original things to emerge in ages out of Brit cinema. Anyone remember Richard Jones' production of La Bête that played Broadway and the West End? Well Godfrey is all in rhyming verse as well - Simon Callow (narrator) must have fallen off his chair in amazement when this script hit his palate. Divine intervention, sales motivation, love and revenge meet Pam Ayres is the pitch. Believe it or not it works! American writer/director Andy Viner's sitcom/vampire/horror Dick Night was also clever fun and deserving of being seen more widely. Norwegians in Los Angeles Marie Kristiansen/Patrik Syversen have a great future given their DSLR feature Exteriors. Two struggling young actresses, two 'a-hole' boyfriends but the result is reminiscent of John Cassevetes.
At The Zabludowicz Collection is the first UK solo exhibition of US photographer/video artist Laurel Nakadate, and the way her photos soak in 'light' are quite compelling.

Across the pond in New York Jack Goes Boating (out this week in London) is Philip Seymour Hoffman's directing debut (also acting in most scenes) that will surely warm your heart. More than that? Well, does it need more than that is really the question? Based on Bob Glaudini's play (originally performed by Hoffman, John Ortiz and Daphne Rubin-Vega) the film easily out-runs most actor/director debuts. Or indeed directing debuts full stop. If we crave 'more than that' it boils down to the script that we've sorta heard before: ordinary people trying to make do with being ordinary. Is Jack not being able to cook or swim a-typical ordinary? In learning to do these things to get the attention of the girl stuck selling funerals Connie (Amy Ryan) extraordinary? Glaudini's play, for many tastes, may just get too stuck on being normal. Hoffman elevates these characters (including his own) to stalwarts in Manhattan's shifting neuroses. But there's an even stranger heart yearning to break loose in Hoffman's performance and we long to be pumped through those extra-ordinary arteries. We don't necessarily want to go Terry Gilliam waltzing in Grand Central (Fisher King) but we sure don't want to go back to driving the limo ourselves. It's not wrong to dream; only errant to delude ourselves that we are the king.
Charms and Miracles continues at the Wellcome Institute (Video interviews HERE). And I'm too late in mentioning Bill Fontana's sound sculpture for the Institute's front entrance. Sorry...but get a taste of it HERE. And you missed Audio Obscura - a new sound work by poet and novelist Lavinia Greenlaw conceived for the public spaces of St Pancras International. Wandering around with her stories in my ears was a great way of retreating from the nerves of heaving travelers. The result was creating a third narrative all of one's own.

And a new Picturehouse cinema has just opened in Hackney. Distributed by the same company, artist Miranda July's second feature The Future opens this week. Too whimsical? Insubstantial? It's Miranda July, she's predictably unpredictable. And quite possibly extraordinary? Jacques Deray's little seen La Piscine (The Swimming Pool) (1969) has received a very nice clean up (out on Blu-ray): Alain Delon and a tres jejeune Jane Birkin wandering around a Côte d'Azur pool scantily clad. But the co-script with Jean-Claude Carrière is quite a subtle satire on aspiration and the idle rich and becomes almost Brechtian when Michel Legrand's song Ask yourself why? chimes in over the soirée.