germany

Womb

by James McNally on September 16, 2010

in Film Festivals,TIFF

Womb

Womb (Director: Benedek Fliegauf): I love films which take a sci­ence fic­tion premise or set­ting and then show us real char­ac­ters reacting to that premise or set­ting. Womb prom­ised to be an inter­esting explor­a­tion of some of the more del­icate eth­ical issues around the issue of human cloning, and it didn’t hurt that it fea­tured the lovely Eva Green.

We first meet Rebecca and Tommy as chil­dren. Rebecca is staying with her grand­father who lives in a beach­front house on a remote-looking island. She meets Tommy on the beach one day and they bond instantly. What’s more, they’re just at that age where they’re begin­ning to feel romantic attrac­tion, and it seems that there is a very primal force drawing them together. But then Rebecca leaves to live with her mother who’s taken a job in Japan, and the two don’t even get to say a proper goodbye. Fast for­ward 12 years, and now the adult Rebecca returns to the island looking for Tommy. When she finds him, the mutual attrac­tion is still there and soon they’re a couple. But it seems that within only a few days, tragedy strikes when Tommy is killed by a car. Here’s where the sci-fi kicks in. Against his par­ents’ wishes, Rebecca has her­self impreg­nated with some of Tommy’s genetic material and nine months later gives birth to his clone. As she raises this child alone, the creep­i­ness gradu­ally increases until 20 years later, when it sud­denly goes off the charts.

This intriguing premise is sadly mis­handled by Hungarian-born Fliegauf, who chose to work in English, not his first lan­guage. As a result, the script is clumsy, even though there is barely enough dia­logue to begin with. When Tommy 2 learns the truth about his ori­gins, he’s left to exclaim, “Why did you do it? Why did you do this thing?” There are long stretches of silence in the film, and there is not a single normal con­ver­sa­tion between any of the char­ac­ters. Nor do we really know what’s going on inside any of their heads. Eva Green’s blazing eyes and pre-Raphaelite beauty do not equal a char­acter. The film is all mood, a col­lec­tion of atmo­spheric shots but not a real story. Rebecca’s obses­sion with recon­necting with her true love just isn’t that inter­esting when it takes 30 years to resolve. Characters living in isol­a­tion in a beach house with no dis­cern­ible friends, family or live­li­hoods just make the story feel more arti­fi­cial. To make mat­ters worse, I found the grown-up Tommy insuf­fer­able. He’s prac­tic­ally aut­istic; cer­tainly childish and a bit prim­itive. When he returns as a clone, he’s still obnox­ious. I couldn’t see the coldly intel­lec­tual Rebecca having any attrac­tion to this farm­hand. His beha­viour becomes even worse when he gets a girl­friend and “mom” with­draws into depres­sion. Rebecca’s way of telling him the truth is both ana­chron­istic and cow­ardly. She gives him Tommy 1’s 20-year-old laptop with pic­tures of Tommy 1 with his (real) par­ents and video of him­self at polit­ical protests. I snickered when he was able to get the old machine up and run­ning instantly and nav­igate through the files.

Although Fliegauf does suc­ceed in thor­oughly grossing out the audi­ence by the end, I still didn’t care about the char­ac­ters. Though the rela­tion­ship isn’t tech­nic­ally incest, it seems even worse, since Rebecca has been cul­tiv­ating this child for so long only to con­sum­mate a sexual rela­tion­ship with him. It’s a shame that this rather inter­esting idea failed so spec­tac­u­larly in the exe­cu­tion. The film never con­vinces us that Tommy and Rebecca were really much of a couple to begin with, and we never learn much about either of them as indi­viduals either. There is no real set­ting; the almost-abandoned beach feels as arti­fi­cial as if the two of them are on the moon. Tommy’s par­ents con­veni­ently dis­ap­pear and when his mother reappears 20 years later, she leaves without saying a word. Rebecca comes across as cold and silent, Tommy as stunted and unlike­able. There is the germ of a good film here. Maybe we could clone that and try again.

Here is the Q&A with dir­ector Benedek Fliegauf from after the screening.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Duration: 19:34

5/10(5/10)

Tagged as: #tiff10, cloning, germany, scifi

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Radio On

by James McNally on December 18, 2009

in DVD

Radio On

Radio On (Director: Christopher Petit): A few years ago, I picked up this DVD, likely for the same reason as Plexifilm decided to put it out: an amazing soundtrack fea­turing songs by Bowie, Kraftwerk, Lene Lovich, Wreckless Eric, Ian Dury and more. The reason it’s taken me so many years to actu­ally watch it is that I mis­takenly read some of the film’s reviews. Critically panned at the time, Radio On has become a bit of a cult favourite among a cer­tain type of music-savvy cinephile. But after watching it, I find myself among those who find it a pre­ten­tious exer­cise in style over substance.

Director Chris Petit had been a film critic for Time Out and a big fan of the road movies of German dir­ector Wim Wenders. Remarkably he was able to interest Wenders in signing on as exec­utive pro­ducer for his first film. Wenders recruited his reg­ular cine­ma­to­grapher, Martin Schafer, to shoot it, and so the res­ulting film is a very odd German-English hybrid. Petit’s use of music is per­haps the best thing in the film, pred­ating music videos by years, and his innov­ative intro­duc­tion of the film’s songs in the opening (rather than closing) credits indic­ated the import­ance of music to set­ting the film’s mood. The music of Bowie’s Berlin period and of German elec­tronic pion­eers Kraftwerk is per­fectly matched to the film’s per­vading tex­ture of exist­en­tial angst. The film has been called an example of the post­punk aes­thetic, and it does cap­ture postpunk’s feeling of resig­na­tion, of punk’s anger now spent and des­pair creeping in. England’s late 70s indus­trial decay is pho­to­graphed in grainy black and white, and as a visual and sonic doc­u­ment of time and place, Radio On is beau­tiful and bor­dering on essen­tial. As a nar­rative film, it’s quite another matter.

The plot con­cerns a London DJ who drives to Bristol to invest­igate his brother’s death, an apparent sui­cide. But between the flat acting of David Beames and the script’s stub­born refusal to divulge inform­a­tion to the viewer in a straight­for­ward way, the plot ends up making little sense. And our protagonist’s inter­ac­tions with char­ac­ters along the way are fleeting and devoid of much human warmth. The closest he comes to a human con­nec­tion is with a German woman (there’s the German con­nec­tion again) who is in England looking for her young daughter who has been living with her father. But even that rela­tion­ship ends abruptly, with no explan­a­tion. In the same way, many of the songs on the soundtrack cut off abruptly when our man gets out of his car, or leaves the pub. Essentially, in a pre-Walkman/iPod age, whenever he’s out of earshot of a radio or jukebox, there is no music. It’s a jar­ring effect.

Petit’s attempt to blend Germanic cool with English grime is effective on a sur­face level, but his auteurist flour­ishes grate when it comes to telling a story or depicting a char­acter. The cameo by Sting (in his first film role) back­fires because in his scenes, he’s more inter­esting than the main char­acter. Even the film­makers acknow­ledge this; the film stays with him even as our prot­ag­onist drives away. The gla­cial pace and flat­ness of almost all the other char­ac­ters make us want to stay with him even longer. Strangely, Petit admitted the casting of the Police frontman was a feeble attempt to put bums in seats. Like the split German/English per­son­ality of the film, it also doesn’t seem to know if it wants to be a work of art or of mass appeal.

When the music is playing, the film sings, but when the radio is off, things are much grimmer. Maybe that’s the point, in the end.

6/10(6/10)

Tagged as: germany, postpunk, uk

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Eh! U European Film Festival 2009

by James McNally on October 28, 2009

in Film Festivals

Eh! U European Film Festival 2009

Now in its fifth edi­tion, the Eh! U European Film Festival seems to be really hit­ting its stride. Billing itself as “the free film fest­ival” (since all screen­ings are sub­sid­ized by the various European con­su­lates), this two-week fest­ival is really a gift to the city’s cinephiles. This year fea­tures 26 films from 23 coun­tries, and among them are no fewer than six sub­mis­sions for the Foreign Language Academy Award. I’ll high­light those six, but be sure to check the fest­ival site for others, as well as the schedule. Screenings mostly take place at the Royal Cinema, with the excep­tions of the opening night film, The Karamazovs (Czech Republic) which plays at the Bloor Cinema, and the closing film, El Greco (Greece) which will screen at the Varsity. In addi­tion to the high-profile films listed below, I can per­son­ally recom­mend an older film from Belgium in the pro­gramme, The Alzheimer Case (review), which screened at TIFF back in 2004.

The fol­lowing are offi­cial sub­mis­sions by their coun­tries for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film:

P.S. For the curious, here’s the com­plete list of sub­mis­sions for Best Foreign Language Film.

Tagged as: #euff09, austria, belgium, bulgaria, europeanfilmfestival, france, germany, netherlands, romania

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Bomber

by James McNally on March 24, 2009

in Film Festivals,SXSW

Bomber

Bomber (Director: Paul Cotter): A well-edited trailer and an inter­esting premise drew me to this film, and I have to say up front that Bomber didn’t quite live up to expect­a­tions. It’s a film I wanted to like. Ross is an under­em­ployed art school graduate with an extremely pos­sessive girl­friend. To make things worse, he’s been dragged unwill­ingly along on a road trip with his par­ents. His father, Alistar, was a teenage bomber pilot for the Royal Air Force during the Second World War and wants to return to the small vil­lage in Germany he acci­dent­ally bombed in order to apo­lo­gize. Director Cotter used only three actors and seven crew, picking the rest of his cast from among the local townspeople. So far, so good. There is actu­ally a lot to like about Bomber: it’s beau­ti­fully shot in high-definition, there’s a won­derful soundtrack (espe­cially the songs by Sweden’s Marching Band), and the per­form­ances are gen­er­ally good. Where the film let me down was in its weak script. Hackneyed dia­logue and crude attempts at humour didn’t bother most of the audi­ence, but they did grate with this reviewer. The pacing could have been tightened up a bit too. The bits I enjoyed the most were actu­ally the dialogue-free shots of the family van driving through the Dutch and German land­scapes, accom­panied by the excel­lent soundtrack music. Unfortunately, those shots could very well have occurred in a car commercial.

Most frus­trating for me was the way son Ross pro­gresses from a total emo­tional melt­down in one scene, trying to attack his par­ents from out­side the van, to later giving them lec­tures filled with psy­chobabble like “you just have to express what you’re feeling.” Normally, com­edies are full of char­ac­ters this incon­sistent, but the problem is that Bomber isn’t strictly a comedy, and when it went for any sort of emo­tional payoff, I was unmoved because these char­ac­ters hadn’t really been developed beyond sketches.

I sus­pect that Cotter fell prey to the mis­con­cep­tion that he needed to be an auteur, both writing and dir­ecting his first fea­ture film. Though the idea ger­min­ated with him and his own family his­tory (and in fact he has also written a radio play called Dropping Bombs essen­tially cov­ering the same ground), I think the story would have been better served by bringing in a more exper­i­enced scriptwriter, who could have pol­ished Bomber into a much better film.

Page for the film on the director’s web site

Trailer

6/10(6/10)

Tagged as: #sxsw09, family, fathers-and-sons, germany, road-movie, uk, worldwar2

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Eh! U European Film Festival 2008

by James McNally on October 20, 2008 · 2 comments

in Film Festivals

Eh! U European Film Festival 2008

Despite being saddled with a rather goofy name, the Eh! U European Film Festival is worthy of being included in your film cal­endar for a number of reasons:

  • Participation from 24 European coun­tries might make this the most com­pre­hensive local survey of European film apart from TIFF
  • Stretches over two full weeks in late November, when my film fest­ival schedule is oth­er­wise clear.
  • Though it’s been around since 2004, it seems to be finally coming into its own, screening a com­bin­a­tion of fest­ival hits, prize win­ners and undis­covered gems.
  • Best of all, all screen­ings are com­pletely FREE, thanks to the spon­sor­ship of the various con­su­lates, embassies and cul­tural institutes.

I’m par­tic­u­larly excited about the lineup this year, which has a number of high-profile films I’d missed at pre­vious fest­ivals. To wit:

  • France: Entre les murs (The Class) — This Palme d’Or winner never actu­ally made it to TIFF this year, so I’m delighted it’s coming to Toronto in a free screening.
  • Ireland: A Film With Me In It — The pres­ence of Dylan Moran (Black Books) is reason enough to see this black comedy.
  • Poland: Katyn — From Polish master Andrzej Wajda (Ashes and Diamonds), the story of the mas­sacre of Polish intel­lec­tuals and army officers by the Red Army in 1940. Wajda, now 82, has said he’s waited many years to make this film, and only now has the polit­ical cli­mate and rela­tion­ship between Poland and Russia made it pos­sible. This is sure to be be an emo­tional screening if mem­bers of Toronto’s large Polish com­munity attend.
  • Portugal: Colossal Youth (Juventude em Marcha) — Pedro Costa’s 2006 film was written about in all the film magazines but has so far been an elu­sive screening around here.
  • Germany: And Along Come Tourists (Am Ende kommen Touristen) — I remember this playing TIFF in 2007. Intriguing sub­ject matter: A young German is assigned to Auschwitz to per­form his civil ser­vice and must care for an eld­erly Polish Holocaust sur­vivor who never left the camp.
  • Denmark: The Art of Crying (Kunsten at græde i kor) — Another 2007 TIFF selec­tion, this film is the story of a very dys­func­tional family, seen through the eyes of 11-year-old Allan.

And those are only the films I’m already familiar with. Boasting such a strong lineup this year, and at an unbeat­able price, Eh! U looks like a can’t miss event.

Tagged as: #euff08, denmark, europeanfilmfestival, france, germany, ireland, poland, portugal

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