Review: Rome, Open City

In 1945 Italy was in the grip of war, finding itself to be a deadly front between Allied attempts to defeat the Fascists. It was in this climate that Roberto Rossellini, one of the country's most celebrated filmmakers, shot Rome, Open City. The BFI have recently restored the first true example of Italian Neo-Realism and are showing it in an extended run.

With the national film industry having been comprehensively destroyed (they had more pressing issues to concern themselves with), such a project was ambitious. Rossellini initially began shooting a documentary in 1944 about Don Morosini, a martyred priest who helped the Resistance, thanks to the funding of a rich old lady. Various other funds were scrimped and the film evolved into a feature length narrative. Thus the movie has the look not of a polished production but an amateur newsreel - footage was taken mere months after the Nazis had jackbooted around the Eternal City. Locations were real, set in the crumbling courtyards and Fascist apartment blocks where partisans really did hide out. The extras were real people, skinny and weary and struggling, adding an authenticity that studios blow huge budgets striving to achieve. Discarded US Army film stock had to be salvaged for use. In my mind, though, the shoddy production does not detract from enjoying Rome, Open City because we are watching a piece of history. Rossellini's masterpiece takes us into the period better than any recreation could, and that is surely one of the central aims of cinema.

This documentary realism did not stop with Rome, Open City. Inspired by the guerrilla attitude to filmmaking, other Italians learnt from Rossellini. Polished aesthetics were shunned in favour of capturing life. Issues important to normal people were told. Locations, non-professional actors and the downtrodden became fashionable. The camera was used to observe stories of everyday life. Thus Italian Neo-Realism was born, a genre which impacted film profoundly.

It is not simply the style which makes Rome, Open City worth seeing. The story focuses on Francesco and Giorgio, two Communist resistance fighters, who are being hunted by the ruthless pantomime villain Gestapo officer. Francesco's fiancee, Pina, struggles to get by with her son, Marcello, a spirited young scamp who plants bombs with the other neighbourhood kids. Don Pietro, the local priest, uses his position to help the anti-Nazi fighters. Pina's sister is not so moral. Along with a friend, she fraternises with the Germans and acts as an informant in exchange for money. The ghost of poverty was a frightening reality for Italians at the time. So things go wrong, arrests are made, and people are killed. Without giving too much away, several deaths and scenes of torture are as harrowing and depressing today as they must have been in 1945. The brilliant acting completes the documentary realism of the production.

While the German antagonists are rather two-dimensional and cliched, the rest of life in occupied Rome is laid out with a startling proximity. If the aim was to seem as if a camera had been stuck in a street and left there, then Rossellini succeeded.

Review: The Grand Budapest Hotel

The Grand Budapest Hotel is indie quirk-master Wes Anderson’s eighth feature. A unique cinematic specimen, tweed-coated Anderson here forces his inimitable style onto the crime caper. The luxurious trappings of European grand hotels have been the source of inspiration before (the aptly-named Grand Hotel being one), but never has the setting looked quite like this. Such adherence to individual style can be suffocating – sacrificing the emotional content for looks. This charge cannot be leveled against TGBH. 

The story is told in a roundabout way: a girl reads a book, narrated by its deceased author, who relays a tale which was conveyed to him years earlier by a rich hotel owner. Through this rambling, inter-generational introduction the story settles on Gustave H., played brilliantly by Ralph Fiennes, a suffocatingly neat and dedicated concierge of the Grand Budapest Hotel in the 1930s. The owner, now the principal raconteur, was apprenticed to the anachronistic gentleman as a lobby boy during the hotel’s interwar glory days.

Things went pear shaped as Zubrowska, the fictional mid-European country in which we find ourselves, teetered on the brink of war. When the death of an elderly guest puts Gustave in the spotlight as her murderer, he and Zero are thrown into the most Hitchockian of adventures to clear his name. Disguises, sped-up chases, prisons and castles, bumbling cops and fascist soldiers, secret notes, secret societies, secret plans – they are all there. The rambling plot remains tight and thrilling throughout.

Wes Anderson’s idiosyncratic style is instantly recognisable. Apparently on a ceaseless search for the perfectly quirky picture, his films are a controlled chaos of off-beat aesthetics and dazzling colour. The locale of Zubrowska has been meticulously planned down to the smallest of details: delectable old-world confectionary from the hotel’s cake-maker makes frequent appearances, and these luxurious treats are simply miniature versions of what Anderson has created with his scenery. The resemblance to stage sets harks back to the first decades of cinema, when many set designers emigrated from theatre to film. The film looks almost like it is based on specific painting style. I doubt that it is, although there is a hint of Hergé in the cartoon adventure. TGBH is worth watching purely for the visuals.

Another prominent aspect is the panoply of characters who pop up briefly or extendedly. Tilda Swinton is the murdered aristocrat, Adrien Brody her scurrilously evil son, Willem Defoe his hulking enforcer and Jeff Goldblum his deputy; Jude Law is the younger version of Tom Wilkinson’s novelist listening to F. Murray Abraham, the lobby boy in old age; Harvey Keitel, Edward Norton, Bill Murray, Saoirse Ronan, Owen Wilson... I could go on. Thus it is all the more impressive that Fiennes and newcomer Tony Revolori (lobby boy Zero) stand out as the chalk-and-cheese double act in the middle. Most have moustaches.

But for all the uproarious humour and quirky joy, there is a bittersweet quality to TGBH. Anderson has tried to capture, if only momentarily, a European world which was lost in the destruction of world war, communism and (post)modernity. The smart style, the dedication to service and the manners really were better in the old days, apparently. Thus a kind of nostalgia is promoted, with the postscript that all the positive values of yesteryear are lost for eternity. The difference between Anderson and Gustave is that the former realises this world died long ago.

Entertaining? Undeniably so. Funny? Hilariously so. Eccentric? Abundantly so. The camera pans and swirls through the richly mad world of old-European charm. Scratch the Dulux colour chart of a surface, though, and there is grief, loss and death. I suspect that most directors would have veered away from such negativity in what is ultimately a comedy, so it is lucky that tragedy has been injected in the way it has. But with a snap of the fingers Anderson sweeps us back into the delightful decadence of a place that never actually existed.

Review: Bastards

Les Salauds, or Bastards in English, is a perplexing Gallic Noir from French filmmaker Claire Denis. Recreating a more macabre Raymond Chandler novel, Vincent Lindon stars as the weary Humphrey Bogart lead. He is Marco, a hardboiled sailor who abandons a prodigal, nautical life when his brother-in-law commits suicide. At the same time, his self-harming niece has been discovered wandering the Parisian streets naked, dazed and bloodied. So begins the revenge of Marco.

The pace is slow and contemplative, eschewing a one-thing-leading-to-another narrative in order to drip-feed details. Mood is conjured through atmosphere instead of events. Bastards certainly has buckets of atmosphere. There is good use of lighting, music and speed. In this regard, the film is in the mould of Drive. The effect that this has is to stimulate an emotional rather than rational response. Personally, it made me feel a little mentally ill. The secrets that our macho maritime champion uncovers are not pretty.

Marco is a laconic observer, moved to quick action when need be. He can handle a gun and he can handle himself. The sailor is often seen smoking pensively in his vast, empty French apartment in the early hours of the morning, lit atmospherically by street lights filtering through the blinds. Marco exudes the self-contained gravitas of a man who takes care of business – like any pulp protagonist. The villain of the piece is Edouard Laporte, a rich puppet-master of power and perversion. As sinister as he is, the character is lifted straight out of Polanski’s Chinatown. Much as Marco has replaced Jack Nicholson’s investigator, so has Laporte assumed John Huston’s role. But so utterly identical is the match that it’s a cliché. As will happen in cinema, Marco becomes involved with the neglected mother of Laporte’s child, isolated in ivory tower luxury. Raphaëlle is played by Chiara Mastroianni, daughter of Italian screen legend Marcello. She has her father’s look of detached thoughtfulness which is well-suited to the depressed and lonely Raphaëlle.

The main drawback of Bastards is its structure. Denis has clearly muddled a perfectly simple plot to heighten the suspense or mystery or whatever. But the lack of clarity doesn’t make it cleverer, it just annoys. Marco seems like he has a plan and the films appears to be going somewhere. But it doesn’t, it just fizzles out. Denis has taken Chinatown’s bitter finale and reduced it into a tasteless spoonful of nothing. The characters are so distant that we don’t really care.

France has its own impressive history of Noir cinema. Themes of revenge, murder and injustice have been played out through the chiaroscuro Parisian landscapes a thousand times before. It is these conventions which Bastards tries to subvert, but instead shoots itself in the foot. What could have been a dark, twisted masterpiece, examining the evil depths of humanity, is needlessly turned into a puzzling enigma. And not in a good way. Nonetheless, the style, acting and soundtrack must all be commended – a film for those who like this sort of thing.

Le Suspense

Review: Dallas Buyers Club

Dallas Buyers Club (annoyingly lacking in apostrophe) is a dramatisation of the life and work of AIDs patient Ron Woodroof, played by Matthew McConaughey as a foul-mouthed Texan hellraiser. Electrician by trade and cowboy by nature, Woodroof hangs out at the local rodeo with his good ol’ boy buddies and spends his winnings on prostitutes and Bud. Unluckily, he winds up contracting HIV with a life expectancy of 30 days. Keen to ‘die with my boots on’, Ron shuns the harmful pills of the hospital and sets about importing unapproved drugs. Ever the American, the lone rider builds a business selling these life-extending narcotics, using various tactics of subterfuge to stay one step ahead of the authorities and keep it all legal.

The power of Dallas Buyers Club lies mainly in the acting. Matthew McConaughey, who always sounds like he has a whistle trapped in his throat, has been the toast of Hollywood recently with a steady flow of respectable roles. Gone are the rom-coms of the past; in are outlandish acceptance speeches at award ceremonies. In addition, he garnered frenzied speculation when the paparazzi spied his dramatic weight loss demanded by the role. But for all the hype, he simply turns in a terrific performance. The Lone Star State native must feel comfortable in Texan backwaters, because there is a documentary realism as he swaggers around in boots and Stetsons, drawling and shooting across the screen. Similarly deserving of praise is Jared Leto as Rayong, a transvestite Marc Bolan fan who is also HIV positive. S/he becomes Woodroof’s business partner, but is perhaps more troubled by the whole situation. Leto manages to capture someone in what is a fairly unimaginable predicament, handling the emotional variation with a restrained intensity. Although less dramatic, Jennifer Garner is quietly beguiling as a doctor struggling with her conscience.

Contrary to tradition in the Western genre, Ron cannot simply ride out of town. He is stuck bang in the middle of the crisis, and any departure from the action would be due to departure from the mortal shore. Some critics have called it conservative and rampantly capitalistic. This ignores the progression of Ron Woodroof. Initially, he is a very traditional, predictable rebel. When he really sticks two fingers up at the world is when he starts running with the ‘tinkerbells’ he loathes and sells his Cadillac to spread the meds. Sure it’s a bit of a cliché – bigot forced to revalue his prejudices – but this convention is barely noticeable. Any film based on real events will send the history nerds scurrying off to Wikipedia, and there are inevitably some departures from the truth. Woodroof was a real guy, but elements of several other figures were inserted, and by all accounts he was less of a bull riding redneck. Again, this is minor criticism.

It is fitting that a topic like this should be difficult to watch in places. Much of it is indeed harrowing: AIDs victims cough blood and trundle drips around; patients lie like sacks of wasting bones; doctors discuss the disease in sterile, morbid wards. There would have been a danger of not doing the issue justice, but this has been entirely avoided. Dallas Buyers Club also does a good job of critiquing the pharmaceutical business without being too earnest. It takes issue with selling medical aid to make money, yet it is never distracted from the personal plot by its own worthiness. With the brazen enthusiasm of its roguish protagonist, and some of the subtlety he lacks, Dallas Buyers Club brings an important issue to the screens with acumen.

Interview: Roger Michell

We often hear how filmmakers looked up at the cinema screen as kids and dreamed of a life of movies – were you the same?

Not really, I was in theatre long before film. I started doing little plays when I was 8, and in school I got into acting but wasn’t very good at it or quite as interested as in directing. After school I went to Cambridge to do English, which is a very well-trodden path for theatre directors. Later I became an assistant director at the Royal Court, working with wonderful people like Samuel Beckett, and then slowly carved out a career. And years after that I did a BBC course, now defunct, for people wanting to get into film.

When you were at university did you have your career carefully mapped out in front of you?

Oh no, it never felt like anything was mapped out at all. It felt like a struggle. Still does!

Did you try to balance youthful vitality and vision with learning from more experienced adults?

Well I was very impressed by the people I was working with but you have to cut your own furrow. You really learn from making your own mistakes.

There must have been a few setbacks.

All the time!  Always I try to learn from the mistakes. Every time you turn to a new project, it’s like learning to make something from scratch. You’re much less aware of skills accrued than what you don’t know.

How do you begin a project?

Well film projects start off in many ways. It can be a script that flops through the letterbox but more likely to be a project that’s been developing for many years. Le Week-End, my latest film, was in development for six or seven years before filming. On nearly all my films I like to get the script to a good stage, get it budgeted, attach  cast, and only then try and finance. If you take a half-baked script to a financier, with no cast, they’ll obviously ask for Brad Pitt or Judy Dench to be attached. Or both.

Your films span several genres and styles. What elements do you think are consistent?

I realised recently that my films are all love stories of one sort or another.

Many are about common human problems. Are they autobiographical?

All art is autobiographical, I can’t think of any art which I admire which noticeably avoids an element of autobiography. Although I often don’t realise that a film is autobiographical until much later, sometimes years later.

In our uncertain economic waters, do you think that the Government has a responsibility to help national cinema?

As in any society I think we have a responsibility to support culture. It is after all what glues us together and allows us to understand ourselves a little better. In the UK we’ve almost ceased being a manufacturing country, but we make films supremely well, and I think governments have started to understand the importance of the industry. Pragmatically, a  healthy film industry is also a huge cash cow.

With digital, 3-D, the internet etc., is the industry at a crossroads?

Yes, everything is up in the air. The music industry has shown us that a tsunami is around the corner, and we should learn from this. Netflix commissioned House of Cards, for example. Last year I shot a film on a smartphone, which was thrilling and liberating.

Is that a change like when sound was introduced, or does it signal the end of filmmaking?

It won’t be the end, but it’s offering new ways of making films. It’s easier than when I was young, and there is much more choice. But people want to come back to see a story being told, whatever the technology – it’s about actors and a story.

If you could work with any actor from history, who would it be?

I’m actually planning a film about two nineteenth-century Shakespearean actors, Edwin Forrest and William Charles Macready, one an American swashbuckler and the other a static, Romantic European. I wouldn’t mind working with them.

What is the best aspect of working in the world of film?

The opportunity for limitless and intense cultural and emotional tourism – you get to live in different worlds.

So do you see cinema as simply another means of self-expression, or is it a unique art?

It stands out because it’s collaborative. It’s not like a painting or a novel.

Finally, could you offer any advice for students aspiring to enter the world of film?

Make films. Get out your phone, shoot some stuff and try and cut it together … and then you start learning that it’s more difficult than it looks.

Review: Inside Llewin Davis

The Coen brothers have an odd way of looking at the world. Not a Hunter S. Thompson acid trip way, just slightly off-beat, as if they wear wry-tinted spectacles. Weaving sardonic humour and gross brutality, tragedy and comedy are rarely far apart – a well-used concept in storytelling. They seem fascinated by those on the losing side, from The Dude to Llewellyn Moss to Larry Gopnik, and this must have been the case with Llewin Davis.

Based on one Dave Van Ronk, Llewin is a musician attempting to forge a career in the burgeoning folk scene of early 1960s Greenwich Village. He is less hero than protagonist, losing friends’ cats, ruining dinner parties, heckling performers and creating unwanted pregnancies. Self-indulgently self-destructive, Llewin wallows in masochistic, passive-aggressive failure. We do not know why – maybe his musical partner’s suicide is making solo work unpalatable. In any case Llewin is complex like any human, a positive three-dimensionality for a biopic to have. He might be a musical genius, but he might be just alright.

Inside Llewin Davis runs so smoothly, like a creamy cinematic oyster, that it is a delightful watch. The Coen brothers have buttered the camera and sent the viewer sliding through, to the extent that the film might feel lightweight to some. There is no linear plot, with each new development fading away. Similarly, the supporting cast enter and exit, forgotten as quickly as they appear. This all reflects Llewin’s life: he cannot grasp career success, but drifts from job to job and couch to couch. But maybe it was too elusive for its own good. It is certainly a film that would do with multiple viewings – the significance of the recurring feline escapades, for example, or what it all really means. The music is mostly performed live, a wise move which provides a bracingly sincere and talented soundtrack in today’s Auto-Tuned pop world.

Oscar Isaac deserves applause for his portrayal, for the production is entirely centred on him. For all of the Coens' abilities, it was up to Isaac to deliver a presence both passively restrained and charismatically dominant. Despite their diminished screen time, there are some other notable performances. Carey Mulligan is a raging wife of one of Llewin’s friends, reluctantly living the Village beatnik life. John Goodman is a heroin-addicted, cane-wielding fat man – Colonel Sanders meets Lord Byron. Pop pretty boy Justin Timberlake sings nicely in a sweater. Various oddballs, from laconic beat poets to guitar strumming yokel GIs, are chanced upon by Llewin.

Those who knew Van Ronk have complained that he was far nicer than Llewin, and that Greenwich Village loses some of its ‘vibrancy’ on-screen. But is the point of the film to tell this man’s story and introduce us to the ’60s folk scene, or is it about themes that the setting encapsulates? Joel and Ethan are very obviously demonstrating Van Ronk’s / Llewin’s influence on the most musical decade of the century, with a young Dylan and the Clancy Brothers popping up. Yet more deeply, Inside Llewin Davis is a study of failed artists, about trying to live one's dream. When do you give up? It is a beguiling, intriguing film, and one which asks more questions than it answers.

Review: The Wolf of Wall Street

Based on the memoir of a convicted fraudster, The Wolf of Wall Street has suffered extensive pre-release fatigue thanks to the dogged media questioning of its ethical position. Will it promote illegality? Will it glamorise dishonest lifestyles? Will it be able to stop the audience thinking for itself? This is all predictable stuff for maestro Martin Scorsese, who has built a career on seducing viewers with the glittering highs of gangster life. Whether or not those questions are satisfactorily answered according to a strict, pre-ordained moral code, however, does not necessarily impinge on The Wolf of Wall Street’s quality.

Like many of Martin Scorsese’s productions, we follow a man who finds himself dangerously in at the deep end of ill-gotten affluence. This time it is Jordon Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio), an ambitious yuppie who climbs the Wall Street ladder by founding his own company, Stratton Oakmont, and trading illegally. He hires a bunch of frat-boy buddies, all part-time weed dealers, and builds the company into a sickening behemoth of corporate greed. All is done, of course, at the expense of ‘ordinary’ Americans. This money is then spent on himself: drink, drugs and debauchery. He becomes addicted to Quaaludes (look them up), has affairs and crashes diverse vehicles.

Needless to say, DiCaprio is faultless, as usual playing the tortured and charismatic protagonist. When he performs the manic sales pitches to his adoring employees, like a warped Sermon on the Mount, we are offered a glimpse of how the actor works. Through colossal force of personality, DiCaprio pulls the viewers into his pulsating eyes, and I suspect that this is close to the real Belfort. Jonah Hill injects much mirth as Belfort’s number two, Donnie Azoff, a cousin-marrying loudmouth who exudes an aura of sweaty perversion. Margot Robbie plays Belfort’s wife. At just 23, this must have been challenging in such a chauvinistic film, and with a director who almost exclusively films from a male perspective. Various other names (McConaughey, Lumley, Dujardin) pop up magnificently.

A lot of what you see on-screen is not cinematic fabrication – bombastic Belfort really did indulge in antics that make Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas look like Last of the Summer Wine. At first, it is dazzling. Then it becomes nauseating. By the end, you are repelled. It’s all fluorescent teeth and Italian loafers at Stratton Oakmont, where Friday night celebrations involve copious cocaine, high-class hookers and more psychotic laughter than a mad hatters’ convention. Standing at three sickening hours, even Gordon Gekko would be put off his popcorn.

So are the stylish peaks of the first half adequately answered by the mortal troughs of the second? If hubris does not subside into nemesis, then the film is simply an advert for immorality, the critics cry. I personally believe that it does: Belfort is clearly a pig and the fact that he gets away with it makes us hate him all the more. There will of course be some whooping young chaps at Canary Wharf Cineworld, but should art be banned for fear of a minority misconstruing its morals? There are always going to be criminals who enjoy Scarface, soldiers who think Saving Private Ryan looks fun, and greedy sociopaths who want to emulate Belfort. Scorsese doesn’t show the victims, focusing instead on the bullies. But he presents Belfort as undoubtedly a wrong ’un; a crazed maniac who would abuse strangers for sport if he gave them a second thought.

Great fun and very funny, The Wolf whizzes along like any good epic. People sometimes claim that Scorsese produces one masterpiece per decade, and this certainly looks to be his 2010s magnum opus. What Scorsese does so well is to let the viewer make up their own mind: this is exactly what you should do with The Wolf of Wall Street.