(Yorgios Lanthimos, 2015)
There are some brilliant ideas and moments here. The central conceit is the kind of thing that shows how imaginatively conservative so much cinema is: it imagines a world where single people are sent to a hotel in order to pair off within 45 days. If they do not, they are transformed into the animal of their choosing. Some evenings, they head off to a local forest to hunt "loners", rogue singles who have forsworn relationships and live off the land. David (Colin Farrell), recently abandoned by his wife for another man, arrives at the hotel with his brother in the form of a dog, and befriends a man with a limp (Ben Wishaw) and a man with a lisp (John C Reilly), while eluding the affections of a desperate woman (Ashley Jensen). Halfway through the action shifts to the forest as David joins the loners. Here, and against the rules, he falls for a woman who is short-sighted, like him (Rachel Weisz), but if the leader (Leá Seydoux) finds out, they will be in danger.
This is all told in a series of deadpan scenes with flat, affectless delivery of dialogue, Lanthimos' coldly controlled style, and a severe score of several pieces for string quartet sawing away in the background.
While there are some moments of brilliant comedy, much of the success of the material is down to the cast. Farrell and Wishaw do extremely well at halting and awkward loneliness, while Olivia Coleman is another standout as the matter-of-fact hotel manager. Weisz's voiceover is played for some big laughs too, but the story takes a strange turn towards the climax and becomes surprisingly moving.
The allegory at the heart of the story is a little too broad and vague to sustain an entire narrative, even if sometimes it becomes more precise and pleasingly cynical. There are shots here at online dating logarithms, tinder and our cultural acceptance of couples over singles which are often provocative, but much of it is too scattershot to have much of an effect, for all that it is still witty and accessible.It occasionally hints at making more profound statements about human attraction and repulsion - why we need other people and what it does to us - but never quite commits to that.
Showing posts with label Allegory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Allegory. Show all posts
Monday, 7 December 2015
Sunday, 3 March 2013
SOUTHERN COMFORT
(Walter Hill, 1981)
Southern Comfort may just be Walter Hill's most acute and perfect film.
By the time he directed it, he had enjoyed a lot of critical and commercial success. Indeed, he was on a run of high quality few directors get to experience in an entire career - from The Streetfighter/Hard Times in 1975, through The Driver and The Warriors in '78 and '79, to the beautiful The Long Riders in 1980. That last film, Hill's first Western, indicated that he had perfected his voice; it is a little arty in its use of genre, elliptical plotting and Hill's embrace of slow-motion as an almost abstract method for filming action. And yet it is accessible - full of action set-pieces, funny, and with a little romance too. Hill made films which could appeal to a mainstream audience and a cineaste at the same time, which explains his enduring popularity with critics.
That success may explain how audacious Southern Comfort is. Hill had the confidence to make it perhaps his starkest film, with a stripped-down approach taken to the setting and characterisation. The back story is dealt with in the fantastically economical opening scene, which also establishes every character in five minutes or so. We are following a troop of Louisiana National Guardsmen on a training exercise in the Bayou. They are a disparate group of personalities, including a few quiet, suburban middle-class types with respectable jobs, a couple of gung ho hillbillies, some ex-Army men who take it all more seriously than the others, and a few loners, only there because they absolutely have to be. In the early stages of a long march through the swamp they steal (they assure themselves its borrowing) some boats they come across. When the men they presume to be the owners of the boats appear on the shore, one of the men shoots at them. The men on the shore - cajun hunters - dive for cover, and then return fire, not understanding that these National Guardsmen are armed only with blanks. A bullet kills the commanding Officer of the National Guard, and the others flee terrified into the bayou. Thus begins a long slow hunt as the group is whittled down by the hunters, by nature and by internal conflict until only a handful remain, desperately clinging to life as they attempt to escape the swampland.
Placing his characters in such an extreme situation allows Hill to test and define them the way he likes - through action. Some panic, a few wilt and one or two snap. The genuine heroes are the ones who keep thinking, who keep their heads. All of this is demonstrated in tight, convincingly fraught dialogue exchanges and some intense action sequences. The heroes who emerge are Spencer (Keith Carradine) a cynical, urban wiseass, and Hardin (Powers Boothe), a new Texan transfer into the squad who is disgusted by the arrogance and stupidity of his comrades even before their ordeal begins. Among the weak links are a terrific Fred Ward as Reece, an aggressive hillbilly who relishes the opportunity for violence the situation provides him, and Alun Autry as Bowden, an uptight High School football Coach who is seemingly driven mad by events.
The way the men turn on one another, the way the chain of command proves ineffective in such a situation, and the way their characters reveal themselves are all neatly executed by Hill and a cast filled with great character actor faces. Action films with such solid characterisation and tight plotting have always been rare, and Hill allies that with his customary action filmmaking - the attacks and fights here are brutal yet elegantly composed, the logic behind each shot and cut clear and beautifully crisp.
Boothe and Carradine offer one of the most interesting buddy-relationships ever seen in this genre; they barely like one another, yet the gradual growth of respect between them is tellingly, convincingly played, and each is excellent in his role.
Southern Comfort offers more than all I have described; Hill's film presents an obvious (though never overstated) allegory for Vietnam, artfully underlined in the final freeze-frame. It is also, for long stretches, a beautiful piece of pure cinema. Andrew Laszlo's cinematography offers a rich symphony of browns and greens throughout, and plays with the light thrown by the murky swamp water and the dulled skies glimpsed through the branches above. Through this the men, themselves in dull green, trudge, making the sudden appearance of civilization in the form of a Cajun village in the last act feel like a moment of alien contact in a sci-fi film. This is all soundtracked by Hill's most frequent collaborator, Ry Cooder, whose atmospheric slide guitar score could not be better.
Southern Comfort may just be Walter Hill's most acute and perfect film.
By the time he directed it, he had enjoyed a lot of critical and commercial success. Indeed, he was on a run of high quality few directors get to experience in an entire career - from The Streetfighter/Hard Times in 1975, through The Driver and The Warriors in '78 and '79, to the beautiful The Long Riders in 1980. That last film, Hill's first Western, indicated that he had perfected his voice; it is a little arty in its use of genre, elliptical plotting and Hill's embrace of slow-motion as an almost abstract method for filming action. And yet it is accessible - full of action set-pieces, funny, and with a little romance too. Hill made films which could appeal to a mainstream audience and a cineaste at the same time, which explains his enduring popularity with critics.
That success may explain how audacious Southern Comfort is. Hill had the confidence to make it perhaps his starkest film, with a stripped-down approach taken to the setting and characterisation. The back story is dealt with in the fantastically economical opening scene, which also establishes every character in five minutes or so. We are following a troop of Louisiana National Guardsmen on a training exercise in the Bayou. They are a disparate group of personalities, including a few quiet, suburban middle-class types with respectable jobs, a couple of gung ho hillbillies, some ex-Army men who take it all more seriously than the others, and a few loners, only there because they absolutely have to be. In the early stages of a long march through the swamp they steal (they assure themselves its borrowing) some boats they come across. When the men they presume to be the owners of the boats appear on the shore, one of the men shoots at them. The men on the shore - cajun hunters - dive for cover, and then return fire, not understanding that these National Guardsmen are armed only with blanks. A bullet kills the commanding Officer of the National Guard, and the others flee terrified into the bayou. Thus begins a long slow hunt as the group is whittled down by the hunters, by nature and by internal conflict until only a handful remain, desperately clinging to life as they attempt to escape the swampland.
Placing his characters in such an extreme situation allows Hill to test and define them the way he likes - through action. Some panic, a few wilt and one or two snap. The genuine heroes are the ones who keep thinking, who keep their heads. All of this is demonstrated in tight, convincingly fraught dialogue exchanges and some intense action sequences. The heroes who emerge are Spencer (Keith Carradine) a cynical, urban wiseass, and Hardin (Powers Boothe), a new Texan transfer into the squad who is disgusted by the arrogance and stupidity of his comrades even before their ordeal begins. Among the weak links are a terrific Fred Ward as Reece, an aggressive hillbilly who relishes the opportunity for violence the situation provides him, and Alun Autry as Bowden, an uptight High School football Coach who is seemingly driven mad by events.
The way the men turn on one another, the way the chain of command proves ineffective in such a situation, and the way their characters reveal themselves are all neatly executed by Hill and a cast filled with great character actor faces. Action films with such solid characterisation and tight plotting have always been rare, and Hill allies that with his customary action filmmaking - the attacks and fights here are brutal yet elegantly composed, the logic behind each shot and cut clear and beautifully crisp.
Boothe and Carradine offer one of the most interesting buddy-relationships ever seen in this genre; they barely like one another, yet the gradual growth of respect between them is tellingly, convincingly played, and each is excellent in his role.
Southern Comfort offers more than all I have described; Hill's film presents an obvious (though never overstated) allegory for Vietnam, artfully underlined in the final freeze-frame. It is also, for long stretches, a beautiful piece of pure cinema. Andrew Laszlo's cinematography offers a rich symphony of browns and greens throughout, and plays with the light thrown by the murky swamp water and the dulled skies glimpsed through the branches above. Through this the men, themselves in dull green, trudge, making the sudden appearance of civilization in the form of a Cajun village in the last act feel like a moment of alien contact in a sci-fi film. This is all soundtracked by Hill's most frequent collaborator, Ry Cooder, whose atmospheric slide guitar score could not be better.
Sunday, 16 January 2011
THE ASCENT
(Larissa Shepitko, 1977)
Shepitko was a special, luminous talent. In The Ascent she transforms a seemingly simple tale of the flight, capture, interrogation and execution of some Belarussian partisans during WW2 into a Christian allegory and an investigation of faith. Her two protagonists cleverly represent different worldviews: one grimly determined to survive at any cost, the other arriving at a zen-like acceptance of his imminent death which Shepitko portrays as an almost Christ-like state of spiritual enlightenment.
She combines fine storytelling - the film works, in it's first half at least, as a genre piece, with battle scenes which are brutal and adeptly shot and edited - with superbly incorporated experimentation with sound and image. White noise rises up on the soundtrack at key points, and ambient sound is used similarly, often to signal a moment of spiritual ecstasy or revelation, while she uses a mobile camera often in the first act before opting for more static shots later in the film. The journey taken by the characters is echoed by this stylistic change, and also by a different palette; the first half is blindingly white, snow covering landscapes with dark tiny figures trudging through them. The second half is much darker, mainly interiors, allowing Shepitko to shoot her hero in glowing chiaroscuro as his spirit lightens with death approaching.
She was a filmmaker capable of pure cinematic poetry, as this film makes clear. And yet, her humanism is apparent too, because The Ascent is, as much as anything, incredibly moving. Her characters struggle with their fates, with the moral issues the Nazi occupation confronts them with, and Shepitko addresses most of it in the interrogation scenes, where a Police Inspector takes on each man and reads their characters precisely. He is the horror of collaboration personified, and we see the effect he has as the men and other condemned prisoners discuss their experiences and options in the hours before they will be executed.
That execution scene, when it comes, is an intense, almost unbearable scene of martyrdom and waste.
Shepitko died in a car crash in 1979. The Ascent was the last film she completed before her death.
Shepitko was a special, luminous talent. In The Ascent she transforms a seemingly simple tale of the flight, capture, interrogation and execution of some Belarussian partisans during WW2 into a Christian allegory and an investigation of faith. Her two protagonists cleverly represent different worldviews: one grimly determined to survive at any cost, the other arriving at a zen-like acceptance of his imminent death which Shepitko portrays as an almost Christ-like state of spiritual enlightenment.
She combines fine storytelling - the film works, in it's first half at least, as a genre piece, with battle scenes which are brutal and adeptly shot and edited - with superbly incorporated experimentation with sound and image. White noise rises up on the soundtrack at key points, and ambient sound is used similarly, often to signal a moment of spiritual ecstasy or revelation, while she uses a mobile camera often in the first act before opting for more static shots later in the film. The journey taken by the characters is echoed by this stylistic change, and also by a different palette; the first half is blindingly white, snow covering landscapes with dark tiny figures trudging through them. The second half is much darker, mainly interiors, allowing Shepitko to shoot her hero in glowing chiaroscuro as his spirit lightens with death approaching.
She was a filmmaker capable of pure cinematic poetry, as this film makes clear. And yet, her humanism is apparent too, because The Ascent is, as much as anything, incredibly moving. Her characters struggle with their fates, with the moral issues the Nazi occupation confronts them with, and Shepitko addresses most of it in the interrogation scenes, where a Police Inspector takes on each man and reads their characters precisely. He is the horror of collaboration personified, and we see the effect he has as the men and other condemned prisoners discuss their experiences and options in the hours before they will be executed.
That execution scene, when it comes, is an intense, almost unbearable scene of martyrdom and waste.
Shepitko died in a car crash in 1979. The Ascent was the last film she completed before her death.
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