Last shot at happiness (ST 11/07/10)

Leaving (15) 85 mins ****
London River (12A) 87 mins **
Eclipse (12A) 124 mins ***

A banner week, this, for British actresses working under the eyes of French filmmakers, with the release of two dramas on the theme of women and violence. Both open with a bang. In Catherine Corsini’s Leaving, an erotic thriller that develops into romantic tragedy, Kristin Scott Thomas’s insomniac Suzanne arises from bed one night to fire a rifleshot into the snoozing form of we-know-not-whom. Flashback to six months earlier, when Suzanne was embarking upon a physiotherapy career, and we observe she had a very different rapport with the male body.

Suzanne’s dismissive businessman husband Samuel (Yvan Attal) has invited a burly builder (Sergi López) into their home to oversee an extension. When the builder - good with his hands, attentive to a woman’s needs - breaks his foot trying to spare Suzanne’s car from a forgotten-handbrake disaster, the fledgling physio ends up overseeing his rehabilitation, and eventually massaging more than just his metatarsal. By which point, worldly viewers might well be thinking: oh, come on - all this needs is a cheesy organ soundtrack, and we could be watching any 1970s skinflick.

Yet Corsini emerges from the French tradition of explicitly feminist directors striving to subvert the framework of pornography, and do something constructive with desire. The physicality of Leaving is double-edged: it encompasses both the lovers’ bedroom romps and Samuel roughing up his wife. Since we know the ending, the affair assumes the look of another form of entrapment. Scott Thomas plays the opposite arc to Tilda Swinton in I Am Love: cheeks that once were tanned and rosy turn gaunt and haunted as Suzanne confesses her deeds to a spouse who grows ever more possessive.

And possession is key here: there is, in this love triangle, an implied critique of the unhealthy links society forges between love and money, and how much capital is required to sustain a relationship. It’s galling that a heartless swine such as Samuel should be able to provide Suzanne with greater protection than her jobbing paramour; though not as galling as seeing Suzanne begging at a petrol station for the freedom to move on with her life. The gunshot, when the film returns to it, is a full stop of sorts, but also the only way Suzanne can see out of a dire financial and emotional situation.

This layer of social comment staves off any suspicions of conservatism: yes, Suzanne is punished for her actions, but in a manner Corsini demonstrates is plainly unjust. A less comforting proposition than 2008’s Kristin-starring success I’ve Loved You So Long, Leaving is nonetheless punchier and more provocative, directed and performed with exceptional economy. We need take but one look at Scott Thomas’s face as she first crosses her lover’s threshold to know this affair isn’t likely to conclude well - but that Suzanne feels obliged to proceed all the same, as a presumed last shot at happiness.


Released to mark the fifth anniversary of 7/7, Rachid Bouchareb’s oddly unconvincing London River finds Brenda Blethyn’s Elisabeth living in isolation on Guernsey when news of the terrorist attacks first breaks. Unable to reach her daughter via telephone, she heads to the mainland to track her down in person, only to find London - in her words - “crawling with Muslims”. Also making his way into town - again, magically avoiding any of the travel chaos the bombs triggered - is Ousmane (Sotigui Kouyaté), a French-African Muslim whose son has similarly disappeared without a trace.

The actors are the film’s strongest suit: the late Kouyaté strikingly dolorous, Blethyn gamely trying something away from the foghorn-broad end of her range. Elsewhere, Bouchareb betrays signs he’s operating in a second language. Themes are spelt out almost phonetically, the plotting both schematic and curious: could Elisabeth really have this little awareness of other cultures, and - as a loving mother - zero grasp of where her own offspring lived? The occasion demanded substantial emotional truths; it gets merely good-to-woolly intentions.


Finally, a Twilight Saga update: Eclipse is the one where Bella Swan graduates, and there’s a sense the series has started to grow up - and out. Director David Slade has raised the action ante with the arrival of “new bloods”, a passing, naggingly irrelevant sideshow of debutante vampires. The mythology, meanwhile, gets ever more floridly self-involved: it sometimes seems as though every minor character is getting their own expositional flashback.

Yet whenever it threatens to crush the delicate rhythms that sustained the first Twilight, Eclipse can pull back to show Bella and her bloodsucking beau Edward tentatively testing out the parameters of their relationship; it’s a franchise of restraint, through and through. Again, it’ll be a swoony nonsense if you’re not, or have never been, a 14-year-old girl. But if you are 14 years old, and a boy has just refused to hold your hand, I could see how it might mean the world to you.

Into the woods (redux): "Predators"

Unlikely places to find one-time Academy Award-winner Adrien Brody: as a growly "stone-cold mercenary" traipsing through a hostile jungle environment in pursuit of that most intangible and elusive of beasts - a copper-bottomed hit. The name-recognition sequel Predators has Brody's Royce heading up a team of what the script describes as "heavy hitters" - a Yakuza (Louis Ozama Changchien), a former member of the Sierra Leone death squads (Mahershalalhashbaz Ali), the FBI's most wanted (Walton Goggins), a sexy sniper chick (Alice Braga) and Danny Trejo - tossed unknowingly out of a plane into woodland that proves doubly deadly. Not just the natural habitat of the all-devouring, lesser-spotted Predator (we're assured the species has evolved, although its MO appears much the same), it's also been boobytrapped by all those who've tried to hunt the creature in the past. Look sharp for the Bill Oddie cameo.

Best to get the cynicism out of the way early doors: yes, Predators is a cash-strapped major studio's way of renewing their dwindling revenue streams by rebooting one of their most enduring franchises - but, as produced by Robert Rodriguez and directed by Nimród Antal, it displays, in itself, just about the right level of genre smarts to pass muster. The opening 45 minutes, certainly, are an improvement on 2008's utterly disposable Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem, currently languishing in a DVD bargain bin near you. Screenwriters Alex Litvak and Michael Finch have shrewdly recycled elements from Lost (the motley crew trying to work each other and their predicament out), Cube (all the while engaged against the ultimate killing machine), the Jurassic Park movies (with the Predators as T-Rexs; there's other, no less threatening indigenous wildlife to duck and dodge first) and that hardy genre perennial The Most Dangerous Game (man as both hunter and hunted, at the mercy of presumably very rich off-screen forces).

Jobbing Hungarian émigré Antal is an unusual choice for this gig, given that his work - pulpy and generic as it has been in spots - has mostly been concerned with interiors: think the Budapest subway system in his international breakthrough Kontroll, the interlocking motel rooms in 2007's Vacancy, or the locked security van holed up inside the disused industrial premises in last year's thoroughly boxy Armored. In fact, while events take a left turn around the halfway mark with the introduction of Laurence Fishburne (an Armored veteran) as a deranged survivor of earlier carnage, interest takes a pronounced dip during a second act in which he lures Royce's crew back to his place - and effectively shuts out any threat the Predators pose.

Briefly, the film turns into Aliens - the production design, all caves and pipework, acknowledges as much - and becomes a good deal stuffier and more familiar for it, although as the final act suggests Predators also wants to be considered as a samurai movie, and as a Vin Diesel opus starring Adrien Brody (holding up his end of the bargain adequately, enhanced abs and all), we might, perhaps, give the filmmakers marks for eclecticism, if not originality; the ending, blatantly setting up a potential Predator3, nevertheless has the authentically downbeat tenor of pulp. In the end, it is just more product - product that, like its target audience, probably needs to get out more - but it's product that pretty much fulfills its lowly remit, and in a summer of major American squibs and duds, we might be grudgingly grateful for that.

Predators opens in cinemas nationwide today.

Bite me: "Eclipse", or Why I Continue to Warm To The Twilight Saga

An early gripe with Eclipse, the latest instalment in the Twilight saga, is that it ducks - or, more precisely, postpones answering - the question popped at the end of last year's New Moon as a major series cliffhanger. Instead, we find Kristen Stewart's Bella Swan still attempting to broker peace between the vampire and werewolf factions of her Washington neighborhood, and - accordingly - refusing to commit fully to either pre-eminent bloodsucker Edward (Robert Pattinson) or oft-topless lycanthrope Jacob (Taylor Lautner). "From now on, I'm Switzerland," our heroine declares, which at least explains the suspicious gold reserves tucked away under her bed.

Eclipse is the one where these main characters graduate high school, and there is - just - a sense of a franchise beginning at last to grow up - and out. The director is David Slade, who made the effective 30 Days of Night, and the introduction of a gang of "new bloods" - unruly vampire debutantes - permits a heightened level of carnage: at one point, unless I'm very much mistaken, there's even an allusion to gang rape, which would never be allowed at Hogwarts. (As ever in this franchise, sexuality in all its forms is something to be fearful of.) As signalled by the first image after the opening credits - Bella reading poetry to Edward in a field of glowing bluebells - the saga has become ever more floridly self-involved. In Eclipse, what seems like every supporting vamp and werewolf gets their own expositional flashback, pushing the running time over two hours, and - for the first time - we see this interspecies conflict receiving serious coverage on CNN. (There should have been a Twilight-themed special edition of The Situation Room, presented by Werewolf Blitzer.)

In other words, the franchise, a decent-sized juggernaut to begin with, has got bigger and bigger ever since - and yet: every time Eclipse threatens to crush the delicate, swoony rhythms that made the first film so intoxicating, it can pull back to show Bella and Edward tentatively testing the parameters of their relationship; if nothing else, it's a franchise with restraint in its veins. As a consequence, some pleasing elements have survived the relentless process of sequelisation. Stewart and Pattinson really do have something going on, onscreen at least, and one might also spare a few words for the increasingly wry and welcome participation of Billy Burke as Bella's father, a touchstone for grown-up viewers in the same way Mr. Bennet is for any men reading Pride and Prejudice.

Of course, this wouldn't be a summer event movie without its flaws and wastage. The new vampires (even Bryce Dallas Howard, a passenger once more after last summer's Terminator: Salvation; someone get this girl a better agent) are little more than a passing, naggingly irrelevant sideshow. (I was happy enough with the old vampires.) And the plasticky Lautner, all teeth and torso ("Doesn't he have a shirt?," Edward muses in one of the film's occasional moments of self-awareness), remains a sticking point in the efficacy of the central love triangle; frankly, Team Jacob is for morons, like anyone who thought England might still win the World Cup after their performance in the group stages. That rare beast - a truly feminine movie phenomenon - it'll again be a nonsense if you're not, or if you've never been, a 14-year-old girl. But if you are 14 years old, and a boy has just refused to hold your hand, then I could see how it might just mean the world to you.

The Twilight Saga: Eclipse previews today, and opens nationwide from Friday.

For what it's worth...

Top Ten Films at the UK Box Office
for the weekend of June 25-27, 2010:

1 (new) Get Him to the Greek (15) *** [above]
2 (1) Killers (12A) **
3 (2) Sex and the City 2 (15) **
4 (4) Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (12A) **
5 (3) StreetDance (PG) **
6 (6) Death at a Funeral (15) **
7 (new) The Collector (18) **
8 (5) Letters to Juliet (PG) **
9 (9) Robin Hood (12A) **
10 (7) Wild Target (12A)

(source: UK Film Council)

My top five:
1. Breathless
2. White Material
3. Skeletons
4. Predators
5. Gay Sex in the 70s


Top Ten DVD rentals:

1 (1) Sherlock Holmes (12) *
2 (2) Alice in Wonderland (PG) **
3 (3) Edge of Darkness (15) **
4 (7) Up in the Air (15) ****
5 (5) Brothers (15) **
6 (9) Law Abiding Citizen (18)
7 (re) Avatar (12) ***
8 (8) The Book of Eli (15) ***
9 (re) Precious (15) *****
10 (4) Crazy Heart (15) ****

(source: lovefilm.com)

My top five:
1. Father of My Children
2. Double Take
3. Samson & Delilah
4. Crazy Heart
5. Ponyo


Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:
1. The Magnificent Seven (Saturday, C4, 6.30pm)
2. Con Air (Saturday, BBC1, 10.30pm)
3. Philadelphia (Monday, five, 10pm)
4. Pale Rider (Wednesday, ITV1, 10.35pm)
5. Ghost Busters (Sunday, five, 6.55pm)

Secret agents: "Skeletons"

There were rumblings and grumblings about the standard of much of the British fare at the recent Edinburgh Film Festival, but surely not about Nick Whitfield's Skeletons, the eventual winner of this year's Michael Powell Award for best homegrown production: a small polished gem that ploughs its own individualistic furrow for 96 minutes, then lingers in your head and heart for days afterwards.

Best of all: it couldn't, surely, have been made anywhere else, because at its centre is a very British double act. Following in the grand tradition of Flanders and Swann, Julian and Sandy, Eric and Ernie, Vic and Bob, and Ant and Dec, we now have Davis (Ed Gaughan), the uptight, wiry one, and the chubby, more empathetic Bennett (Andrew Buckley). For a fee, this pair will come round and clean out the skeletons in your closet - literally: like the healer John Coffey in Stephen King's The Green Mile, these two men possess a gift that allows them to enter into their clients' past and hoover up any indiscretions they might find there, in the interests of fostering greater honesty between persons.

The film begins with Davis lauding Rasputin for the consistency the otherwise mad monk maintained between his public and private personae, and what follows will teach him how hard, if not impossible, it is to fully compartmentalise; that there will always be some form of psychic slippage. There is an obvious personality clash between Davis and Bennett - the latter determined to reach out to his clients emotionally, the other withholding, keener simply to get the job done - and their personal and professional relationship will be placed under further strain when they're assigned the case of a single mum (Paprika Steen) living with a sullen, unresponsive daughter (Tuppence Middleton) in a house that sits on an abandoned "corpse road" - the morbid equivalent of a leyline, perhaps.

As our heroes shuttle between assignments - and one drizzly, underpopulated corner of the Fens to the next - in rattly old 1980s railstock, Whitfield begins to set out a funny-surreal bureaucracy of secrets, and observes what happens when human emotion begins to inch its way up the chain of command. Given that what these literally secret agents are collecting is the intangible, impossible to nail down, it seems doubly absurd that Davis should insist on having every full-stop on the signing contracts be properly initialled - and let's say hello to Jason Isaacs, turning up in a flat cap and comedy 'tache as the pair's boss, "The Colonel", trailing rumours the organisation is set to sign a lucrative deal with the Saxe-Coburgs ("Imagine the filth!").

The whole film is what one might call off to its advantage, and never more so than in its casting. It's a tremendous surprise to see Danish Dogme veteran Steen embodying a brisk country wife who seems to have real trouble making small talk. (She'd rather move on to address this family's bigger issues, you sense.) Buckley, who had a minor role on TV's Extras and could pass for Stephen Merchant's pudgier brother, is terrifically gentle as an affectionate stay-at-home who's used his gift to avoid what would surely have been his true calling in life: assistant bank manager. Gaughan, meanwhile, has arrived at the genius conclusion that nothing is funnier than someone saying "eppy" in a Norfolk accent - except when circumstances contrive to leave Davis speaking Bulgarian, at which point we might ourselves conclude the film's drollery is less East Anglian than Eastern European.

Certainly, the strangeness is such that Skeletons never allows itself the chance to fall into a rut of familiarity, although I spotted faint echoes of Paul Auster's novel "The Music of Chance" (and Philip Haas's screen adaptation thereof) - another yarn fusing together metaphors and metaphysics, charting the influence of our past on our present courses - particularly when Steen begins digging up her back garden in the hope of laying her absent hubby's ghost to rest. Comedy this subtly left-of-centre - not quirky, just uncanny - always risks alienating those (and there will be those) who won't get it, but it's a hugely confident debut, leaping from one reality to the next in such a way as to maintain not just narrative but emotional coherence, and strikingly shot by Zac Nicholson on the broadest of widescreen canvasses. I loved it.

Skeletons is on selected release.

Over their shoulder: "Gay Sex in the 70s"

Joseph Lovett's brisk, to-the-point documentary Gay Sex in the 70s charts the period in gay culture between Stonewall in 1969 and the discovery of AIDS in 1981 - as one interviewee describes it, the most decadent decade since the fall of the Roman Empire, Sodom before the gonorrhea. The thesis these interviews set out is that the gay men who fought their corner at Stonewall - homosexuality's own Vietnam - were mere boys, with no context for growing up gay. By contrast, the 70s were an explosion of pent-up sexual energy, aided by throbbing disco beats and the easy availability of recreational drugs, and perhaps most apparent in the sudden proliferation of gay and camp imagery in art, on stage (in the likes of O Calcutta! and Hair, with their frequent, dangling penises) and in pornography.

What we get, then, is an especially horny coming-of-age story, its locus the abandoned piers way down low on the southernmost tip of Manhattan, where the element of risk was only enhanced by the darkness and the dodgy floorboards; habitues of the scene recall guys falling into (and, in especially extreme cases, drowning in) the Hudson River below, or emerging into the morning to find their wallets had gone AWOL. The sense one gets is of a decade of experimentation and naivety: one participant reveals how perplexed he was when he took home a leather boy who wanted to flush his head down the toilet, and I feel we should probably warn grandma there's a painful fisting anecdote at one point.

A somewhat childish approach towards matters of sexual health becomes apparent, too. We hear of doctors holding orgies, and of cruising going on in the waiting rooms of New York's STD clinics. AIDS was surely lying in wait around the next corner (or under the boardwalk), but for the most part, the consensus was the period was non-stop hedonistic fun: nude sunbathing, glitterballs and cock by the yard. One caveat with Lovett's film is that it's almost entirely Manhattan-centric: very much Gay Sex in the City in the 70s, there's little on what it might have meant to grow up gay in the sticks, where there weren't any gyms or baths or Fire Island to hang around; the idea everyone was out and proud and getting some (if not loads) surely throws a rainbow-coloured blanket over some of the trickier stories that might have been told. (Nothing, either, of lesbian or transgendered sex in the 1970s, either, if we're going to enter into that debate.)

The interviews are your standard low-budget, face-on, single camera fare, with no adornment save the occasional example of outre facial hair, but the formal slack is taken up by Lovett's evocative use of archive footage and photography: candid period snapshots displaying consenting adults getting up to all sorts of naughtiness on rooftops, in windows and steamrooms, and - of course - on the dancefloor. Any voyeuristic tendencies are offset by the personal nature of the testimony Lovett has collated: explicit at some points, yes, but reflective at others (particularly towards the end, as the first lesions begin to appear), it manages to overturn a good few of the stereotypes and assumptions we may have come to associate with the era. That said, one of the interviewees actually turns out to have been in the navy. If I knew how to scream, my friends, I would have done.

Gay Sex in the 70s is on selected release.

Tick, tick, tick...: "Lymelife"

"The American Dream Sucks," runs the tagline for Lymelife, and - after The Ice Storm, American Beauty, Imaginary Heroes, The Chumscrubber and countless other copycats attempting to expose the white-picket fence as innately rotten - you might legitimately think: well, do we really need to be told this in a movie theatre anymore? To give him his due, writer-director Derick Martini carves out a niche for himself through his setting (America, the late 70s: before the prosperity of the Reagan years had had the chance to trickle down to his middle-class white supporters) and location: not, this time, a typical suburb, but an affordable housing development in Long Island, on the edge of a patch of woodland that has left the locals susceptible to (and shit-scared of) Lyme disease, the infection transmissible from deers to humans via ticks. Taping up their trouser legs in one notionally happy household are aspirant developer father Alec Baldwin, his wife Jill Hennessy, their youngest son Rory Culkin and - passing through on army leave - his elder brother Kieran Culkin. Next door are perky housewife Cynthia Nixon, her oddball hubby Timothy Hutton - who's been using one form of bug (surveillance equipment) to track the progress of another (the undiagnosed MS/syphilis/Lyme disease that's left him with a bad case of the sweats) through the vicinity - and their blossoming daughter Emma Roberts, upon whom the younger Culkin has developed a serious crush.

Though it borrows the latter actor from The Chumscrubber (and the elder Culkin from the not dissimilar Igby Goes Down), the film's closest suburban-hell model is Ang Lee's The Ice Storm. Within a rural setting - another spoiled paradise - we again observe that the wholesome family values being imposed from the top down by a particular administration are founded on a lie; that while the philandering parents install themselves in the basement to exchange partners and fluids with abandon, their sons and daughters, left to their own devices, will be out on the front porch, taking hits on a joint. In a film where some of the actors are perhaps too well established as personalities to entirely convince in anonymous roles (Baldwin and Nixon, in particular; Hutton, too, feels like meta-casting designed to invoke the spirit of Ordinary People), Roberts - taking intriguing steps to shed her Nancy Drew image - and the two Culkins share the freshest-seeming scenes, though even they sometimes appear to be operating in the shadow of Christina Ricci, Elijah Wood and Adam Hann-Byrd's superior work in the Lee film.

Where Lymelife scores over that film's many imitators, though, is in moving beyond new-bohemian sneering to develop a strain of social comment: the idea is that in the rush to get rich - the throwing up of these houses on cheap, disease-ridden land - lives have been placed in mortal danger. It's a mounting sickness - not your standard consumerism-induced impassivity - which defines these characters: the beads of perspiration breaking out on Hutton's brow and Baldwin's upper lip, Culkin jr.'s dash to the toilet upon learning the extent of his father's hypocrisy. It inevitably has to come back to strained kitchen-sink conversations, awkward adolescent sex and poor, defenceless inanimate objects being knocked off the dinner table in explosions of long-suppressed rage, but Martini is at least trying to find new angles on this most familiar of modern Western sob stories: we never knew we had it so bad.

Lymelife opens at selected cinemas from tomorrow.