At the LFF: "Curling King"

The droll Norwegian comedy Curling King brings to a sport oft referred to as "chess on ice" a sensibility immediately recognisable from Dodgeball and certain Wes Anderson ventures. Just as chess has had its fair share of lunatic geniuses, Curling King presents us with one Truls Paulsen (Atle Antonsen), an erstwhile champion of the rink institutionalised after his obsession with getting his stones in the exact right spot began to get the better of him. Returned to the custody of a generally disapproving wife, he's soon obliged to reunite the rest of his crew - an incorrigible tailchaser, an insomniac grouch and a seasoned birdwatcher - in order to win the prize money that'll send their ailing coach to the States for a lifesaving operation.

From Anderson, director Ole Endresen cribs the rigidly head-on framing and obsessive production design: in his signature yellow sweater and socks, Truls is at once at odds with the pastel-pink dollhouse look his wife has cultivated for their home. From Dodgeball, the film serves up the bouffanted rival, the flowery commentary team (seen putting on their coats and locking up the studio before Truls attempts his final, seemingly impossible shot) and a mildly smirky attitude to its chosen minority pursuit: the film's best joke involves a curling administrator who refuses to answer any question from reporters that includes the diminutive term "niche".

No prior knowledge is assumed, or needed: the mechanics of the sport are actually less important than the progress of these middle-aged men in getting over their individual issues with father figures (the insomniac's dad is a Rod Stewart impersonator, to his shame) and coming to pull or push and sweep as a unit. Like the American comedies it apes, it offers very little for the women on the sidelines to do: Truls's wife is an emasculating shrew turned traitorous harpie, leading him to take up with a kooky, paint-slinging free spirit; its chief concern is with men being men - the script doesn't lack for dick jokes - as they would had they retreated to a cabin to go ice fishing. At 75 minutes, it's slight and ever so slightly sitcommy, but amusing all the same.

King Curling screens at the Vue West End on Sat 22 at 8.45pm, and again on Sun 23 at 12.45pm.

At the LFF: "Oslo, August 31st"

There is another Scandinavian filmmaker whose name is Trier, and his refusal to adopt the grandiose, mock-aristocratic "von" assumed by his Danish namesake Lars seems, in this instance, telling. The Norwegian Joachim Trier evidently goes about his business in an altogether more modest fashion: his debut Reprise snuck into UK cinemas in 2007, and its follow-up, Oslo, August 31st, is a film that considers depression, mortality and the end of things in a calmer manner than the operatic Melancholia. Low-key naturalism is this Trier's bag. The scenario of his latest - inspired by Pierre Drieu la Rochelle's novel Le Feu Follet, previously filmed by Louis Malle in 1963 - introduces us to Anders (Anders Danielsen Lie), a 34-year-old sometime writer and drug addict who, a day after making an unseen and unsuccessful attempt to drown himself, is granted 24-hour release from rehab to attend a job interview intended to get him back into society.

The interview will, it turns out, be brief, and not a notable success, so Anders uses the remaining hours available to him to conduct other business: tying up loose ends, reaching out. On a visit to an old acquaintance - himself a former party animal, now happily settled with a wife and child - a series of conversations see the two men kick over their regrets, their shared memories, and what-might-have-beens. Such encounters have the easy intimacy of many other cinematic walk-and-talks, but it's the leavetakings that prove backloaded with emotion: neither these old friends, nor really the audience, can be sure they're going to see a self-destructive drifter like Anders again.

Trier keeps subtly altering the film's tactics, which both keeps us on edge and better describes a character with no evident structure to his life: Anders is notionally free to go anywhere and do anything, yet he seems trapped within his head and body by a heavy-weighing despair. Around the halfway point, with afternoon turning to dusk, the film simply sits down alongside him in a cafe, and as Anders observes the passing foot-traffic - seeking out fellow travellers: not, perhaps, the students making optimistic plans for the future, more likely the mopey old souls heading into the night outside - so too Trier follows these characters with his camera, in the process swerving past those accusations of solipsism that dogged Melancholia, and sketching a deft portrait of life going on with or without the presence of his lead character.

And as the light begins to fade, so too the film becomes more episodic and scattered, individual scenes dissipating like shoppers from the city centre at closing time, here tuning into Anders' internal monologues, there leaving him entirely alone with his thoughts. In Danielsen Lie's perfectly pitched performance, this young man becomes a spectral figure - barely present, drifting mostly unseen through his contemporaries' parties - albeit one sharp enough to have gained some insight into his own condition. This is someone attempting both a reintegration with society and, one soon gathers, a reintegration of the self, gathering up the pieces of his life and seeing if there's anything there he might work with, that might provide him with a second chance, some reprieve.

Trier exercises cool control of the material, leavening this long, dark night of the soul with flashes of black wit and nocturnal beauty (Anders and his buddies take to their bikes at one stage, letting off fire extinguishers, and steam; they're freewheeling, much as the film is at this point); the final scenes inject a note of suspense, providing the protagonist with his best hope of happiness as dawn breaks, yet we've been left in little doubt that Anders has something deadly in his pocket, and indeed in his heart. After the Wagnerian sturm-und-drang of Melancholia, the younger Trier's film is destined to be found quieter - quietly optimistic, and quietly saddening - yet it gets to you no less. In its unshowy way, Oslo, August 31st is attempting a radical overhaul of recent cinema history, a project made clear by its own lump-in-throat coda: what if you remade Before Sunrise, only with a character who - in whatever company - is unshakably, inescapably alone?

Oslo, August 31st screens at the Vue West End on Wed 19 at 8.30pm, and again on Thu 20 at 12.45pm, before opening in selected cinemas from November 4.

At the LFF: "Nobody Else But You/Poupoupidou"

Trace elements of Twin Peaks (not to mention certain other 50s-infused fictions) dot the tragicomic murder-mystery Nobody Else But You (a.k.a. Poupoupidou), about a writer (Jean-Paul Rouve) who pulls into a small town on the Franco-Swiss border just as the body of a local celebrity is discovered frozen in the snow. Stuck for book ideas, he begins an investigation of his own, uncovering a deskful of diaries that collectively tell the sad and sorry tale of a provincial girl (Sophie Quinton, in flashbacks) hooked on a dream of stardom, yet destined to know only unhappiness in her personal life - watching over the writer as he tenderly inspects her corpse, the girl's spirit is moved to remark: "Typical I should meet a nice guy only after I'm dead."

Where Lynch knew how to make similar material cut deep, any latent tragedy in Gerald Hustache-Mathieu's film is undercut, at least initially, by the sheer range of surface kooks and quirks we encounter (the writer has hyper-sensitive hearing, and the plot stops so that everyone can go bowling), such that it often has the look of a post-Midsomer Sunday night television pilot. Yet there are vivid moments and details - a desk toy modelled on Courbet's The Origin of the World, a pen name (Magnus Hørn) seemingly inspired by the current interest in Scandinavian crime fiction - and something subtly clever in the way the men in the doomed blonde heroine's life (the sportsman, the older man of culture, the man of power) come to mirror those in Marilyn Monroe's life. As fan fiction goes, it can only summon up a limited amount of the emotional devastation contained within the pages of Kathryn Hyatt's graphic novel Marilyn for Beginners, but Quinton is such a bombshell filming cheese commercials and weather reports, and so tragic everywhere else she appears on screen, that Nobody Else But You comes finally to serve as its own modest kind of tribute.

Nobody Else But You screens at the Vue West End tomorrow (Mon 17) at 9pm, and again on Thu 20 at 1pm.

At the LFF: "Snowtown"

And you thought Animal Kingdom was hard yakka. Snowtown, Justin Kurzel's dramatisation of what came to be known as the "Bodies In The Barrels" case, opens as a deceptively low-key, naturalistic study of life in a working-class neighborhood in South Australia, some time in the late 1990s. A single mother, painfully skinny in the manner of someone who's known either the needle or the damage done, and with more kids than space to put them in, recruits a middle-aged male neighbour - an outwardly respectable type, previously seen helping the family with their weekly shop, and crafting clay pots with the mother in her poky kitchen - to look after her boys for the night. He will spend the evening taking naked Polaroids of his charges. The jaunty lilt of Tony Hatch's best-known television theme suddenly feels a very long time ago.

And Snowtown, for its part, begins to seem like a vaguely self-conscious attempt to subvert every last sunkissed image or happy-go-lucky sound we've ever come to associate with Australia as a nation. Returned to their rightful bedroom in the wake of this abuse, one of the teenagers, the sensitive Jamie (Lucas Pittaway), wakes to find his mum's new boyfriend John (Daniel Henshall) chopping the heads and tails off kangaroos, then putting their entrails in buckets; these will end up all over the pederast's front porch and lawn, once he's been released on bail. We sense the film striking out in the direction of bloody retribution, but real-life is rarely that predictable, and their target is soon observed moving out of the area, quietly, ordinarily.

Instead, the film shifts its focus onto the vacuum left behind, the void in which this family unit exists. Oldest son Troy (Anthony Groves) challenges Jamie to a living-room wrestle, that familiar test of sibling masculinity, only for their roughhousing to go - in the most literal of ways - to buggery. In the background, the television pumps out the comforting sounds of a David Boon-era cricket commentary. Jeez, what next, we might wonder - the sight of somebody getting brained with a party barrel of Castlemaine XXXX? A gang rape involving Dame Edna Everage and the group Men at Work, using Vegemite as a lubricant?

I jest, but Snowtown retains a seriousness of purpose that keeps you in its grip for a good while - the kind of seriousness that seems beyond many a British underworld thriller, for one. Jamie falls under the malign influence of John when the latter vows to make a man out of the younger party. Heads are shaved. The drug use ratchets up. Unexplained blood is spotted on bedsheets and the inside of grimy bathtubs. In brief, we begin to fear things will turn out somewhat less than bonzer. Parts of Kurzel's film are, to this end, wilfully scuzzy. Answerphone messages crucial to the plot are so poorly recorded and replayed that we struggle to make them out; one scene finds John taking in the sight of an acquaintance's plump wife whilst getting stuck into a sandwich, clumps of Mighty White hanging from his beard.

I'm not sure if blessed is the word, exactly, but Snowtown is certainly well-stocked with actors sporting the kind of grimy authenticity one might only get from holding casting calls in a skip, or by looking under a rock: the most grizzled transvestite in screen history, say, or a man whose cheeks aren't sunken so much as subsided altogether, perhaps out of a sense of disappointment that no good can ever come of himself. Kurzel gets a buzzy turn out of Henshall, who has the same still intensity one sees watching De Niro or Joe Pesci in prime-era Scorsese films: his John is a man who gives the viewer that terrible sensation that he's capable of doing anything, and at any minute.

More troubling, perhaps, is Kurzel's deployment of real-life Snowtown locals, recruited for recurring kitchen-table sequences where they've been encouraged - either pushed by Henshall in character, or by someone behind the camera - to say the foulest things they can think of in response to the idea there might be a paedophile in their midst. This seems to me a fairly high-and-mighty (not to mention hugely exploitative) way of going about illustrating and denouncing the mob mentality, and indeed too often one catches the film jabbing at our disgust buttons; it's been tooled up for a particular kind of shock value, notionally throwing up its hands at violence even as it cuts to a lingering shot of a nail being ripped from a toe.

The crux of the film is a sequence where John invites the reluctant Jamie to watch him strangling some unfortunate who's crossed the pair of them: the throttling goes on and on, sparking the walkouts of those who've managed to sit through the callous (off-screen) murder of a dog, until Jamie finally screams "just fucking do it" and rushes to himself put the victim out of his misery. I think he's supposed to be a surrogate for the viewer, who may well want the dirty work over with, and the scene intended to make some point about just how easy it is to cross a line and get sucked in, but that point is very sub-Haneke or John McNaughton, whose landmark Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is a good two decades old now.

Snowtown has a good forty minutes left to go at this stage, and from then on, you really do come to feel it bashing you over the head: most viewers, even hardened critics, have emerged feeling traumatised by it, and you'll have to decide for yourself whether or not that feeling does justice to the nature of this specific case. What I will say is that the comparison with Animal Kingdom is actually a false one, for all sorts of reasons: in the earlier film, the characters were pushed towards crossroads without you seeming to notice, where Kurzel is so blunt in hammering home his themes and ideas he actually places Jamie and a friend at a literal four-ways just ahead of the final mise en abyme. The rest, compelling and problematic in equal measure, makes for a worthier successor to the likes of Romper Stomper and Chopper, two films equally beholden to the traditions of Ozploitation - and Snowtown's closest, uneasy bedfellows in that category of Films That Make You Go Strewth.

Snowtown screens at the Vue West End tomorrow (Mon 17) at 8.15, and again on Tue 18 at 12.15pm, before opening in selected cinemas from November 18.

At the LFF: "Coriolanus"

Now that Kenneth Branagh looks to have abandoned the Bard for comic books, who will bring Shakespeare kicking and screaming into the multiplexes? Branagh always was a cuddly, approachable crowdpleaser - part Olivier, yes, but also part Noel Edmonds, casting Dickie Briers and Brian Blessed in much the same way Cheggers and Tony Blackburn would always show up on old episodes of Noel's House Party. The star persona of Ralph Fiennes - erstwhile Amon Goeth and Francis Dolarhyde - is, however, a very different construct, which may be why the actor has taken as his directorial debut Coriolanus, Shakespeare's eel-like musing on war, politics and the people. In the lead, Fiennes appears scarified and bald-pated, covered in blood and gore from more or less the word go, both man of war and a thrusting, threatening meathead. To pursue the comparison using a current literary sensation, where Branagh's always been a bit of a Gilderoy Lockhart, Fiennes still unshakably has something of the Voldemort about him.

The action in Fiennes' version, adapted for the screen by Gladiator scribe John Logan, unfolds in and around Rome, though it was shot in Serbia and Montenegro, giving the city a distinctly mitteleuropan feel; inserts apparently sourced from actual Balkan uprisings lend additional dramatic spice. (In a further bold, incongruous touch, our very own Jon Snow is still to be observed reading the nightly news in iambic pentameter, which will doubtless come as a relief, comic or otherwise, to some.) Fiennes' Caius Martius rises to prominence in post-Hurt Locker urban warfare sequences that allow the director-star to run about with an automatic rifle and brawl with Gerard Butler's Aufidius; it's only when he inherits the name Coriolanus - and the social responsibility that comes with it - that he reveals himself as greatly more at home in uniform than he is in a politician's suit. These latter scenes bear the influence of later seasons of The West Wing, as a born leader of men has to be talked into leading, only to then struggle to talk the electorate round, lacking both the emollient words and the general inclination to do so.

I'm about as far from an expert in this field as it's possible to be, but in an age where even Roland Emmerich is making movies about this playwright (Anonymous screens at the LFF next Tuesday), maybe there's no real harm in venturing an opinion: this strikes me as one of Shakespeare's least populist plays, and Fiennes and Logan have preserved an ambivalence about "the rank-scented many" that chimes with the actor's aloof demeanour, while immediately setting this version in conflict with anyone showing up to Screen One with hotdogs and nachos. Yet if the tenor throughout is coolly cerebral, Coriolanus is none the worse for it. Fiennes' relatively sparse, unflashy staging returns us to the text without ever seeming to shrink the screen to a stage: the audience I saw the film with sat in an unusually rapt silence, as we collectively attempted to decipher the language, its nuances and subtleties, beyond the clues and prompts the director and his actors offer us.

Still, there are points where Coriolanus doesn't seem nearly smart enough, and these can mostly be put down to the vagaries of enforced modernisation. It was a stroke of genius that Michael Almereyda should, in his 2000 Hamlet, have had his slacker prince recite the "To Be or Not To Be" speech in the Action section of a Blockbuster Video: here, everything seemed not just plausible, but newly modern and resonant. By contrast, Fiennes needed to know that if you're going to restage a senate debate as a TV show, you're going to need a host - to respect the format - and not just rely on a pair of scheming tribunes (James Nesbitt and Paul Jesson) whipping the studio audience into a frenzy. (Was Jeremy Kyle not available?) Similarly, I didn't quite buy Coriolanus's decision to exile himself, turning his back on his plush upper-class existence to hobo his way around Europe with a rucksack on his back. Again, I'm no scholar, but this feels like a play of sudden, almost arbitrary alliances and ruptures, and the filmmakers needed to be just a little more careful about selling us on each one.

Yet patches of it, vivid scenes and runs of scenes, are powerful indeed, lent force and weight by an exceptional cast. If Fiennes' natural tendency towards restraint isn't doing himself or the film any favours - clenched and coiled, this Coriolanus isn't someone any of us can cheer for automatically - it is peculiarly right for the role, and he deserves our respect for transforming the downfall of an individual who might otherwise have resembled Ross Kemp into a complex and mostly compelling spectacle. Brian Cox really does know how to make this text come alive, as the spindoctor-kingmaker Menenius, and there's a thoughtful, noteworthy performance from Butler, who suddenly seems an actor rather than just a brickie who got lucky. Not all the casting comes off - Jessica Chastain and John Kani appear here simply to lend colour of different kinds to a generally sombre palette - but it's revivifying to have the Vanessa Redgrave of old back on screen, her Volumnia tall and imposing, rather than the dotty dears the cinema too often encourages her to play these days, and speaking the text like a mother tongue. Her scenes together with Fiennes are properly chilling; for better and worse, so too is the film.

Coriolanus screens at the Odeon West End tonight at 7.30pm, and again at the Vue West End tomorrow (Mon 17) at 12.30pm, before opening nationwide in January 2012.

For what it's worth...

Top Ten Films at the UK Box Office
for the weekend of October 7-9, 2011:

1 (new) Johnny English Reborn (PG) **
2 (new) The Lion King 3D (U)
3 (1) Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (15) **
4 (2) Abduction (12A)
5 (new) Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (15)
6 (new) Midnight in Paris (12A) ***
7 (4) Crazy, Stupid, Love. (15) ***
8 (8) Drive (18) ***
9 (7) The Inbetweeners (15) **
10 (5) The Debt (15)

(source: UK Film Council)

My top five:
1. Amelie [above]
2. Hell and Back Again
3. Tyrannosaur
4. Sleeping Beauty
5. Retreat


Top Ten DVD rentals:

1 (4) Limitless (15) ***
2 (2) Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (12) *
3 (new) Water for Elephants (12)
4 (1) Thor (12) **
5 (3) Source Code (12) ***
6 (5) Attack the Block (15) **
7 (8) Unknown (15) **
8 (new) Chalet Girl (12) ***
9 (re) The Lincoln Lawyer (12)
10 (new) Something Borrowed (12)

(source: lovefilm.com)

My top five:
1. The Messenger
2. Cave of Forgotten Dreams
3. Winnie the Pooh
4. Senna
5. Le Quattro Volte


Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:
1. Dances with Wolves (Sunday, BBC2, 5.25pm)
2. Toy Story (Sunday, five, 4.35pm)
3. Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Director's Cut (Sunday, five, 6.20pm)
4. Morvern Callar (Wednesday, BBC1, 12midnight)
5. Fallen (Friday, BBC1, 11.30pm)

Homecoming: "Hell and Back Again"

After the heavy-duty bombardments of Restrepo and Armadillo, you could be forgiven for suffering from Gulf War Documentary Fatigue (GWDF), or at least a feeling of over-exposure to scenes of men in fatigues standing about fields hearing complaints from men in robes about the brusque treatment meted out to their crops and livestock: such petty border disputes have been the abiding images of the conflict in Afghanistan, as observed by our documentarists. This year's Sundance documentary prize-winner, Danfung Dennis's Hell and Back Again, features its fair share of this, certainly, but actually appears to proceed as an investigation of one of the most striking images in Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker: that of a military man on leave, finding himself ill-at-ease in the aisles of a well-stocked supermarket.

The film charts the homecoming of one Sergeant Nathan Harris, on indefinite leave at his North Carolina abode after being shot in the hip during an ambush in southern Afghanistan in the summer of 2009. A garrulous, engaging character, Harris enters said supermarket on a mobility scooter, flashing his stitches (and, as he phrases it, his "buttcrack") to the elderly female greeter as he passes. Thereafter, Dennis crosscuts between the grunt work Harris completed on the frontlines before his injury - very sharply and eloquently recorded, the photojournalism on display several clicks north of the point-and-shoot functionality of its documentary predecessors - and his life back in the States, as he adapts to a newly challenging set of routines (shopping, physio, medical appointments), and we notice the contrast between the sharp, focused warrior Harris and the doped-up walking wounded he's become.

Occasionally, Dennis insists, a form of slippage occurs between these two states. A round of Call of Duty blurs with footage of Harris in the midst of non-virtual carnage. The chaos of a drive-thru order sparks flashbacks to an incident when Harris's troop first came under fire. And during a conversation between Harris and his physician, the sound mix drops out from beneath them both, as though shellshock were setting in all over again. These are the film's most contentious choices: we're well aware that Harris, woozy on painkillers, might drift off like this, but how can we be sure he drifted off during this specific conversation? He appears lucid enough, to look at him, and doesn't subsequently communicate any issue to Dennis - is this mere edit-suite sophistry on the director's part?

Again, as in Armadillo, we're faced with sequences that bear the distinct imprint of reality television, as though key confrontations (those on the homefront, in particular) were being restaged before Dennis's camera: in the modern, battle-scarred world, it seems everyone is acting up, including those who've served on active duty. The film's successes are less objective than impressionistic: Hell and Back Again evokes confusion, trauma, uncertainty, the Afghan scenes stumbling onward to the moment of Harris's injury even as the soldier's recovery in Carolina is measured out in agonisingly small steps. This latter strand deals in dull aches and pains, anaesthetised sadness, benumbed poignancy: an Army memorial service, presided over by a sobbing chaplain, is another in the constant parade of reminders that America isn't going to be healed anytime soon.

There are points where Dennis's film itself appears concussed or disoriented, unable quite to comprehend what it is it is looking at, only for some bold, vivid detail to cut through the haze, or apparent artifice: the vast transparent bag of painkillers Harris is now obliged to lug around wherever he goes, the gradual revelation he's become closer to his guns than he is to his pretty, endlessly patient wife, as though to compensate for the temporary loss of power in his legs. In the figure of Sergeant Nathan Harris, who - for all the obstacles he faces - remains from first to last committed to getting back out to the front, we are presented with one of the starkest portraits the cinema has yet given us of how the expected march to victory over the Taliban has been slowed to a painful, limping shuffle.

Hell and Back Again is in selected cinemas.