1,001 Films: "Come and See" (1985)

Come and See remains one of the most effective anti-war movies ever made, less for any artistic control (which is debatable) than for the mad, naive conviction that sees it veer from the utterly brilliant to the near-unwatchable on almost a minute-by-minute basis. Byelorussia, 1943: a young boy happily signs up to fight the Nazis, expecting to do right by his mother and his twin sisters and become a hero to his people. Instead, he's summarily orphaned, deafened and forced to swim through shit; he witnesses every last one of his travelling companions (including, in one remarkable sequence, a cow) being put to death; and - at the very last - he finds himself unable to pull the trigger the one time it would have mattered, in a moment of complete and utter impotence. Lead actor Alexei Kravchenko, who appears to age around fifty years in the course of this two-hour twenty minute movie, had to undergo hypnotherapy at the end of it all; see the film, and that will come as no surprise.

Technically, at least, the film is a wonder. (A one-hit wonder, perhaps; Klimov, who died in 2003, would never direct again.) Forestry explodes in a fashion not even Coppola could contrive for Apocalypse Now. Firefights rage across the full expanse of the screen. Viktor Mors' sound design replicates exactly what it is to be shell-shocked, lost both inside your own head and the wider world. The film has been put together in such a way that it cannot fail to get to you, one way or another: a cast with real mania in their eyes stare madly or disbelievingly into the camera lens, imploring us to listen to what they're saying (if you can hear them) and look at the horrors they've encountered. (The title is an invitation to a monstrous headache.) It's roughly as subtle as an atom bomb, which is the point (war, in this sense, takes no prisoners), the source of its power and energy, and a serious limitation to its potential as involving drama, because you soon work out events can only accelerate downhill. And they do.

Klimov makes like a kid in the war-crime candy store. Why ask your characters to find a route around a cesspit, when you can make them swim through it? When villages are being torched (with the villagers trapped inside), why not set the whole sequence to a soundtrack of Tyrolean yodelling? Why not blow up a cow? And why not top everything off with newsreel footage of horribly emaciated concentration camp inmates? (Though the final reversal of this newsreel - so that the bombs climb back into the planes, and the Nazis go into retreat - is an inspired example of movie wish-fulfilment.) Rivalled only by Pasolini's Salò in its assembly of horrible sights, it's an extraordinary experience - once seen, never forgotten, as they say - although I've never entirely been convinced by its more enthusiastic supporters' claims for its greatness: once seen may be enough. Pitched at a level of perpetual hysteria that suggests what Emir Kusturica would have made of WW2 material, it's guaranteed to leave an impression at least - but all's very noisy on this particular Eastern front.

Come and See is available to stream via Filmstruck. 

For what it's worth...

Top Ten Films at the UK Box Office 
for the weekend of July 27-29, 2018:

1 (new) Mission Impossible: Fallout (12A) ***
2 (1) Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again (PG)
3 (2) Incredibles 2 (PG) ****
4 (new) Hotel Transylvania 3: A Monster Vacation (U)
5 (new) André Rieu 2018 Maastricht Concert (U) [above]
6 (4) Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (12A) ***
7 (3) Skyscraper (12A)
8 (5) The First Purge (15)
9 (7) Ocean's 8 (12A)
10 (11) Sherlock Gnomes (U) **

(source: theguardian.com)

My top five: 
1. Cléo from 5 to 7
2. Jacquot de Nantes
3. The Gleaners and I
4. The Beaches of Agnès
5. Teen Titans Go! To The Movies


Top Ten DVD sales: 

1 (new) Peter Rabbit (PG)
2 (2) The Greatest Showman (PG)
3 (1) Tomb Raider (12)
4 (new) Duck Duck Goose (PG)
5 (3) The Incredibles (U) ****
6 (8) Mamma Mia! (PG) *
7 (23) Thor: Ragnarok (12) ***
8 (9) Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (12)
9 (7) Coco (PG) ***
10 (5) Black Panther (12A) **

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Sweet Country
2. Lady Bird
3. Ready Player One
4. Love, Simon
5. Isle of Dogs


Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. My Brother the Devil (Friday, BBC2, 11.35pm)
2. Chevalier (Sunday, C4, 2.15am)
3. Nightcrawler (Sunday, BBC2, 10pm)
4. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1 (Saturday, C4, 11.20pm)
5. Iron Man 3 (Saturday, BBC1, 10.10pm)

From the archive: "The Gleaners and I"

Agnès Varda's turn-of-the-century video essay The Gleaners and I squirrels out multiple meanings from the phrase "picking things up". At its centre is the ancient pursuit of gleaning: the practice once undertaken by workers in farm communities, who would roam the fields after a harvest, appropriating the food abandoned there for their own use. (In Britain, of course, we had the Wombles, "making good use of the things that [they] find/Things that the everyday folk leave behind".) Varda's treatise is that there remains a certain noblesse and humility in stooping to reclaim the fruits of the earth, and to back it up, she finds the tradition alive and well in latter-day France - indeed, it's become more than ever radicalised, a defiant stand against the forces of industrialisation and globalisation. (The fruit and veg snaffled have slipped through some of the cracks Naomi Klein describes in "No Logo".) 

In some respects, then, Gleaners was ahead of the movie curve, pipping to the post all those Noughties docs on the racket that is modern food production, and exposing the heinous waste permitted at both the point of picking (where those potatoes and apples that don't fit a standardised description are discarded) and at the point of sale (where overly cautious best-before dates hold sway). That the farmers and companies involved don't want to sell us these outsized and undersized fruits is one ethical failing; that they'd rather leave them behind to moulder than allow them to be picked up and eaten by those earning less than the average wage quite another. As such, the film forms an extension of Varda's ongoing interest in outcasts, whether those comestibles deemed unseemly or not up to snuff (she shoots loving close-ups of abandoned heart-shaped potatoes) or the travelling communities trying to feed themselves by gleaning. The film extends its definition of gleaning in its closing moments: here, Varda encounters a young man living in sheltered accommodation who spends his mornings raiding bins for sustenance, and his afternoons as a teacher, giving immigrants the opportunity to pick up their first words of spoken French. He takes away; he gives back. 

Varda is herself picking something up here - the new lightweight digital technology, as roadtested in the Dogme films, and here used as a tool to get closer to her subjects, the soil, and herself. Memorably, she shoots an extreme close-up of her fingers, "one hand filming the other", a phrase in her narration that somehow ties in with the overriding idea we should make better use of our discards, our off-cuts, our spare time, to better help our fellow man. For all the film's diverse lines of inquiry - and this may well be your only chance to see a lawyer in full courtroom garb standing in a cabbage patch - it has an extraordinary thematic continuity: nothing gets wasted. The Gleaners and I may not be Varda's most rigorous work - she leaves in thirty seconds' worth of footage accidentally obscured by a lens cap, just to demonstrate how human she really is - but it sure counts among her loveliest: a cinema that feels good for the soul. 

(June 2010)

The Gleaners and I returns to selected cinemas, and is available to stream via Curzon Home Cinema today, as part of the Gleaning Truths season. Full details here.

"Teen Titans Go! To The Movies" (Guardian 03/08/18)

Teen Titans Go! To The Movies ***

Dirs: Aaron Horvath, Peter Rida Michail. Animation with the voices of: Greg Cipes, Tara Strong, Will Arnett, Kristen Bell. 93 mins. Cert: PG

For the uninitiated, the Teen Titans are the DC universe’s Muppet Babies: pint-sized, brashly animated avatars of Justice League hangers-on – Batman’s eternally derided sidekick Robin is the best known – whose knowing misadventures have set youngsters and stoners alike to cackling over several seasons on TV’s Cartoon Network. That their big-screen debut intends to operate closer to the irreverent spirit of studio Warners’ Looney Tunes than Zack Snyder is immediately signalled by an opening sight gag that appears to pre-empt rivals Marvel Studios’ familiar page-shuffling logo – only for the camera to pull back and show a seagull flicking disinterestedly through a comic.

The stage is hereby set for a brisk ninety minutes of metatextual mirth: a potential franchise-starter in which superheroes literally not big enough to land their own franchise take extreme measures to land their own franchise. Denied entry to the “Batman Again” premiere – attended by Batman, Superman (voiced, finally, by Nicolas Cage) and Wonder Woman – these Titans lay siege to Hollywood and travel back in time to rewrite key origin stories, starting by rerouting Bruce Wayne’s traditionally doomed parents away from Crime Alley and down Happy Lane. Narratives treated like the holiest of holies elsewhere become doodlepads for riffs and skits, odds and sods. A dream sequence lampoons Disney’s Africana; Stan Lee’s crowbarred cameos get increasingly desperate.

Arguably, these are the crumbs left behind when a major entertainment conglomerate has its cake and eats it, pointing out how ridiculous and repetitive superhero stories can be, even as the suits in the studio’s live-action arm are quietly pencilling in a Jonah Hex reboot for 2024. Still, with its committed fart and poop jokes, and one entirely gratuitous (yet not unamusing) attack on Shia LaBeouf, it’s encouraging to see someone at DC approaching this material as an opportunity for colourful fun rather than a grim matter of rights maintenance. A handful of jokes in this minipop Ragnarok, like the crack at Gene Hackman’s role in the 1978 Superman, land at the exact sweet spot where fond fanboy scholarship meets sublime goofiness.

Teen Titans Go! To The Movies opens in cinemas nationwide today. 

The Witnesses: "Apostasy"

It's taken a period of reflection - and resulted in no less than three God's Not Dead films - but finally we seem to have worked out how to elevate the faith-based movie to something worthy of a cinema screen. There are laws, which we should perhaps have inscribed in stone tablets for our descendants to pore over. Firstly: there is little to no dramatic value in following characters who are true believers at the start of your film and true believers at the end of it (as per those God's Not Deads); there must, as in life, be some measure of uncertainty in between. Secondly: the very idea of faith only really becomes interesting when it's set against and challenged by the real world. The promising British debut Apostasy enters arthouse cinemas that have just been vacated by First Reformed, Paul Schrader's searching study of a priest cracking under the pressure of the daily parade of horrors; its title will already be familiar to admirers of Martin Scorsese's Silence, which reintroduced cinemagoers to the somewhat arcane concept of renouncing one's religious beliefs. Writer-director Daniel Kokotajlo, raised as a Jehovah's Witness, has drawn on his own experiences to give us this greatly more contemporary piece, set in an unidentified Northern town where Poundland is very much visible through the drizzle, and a life-or-death split becomes apparent in the ranks of a family steeped in the Christian sect's teachings.

In the beginning, there is a mother (Siobhan Finneran) and her two daughters. (Where the father has disappeared to is one of the film's mysteries; there may be so much religion in this household that it has no further need or room for another Godhead.) Oldest daughter Luisa (Sacha Parkinson) has reached her early twenties, and is beginning to drift away from the flock - towards friends, gigs, a relationship with somebody other than Jehovah. Her sister Alex (Molly Wright), just turned eighteen as we join events, is very much her sternly conservative mother's girl, on the other hand. When mum proposes a love match with Steven (Robert Emms), a milquetoast new elder at the church where the family worship, Alex all too meekly submits, no matter that this pairing might look to non-believers like a way of neutralising the girl's nascent curiosity and tying her down. (One rebel in the clan would seem to be enough.) God, in whatever form you care to imagine Him, has other plans, however: the film's dramatic grip derives from watching ordinary people having their core beliefs severely tested by the mysterious, sometimes fathomless ways of the universe.

For much of these 95 minutes, you can feel Kokotajlo himself weighing his own feelings about the world from which he stepped back. He's prepared, at least, to concede there may be some validity, wisdom and comfort in these teachings, as illustrated by the Bible quotes he inserts as chapter headings ("Each one is tried by being drawn out and enticed by his own desire"). It's the physical shape of the film that feels most damning. Projectionists who screened the Schrader film will scarcely need to reset their equipment: Apostasy has been shot in a narrow aspect ratio that, coupled with cinematographer Adam Scarth's muted palette, catches the evident limitations of this cloistered, unworldly existence. Here are people waiting for the second coming as if waiting for a bus in a municipal station left unrefurbished for decades; the quaint quietude of these locations allows words - and The Word above all - to hang heavy in the musty air above the characters' heads. (One simple yet dramatically effective touch: Kokotajlo permits us to hear what are offered up as silent prayers out loud, providing us with unfiltered status updates for this family's mortal souls.)

What Apostasy rejects is that blood-and-thunder melodrama - a feature of The Book - which survived into Mel Gibson's Christ movies, the God's Not Deads and perhaps even the Schrader film's finale: it's just possible Kokotajlo chose a squarish frame to shear off that 25% of the screen that might be deemed frivolous. When a major, life-altering event occurs, it's not only kept offscreen, but rationalised by these characters as part of some higher plan, where you or I might at the very least be inclined to shake a fist at the fates. The approach requires considerable control, both narrative and formal; it's one of those debuts that will leave an impression without once appearing in any way showy. Yet I occasionally wondered whether Apostasy's integral dourness might be an issue for some: from first branflake-coloured image to last, it remains a determinedly earthbound film, where Schrader and Scorsese pushed onwards and upwards towards the transcendent. The performers may be the element that hold you, particularly Finneran, who initially seems as remote and irredeemable as Piper Laurie in Carrie, but suddenly becomes fascinating in the second half, as she fumblingly tries to find an expression of love that isn't tied up with the end of the world. This is Kokotajlo's notable achievement here: to extrapolate deeply internalised processes, finding the human within the dogma, the doubt inside the belief.

Apostasy is now screening in selected cinemas, and is available to stream via Curzon Home Cinema and the BFI Player.

Tom Tom club: "Mission Impossible: Fallout"

Unlike the Fast & Furious franchise, which has powered steadily along in third gear for eight films without ever once threatening to generate great or even especially memorable cinema, the Mission: Impossible movies have given rise to an unusual degree of variation and deviation. The series has so far encompassed auteurist flourishes (Brian De Palma's 1996 original, John Woo's 2000 sequel), heavyweight acting face-offs (Tom Cruise versus Philip Seymour Hoffman in 2006's MI3, an echo of the fact the franchise became a renewed concern for its star after the box-office failures of 1999's Magnolia and Eyes Wide Shut), and a live-action cartoon (Brad Bird's Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, from 2011) in which Cruise scaled tall buildings with his bare hands before comprehensively outrunning a sandstorm. 

Since 2015's Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, the series has been in the care of Christopher McQuarrie, previously best known as the screenwriter of 1995's The Usual Suspects, who's assembled his instalments much as his most celebrated character Keyser Söze did his cover story: as a loose tissue of connections permitting all manner of switchback swerves, thrills and spills. The underlying formula, however, remains unaltered: a core squad of goodies (now standing at Cruise's Ethan Hunt, tech whizz Simon Pegg and comms giant Ving Rhames, with Alec Baldwin carried over from Rogue Nation as Hunt's boss), one or two baddies for them to outwit, a whole prop truck's worth of masks and gadgets, and a spectacular setpiece every twenty-to-thirty minutes, carrying us through to the reprise of Lalo Schifrin's original TV theme, cue for us to vacate Screen One, broadly convinced we've had our money's worth.

The good news with Mission Impossible: Fallout is that McQuarrie has massively improved as an action director since Rogue Nation, a film of expensively grand yet fundamentally hollow gestures. You'll have to sit through a chewy opening twenty minutes as the film gets its narrative cranks and pistons going, but McQuarrie thereafter delivers a parachute jump into stormy skies over Berlin, a colossal, set-trashing two-on-one dust-up in a gents' loos, a car chase through the streets of Paris immediately topped by a motorcycle chase through the streets of Paris, a brisk foot pursuit over the rooftops of London, and a finale involving helicopters duelling over the peaks of Kashmir, because if any man can bring peace to that region, Cruise can.

What's in between is really just there to enable the stunt team - who barrel through these old-school analogue crash-bangs as if the Bourne movies never existed - to go to work again, and to allow the leading man to play exactly the indomitable hero he might have played twenty years ago before he resumed his interest in serious acting. The plot McQuarrie has dug up would have seemed unoriginal in 1998, in the wake of the Clooney/Kidman runaround The Peacemaker - Hunt and team lose three nuclear warheads during a pre-credits prologue, then have to go mildly rogue to retrieve them - but it's worked through as coherently as any Mission: Impossible plot can be. The argument remains, however, that these films are ultimately far less about saving the world than they are about shoring up its star's image.

The M:I franchise has functioned best whenever its leading man has run up against someone who genuinely appeared capable of taking him down a notch or two: Hoffman, you feared or maybe hoped, might have crushed Cruise between his thumb and forefinger, if he'd felt so inclined. Fallout opens promisingly in this respect, bringing Ethan Hunt into contact with man-mountain performers visibly taller than him (bullnecked Henry Cavill as a rival agent assigned to shadow our hero's movements, Frederick Schmidt as a shady British broker) and, all too briefly, with Angela Bassett as a CIA chief striving to rein in the Impossible Missions Force. Yet it very quickly defaults to familiar positions and situations, getting everybody into some perilous corner, only for Ethan to run, jump and punch his way out. Bassett fades wastefully into the background; the excellent Sean Harris, whose Rogue Nation ne'er-do-well Solomon Lane is returned to play here, is no more than a beardy MacGuffin, shuffled around with the warheads as part of the plot's three-card trick.

There's a reason why Cruise has put life and limb on the line for these movies (among its other oohs and aahs, Fallout's final cut appears to preserve the much-reported incident where self-stunting star snapped an ankle while traversing the London skyline), and that's because no other franchise has so dedicated itself to making its now fiftysomething star look youthful, virile, good. (And so enabled him to do the box-office numbers he was doing in his thirties: none of that "I'm too old for this shit" shit for our Tom.) The Fast & Furiouses, with their interminable emphasis on "family", are a team effort; the Mission: Impossibles, by contrast, are more than ever a one-man show, as underlined by those scenes in Fallout where Hunt runs through an office or into a packed-pew church ceremony, and the assembled extras gawp en masse, as if to say "Look, it's Tom Cruise!" I wonder if this is where this franchise's appeal ultimately lies: in the opportunity it presents for us to observe one of the few Eighties/Nineties stars who hasn't yet been reduced to providing direct-to-DVD content at large in the kind of male ego-stroke megaproduction the studios routinely turned out before the comic-book nerds moved out of their bedrooms and into the boardroom. (In this, these films are as nostalgic as any Skyfall or SPECTRE, any Jurassic World.) 

Yet the more McQuarrie gives us of Cruise saving the day, the less space there seems to be for anybody else. It's telling that the wide-reaching ensemble De Palma recruited for that first Mission: Impossible has dwindled to a few loyal sports who don't mind playing second fiddle for these paycheques, nor having to mouth the odd godawful line of dialogue clangingly inserted to underline just what a thoroughly great guy Ethan Hunt is. McQuarrie's fetish for makeweight British actresses doesn't help anybody's cause: it seems an especially precipitous decline from Kristin Scott Thomas and Thandie Newton to Rebecca Ferguson and Vanessa Kirby, though this may also be indicative of how unimportant the female roles have become in Tom Cruise vehicles. (Emily Blunt in 2014's Edge of Tomorrow remains the anomaly in this field.) In a timeline where Eyes Wide Shut got across-the-board raves and Magnolia won Cruise his Oscar, there would be no need for the star to have pursued this calculated, give-'em-what-they-want retreat any further, but here we all are. A star going at full pelt through one setpiece after another is all this series now has; the consolation lies in knowing those setpieces may be the best the business has to offer this summer.   

Mission Impossible: Fallout is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

From the archive: "Jacquot de Nantes"

Agnès Varda's supremely fond 1991 picture Jacquot de Nantes breaks with convention by opening with a list of the chansons that will fill our ears over the coming two hours. It's apt this discography should take the place of credits, because what follows proves to be both love song and lament: a tribute to a husband - director Jacques Demy, glimpsed in an early scene on one of Varda's signature beaches, sands passing through his fingers - who would eventually slip away from the filmmaker. (Demy died in October 1990 from AIDS-related complications, as Varda was finishing production.) The bulk of the film is Demy's memoir of what appears to have been a blissfully happy childhood in a working-class neighbourhood of Nantes as the Thirties gave way to the Forties. The most formative activity, however, takes place between the proscenium arches of the puppet theatres the young Jacquot delighted in attending, or in front of the windows at which Demy's neighbours danced and pranced; the initial impression is of a mind that, while tender and impressionable, was already beginning to frame everything it was taking in. Here are scenes that would later recur in Demy's own filmography, in one form or another. Snow White, whistling while she works, becomes inextricably linked to Demy's loving mère, who becomes the basis of Catherine Deneuve's princess in Donkey Skin; Demy père, meanwhile, becomes a model for the mechanic hero of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. And throughout this most sentimental of filmmaking educations - even under the Nazi occupation - there is music, which likely goes towards Demy's interest in all things terpsichorean.

Scenes of actuality are shot in monochrome; any kind of escapism - whether Punch and Judy shows or school plays - vividly colourful. The two are joined in matrimony by a bravura editing conceit that is oddly reminiscent, two decades on, of those DVD special features that allow viewers to watch hidden or deleted material during the feature proper by pushing the appropriate button: clips from Demy's features come to be inserted within Varda's filmed memories. The technique would be jolting (alienating, even) were these extracts not so seamlessly integrated; real effort and care has been taken to return to the original exteriors wherever possible, and there are half a dozen or so of the most gorgeous, seductive match cuts in all cinema. Jacquot turning the crank of his beloved new camera rhymes with his mother, behind him (as ever), grinding coffee beans; the tangled roots of a cherry blossom tree, poking through a crack in the Demys' yard, cedes the screen to strands of hair on Jacques the elder's head. Varda strives to put on screen every fibre of her beloved's being, not out of some morbid fear of losing this man - the ever-ebulliant movies themselves act against that - rather to connect the dots between one Jacques Demy and another, and in so doing, to celebrate a life in word and image and song. This is one of the few memoir-movies, and memorial movies, that really does merit the adjective lyrical.

(May 2010)

Jacquot de Nantes returns to selected cinemas from Friday.