Support: "A Day in the Life..."

In one of those archival projects you just hope won't be rendered impossible in future years by proposed funding cuts, the BFI has turned its focus upon the unfashionable yet hugely rewarding subject of British post-War documentary - in particular those (often sponsored) shorts that played alongside theatrical releases of the era, and contributed so much to our sense of national identity. Launching a season of retrospectives and talks is the touring programme A Day In The Life - Four Portraits of Post-War Britain, a deeply evocative compilation of four such shorts that established the writer-director John Krish as among the period's very best chroniclers of domestic life, travelling as they do across the length and breadth of the country to survey the processes of change at work - and to highlight where further change may be required.

1953's The Elephant Will Never Forget, typical supporting fare in most respects, marks the final running of trams through London's Elephant and Castle interchange - a fond farewell, set to communal singalongs from the Lewisham Darby and Joan Club. The unexpectedly moving They Took Us to the Sea, from 1961, follows a group of Birmingham pre-teens undertaking an NSPCC-backed outing by train to Weston-super-Mare (a.k.a. "Midlands-on-Sea"). The kids' own voiceover highlights their own particular preoccupations ("We had fish-and-chips for dinner; a lot of us just had the chips"), while Krish and editor Fergus McDonnell contrast the breezy coast with the bombsites then still prevalent in Britain's inner cities; we're struck by just how utopian Weston could seem at the time - and that these under-privileged youngsters would eventually grow into a leisured class for whom holidays by the sea would be not a treat, but a regular occurrence.

1962's Our School, sponsored by the NUT, offers several hours in the life of one of the country's exciting new secondary moderns: between the wall bars and misplaced apostrophes, we observe the daring introduction of a Doris Lessing short story to the syllabus ("It teaches us you can't crush man's spirit"). It's of note for the slightly stiff spontaneity of its teaching sequences: the show is comprehensively stolen by one cheeky tyke who gets excited at his history mistress's fleeting reference to dancing girls. The topper, though, is 1964's I Think They Call Him John, which reveals a public-service filmmaker at the very peak of his abilities. The most formally daring of the four shorts, it follows widower John Ronson ("old miner, old soldier, old gardener, old age pensioner," as Victor Spinetti's narration has it) as he goes about a limited existence in a poky council flat, to long stretches of silence: he puts the budgie out, he answers a letter from a sister living in America, he prepares a modest lunch, he nods off at the table.

It's a masterpiece of its kind: utterly unpatronising about the plight of the elderly, with a punchline (involving a still-extant television favourite) every bit as devastating as one might find in a Douglas Sirk tearjerker. And it still functions as conscience-pricker, too: if the fate of this old soldier doesn't get you to shell out for a Remembrance poppy, nothing will. This final short - slowing itself to John's own pace, asking us to shuffle a mile in his carpet slippers - is exceptional in more ways than one: elsewhere in the compilation, the use of music and editing is remarkably sharp and clipped, the films forever in a hurry to get where they're going - filled with a hope and optimism (that, perhaps, of a nation entering a period of rebuilding and prosperity) that our present administrators might do well to take note of. As the daytrippers file past the camera to board the train back to Snow Hill, or John Ronson settles into his flat for the evening, we ask the same questions of Krish's subjects as we might do today observing the occupants of pushchairs parked outside a child-benefit office, or those hustling and bustling to secure themselves a place at university: whatever will become of them?

A Day in the Life - Four Portraits of Post-War Britain opens in selected cinemas tomorrow.

An education: "My Afternoons with Margueritte"

The sly little charmer My Afternoons with Margueritte arrives care of Jean Becker, the writer-director who - the lubricious One Deadly Summer and Elisa aside - would appear to have inherited the tradition of genteel humanism (what the New Wavers called the cinéma de papa) so prevalent in French cinema at the time of his father Jacques. His latest is surely made for matinee viewing, unfolding as it does to the leisurely rhythms of a sunny afternoon in the French provinces. It's here that two opposites happen to alight on the same park bench: Margueritte (Gisèle Casadesus) is an elderly ex-schoolmistress who - with time on her hands - spends her days tending to the pigeons, while Germain (Gérard Depardieu) is a plump bumpkin who - when not presiding over the regulars at the village bar or whittling away in his caravan - can be found defacing the local war memorial. After he warns her to keep a close eye on her handbag, an unexpected friendship begins to blossom, and there they continue to sit, these two childless strangers, the one in a delicate pink cardy, the other in dirty dungarees. Her erudition comes to complement his natural appetites, his curiosity; soon, he's hooked on Camus, devouring The Fall and finding that its existentialism works its way into his everyday conversations.

A simple, sedentary affair, you might be tempted to label it a Gallic Driving Miss Daisy - except the film itself is never quite as complacent as that makes out. The old dear is really, in this instance, just a catalyst; instead, the script by Becker and Jean-Loup Dabadie (adapting from a novel by Marie-Sabine Roger) comes to interrogate the Depardieu character's relationships with the other women in his life - his indifferent mother (Claire Maurier) and loving girlfriend (Sophie Guillemin) - and forces him to redefine himself, much as he does the words in his prized Petit Robert dictionary. The backdrop, admittedly, conforms to an exportable vision of la belle France: the bar, with its array of local characters and romantic subplots, is very Amélie, and we never seem to be that much more than ten metres from the nearest game of boules. Yet it's a cordial film, nudged out of its sporadic ruts by the obvious affection the two leads share for one another; there are many worse ways of spending an afternoon of your own.

My Afternoons with Margueritte opens in selected cinemas from tomorrow.

Pop will eat himself: "We Are What We Are"

The Romero-influenced We Are What We Are is a film about consumption, in more ways than one. Jorge Michel Glau's feature debut opens with a prologue tellingly set in a Mexico City shopping mall, where a bearded middle-aged man shambles into view, appearing to recognise his own reflection (and thus, we infer, who he really is) in a shop window, before collapsing, clutching his guts and vomiting blood. The truly disquieting pay-off to the scene sees the body spirited swiftly away, the blood mopped from sight, as though he were never there in the first place - for as the modern world, and the world of commerce in particular, likes to remind us, we are replaceable; if we don't want to do something or go somewhere - or if we, in turn, are no longer wanted - there's bound to be some other sucker who'll come along sooner or later. It transpires this man was father to a large-ish family: a wife and three teenage children, who each have their own needs. Grau is deliberate in withholding exactly what these needs are for an hour of the film, but all the talk of rites and hunting suggests they're unlikely to be entirely bloodless. It's not giving too much away to say that - with the mother withdrawing into grief, and her rowdy, hormonal offspring appearing unlikely to meet their sudden-found responsibilities - the family has been struck down by a curse: a particular inability to bring home the bacon.

Looked at purely from an economic perspective, We Are What We Are could be understood as a parable concerning a generation struggling to deal with the brutal demands of the marketplace. Irascible eldest son Alfredo (Francisco Barreiro) goes for the throat of one of his late father's customers when he happens to ask when the watch he's brought in for repairs will be ready, and - just as Guillermo del Toro's Cronos became a touch more Gothic by situating itself within an antiques shop - there's something thematically resonant in the way the family have made their living from repairing such timepieces, which tick and tock through the later stages of the film. For this lot, time is literally money - one means of measuring just how much (and how long) they have left.

The twist is predicated on the family's unusual, some might say insatiable, appetites: early on, we learn the mother (Carmen Beato) would berate her husband for expending too much energy on hookers, although the precise nature of these transactions will only become apparent when the couple's two boys, too, find themselves having to smuggle a streetwalker of their own into the back of a car. We notice how the family's victims are drawn from the underclasses: the film is very specific in delineating how, in the absence of moral authority (and Grau's police officers are sketched as singularly clueless and grasping: they're only in it for the money), the laws of the jungle have come to be applied. Minorities and the poor become easy(ish) pickings: there's one especially suspenseful sequence in a gay bar, where we wonder what exactly Alfredo is going to out himself as.

With the exception of Enrico Chapela's self-consciously baroque score, this is a restrained debut, most likely - in its conjunction of horror and social realism - to end up garnering the title of this year's Let the Right One In. If anything, Grau's film proves even more self-contained, holding back on the grue until the final, dog-eat-dog feeding frenzy, and limiting its movements to the family's grim retreat (easily the least welcoming abode since the farmhouse in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre) and a small handful of grimy backstreets. In doing so, We Are What We Are perhaps lacks the flair - the X (certificate) factor - that would guarantee a breakout success; unlike del Toro, who from the off displayed a marked facility with both, Grau proves more persuasive with ideas than images, and the film is visually rote accordingly. Nonetheless, it's a credible, quietly impressive vision of a society going to hell - not to mention a timely portrait of a family unit having to resort to desperate measures simply to survive.

We Are What We Are opens in selected cinemas from Friday.

From the archive: "California Dreamin' (Endless)"

The title of California Dreamin' (Endless) pertains to one of the great bittersweet pop songs, of course - Wong Kar-Wai understood as much while making his modern classic Chung King Express - but there's an equal weight of sadness behind that bracketed subtitle, a better translation of which might have been "unfinished". California Dreamin''s director Cristian Nemescu died, aged just 27, in a car crash in August 2006, while completing post-production; the film has been released as it stood, by way of a memorial to the filmmaker, yet watching it is far from the morbid experience you might imagine: part-sociopolitical epic, part-Ealing comedy, Nemescu's first and only feature fair bursts at the seams with messy, glorious life.

The year is 1999: a train of American soldiers escorting NATO equipment on its way to Kosovo is approaching the small Romanian village of Capalnita, expecting easy passage. They have, however, picked the wrong day for that. The train soon comes to a grinding halt, and the troops find themselves caught up in, among other issues, an ongoing labour dispute, the desire of a teenage girl to get out from under the thumb of her obstructive, anti-American stationmaster father, and the local mayor's plans to commemorate the village's anniversary. How Nemescu would have proceeded with this material is a moot point, but he might have trimmed something further off the two-and-a-half-hour running time (perhaps the monochrome flashbacks to the bombing of Capalnita in May 1944), or finessed the last-reel's abrupt shift into tragedy.

Yet this cut is distinguished by its sheer expansiveness, and Nemescu's ability to see all sides in the stand-off: geeks and marines, village elders and flighty schoolgirls alike. These vast reserves of empathy and generosity become most apparent in the director's fondness for gatherings - parties, meals, protest meetings, ad hoc polyglot conferences, those events that throw people up against one another - but also in the film's surprise appearances (a replica Eiffel Tower; a Romanian Elvis impersonator; Armand Assante, doing his best work for years as the frustrated buzzcut in charge of the troops), its nose bleeds, bureaucratic tangles and power outages. UK audiences have already been wowed by one outstanding Romanian film over the past twelve months (4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days), and warmed to the droll wit of another (12:08 East of Bucharest). Nemescu's talent was still unruly and instinctive, it's clear - but dare I suggest that California Dreamin', being the Romanian Magnolia or Underground, is livelier, even more cinematic, and more purely pleasurable than either of the above? (And it wasn't even finished.)

(August 2008)

California Dreamin' screens on Channel 4 on Monday at 2am; 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days screens on the same channel tonight at 1am.

On DVD: "The Concert"

The Concert, or Le Concert in its original incarnation, is a title almost guaranteed to set a certain demographic running to their nearest comfortably appointed artiplex, giddy with anticipation of a civilised, cosy, bilingual entertainment. Radu Mihaileanu, the Romanian director who made his name with such middleweight dramas as 1998's Train of Life (about Orthodox Jews defying the Nazis) and 2005's Live and Become (concerning an Ethiopian refugee's progress across Europe), here takes his foot off the gas a little, arriving at a whimsical fiction about a Russian conductor deemed an enemy of the state under the Brezhnev regime. Reduced to performing nothing more than menial janitorial duties at the concert hall in which he once wielded a mean baton, Andrei Simoniovich Filipov (Aleksei Guskov) ends up roaring around in a battered ambulance, attempting to reunite his old orchestra players - and pass them off as the prestigious Bolshoi ensemble - in advance of a concert at an illustrious Parisian conservatoire.

Mihaileanu and his co-writers paint in broad, satiric strokes: here's the aging Communist Party zealot (Valeri Barinov) chuffed at the fact the Parisian hotel he's secured for himself can boast a full three stars, and here's the gaudy tastelessness of an oligarch's wedding celebrations, which begin with a cello-versus-electric guitar duet, and descend into outright gunfire. It's rarely subtle - clock the Jewish trumpeter who uses the trip as an opportunity to flog black market caviar, or the French-Algerian restauranteur who refers to himself as Abdul Al-Qaeda - but there are fixed and sincere points in the playing: Guskov cuts a touching, melancholy figure striving to make up for lost time, and there's solid work from Miou-Miou as an old family friend, and from Mélanie Laurent [see photo above], late of Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, as the star violinist Filipov rediscovers in Paris. "The notes all look for harmony," the conductor tells the latter over dinner one night, and the film appears to have been conceived in a similar spirit of transcontinental unity; for those so inclined, le DVD vous attend.

The Concert is available on DVD from Monday.

For what it's worth...

Top Ten Films at the UK Box Office
for the weekend of October 29-31, 2010:

1 (new) Saw 3D (18) [above]
2 (2) Despicable Me (U)
3 (1) Paranormal Activity 2 (15)
4 (3) RED (12A)
5 (4) The Social Network (12A) ****
6 (new) Burke & Hare (15) **
7 (5) Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole (U)
8 (6) Alpha & Omega 3D (U)
9 (new) The Kids Are All Right (15) ***
10 (7) Vampires Suck (12A)

(source: UK Film Council)

My top five:
1. It Happened One Night
2. The Social Network
3. A Town Called Panic
4. Another Year
5. Out of the Ashes


Top Ten DVD rentals:

1 (1) Iron Man 2 (12) ***
2 (new) Killers (12) **
3 (2) Brooklyn's Finest (18) **
4 (3) The Blind Side (12) **
5 (re) The Ghost (15) **
6 (4) Black Death (15) ***
7 (5) Shutter Island (15) ***
8 (7) Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (12) **
9 (6) Frozen (15) ****
10 (re) The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (18) ***

(source: lovefilm.com)

My top five:
1. Wild Grass
2. Collapse
3. Le Refuge
4. The Concert
5. Carlos the Jackal


Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:
1. Se7en (Monday, five, 10pm)
2. Stand by Me (Sunday, five, 2.40pm)
3. California Dreamin' (Monday, C4, 2am)
4. 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days (Saturday, C4, 1am)
5. Harold and Kumar Get the Munchies (Sunday, five, 11.20pm)

Man fall down, goes boom: "Jackass 3D" (Metro 05/11/10)

Jackass 3D provides another addition to this year's roster of Flagging Franchises Given a Stereoscopic Shot in the Arm - although, in the case of Johnny Knoxville's gonzo pranksters, invariably cheaper shots also follow to the face, stomach and groinal areas, and as the film has been assembled in much the same shambling, anything-goes fashion as previous Jackasses, the 3D element proves patchy indeed. Still, if you really feel the need to witness shirtless individuals playing swingball with a beehive, it's right here for you. Impromptu dentistry involving a speeding Lamborghini? That's here, too. Sex toys fired from cannons and projectile excrement? Uh-huh. How about a pig snaffling an apple from between a fat dude's buttocks? You got it, plus a novel way of getting your five-a-day.

Putting aside its general resemblance to the kind of yahoo entertainment we'll all be watching come the End of Days, the new film displays the vaguest flickers of visual and narrative inspiration: some blowaway sight gags staged in the wake of a jet's turbine engine, a fiendishly conceived, tripartite prank involving Bam Margera and snakes both plastic and real, an all-midget poolhall skit that suggests it really is a small world after all. Elsewhere, though, the continual reliance on pain as a punchline proves monotonous and wearying, as does the constant soundtrack of the participants' gurgling, demonic, self-amused laughter.

Again, the most telling skit is an attempt to put the wind up Margera's folks, this time with the aid of a lifelike gorilla costume (and Will Oldham as a hapless animal trainer): a decade down the line from the TV series that established the Jackass brand, Knoxville and co. remain big kids, and in any other context, the sight of thirty- and fortysomething Americans egging one another on to do these kinds of things would merit no more than a sorry shake of the head and the tutted one-word verdict "bellends". Good news: the players take so many blows to the 'nads that these self-annihilating genes seem unlikely to be transmitted further - though we might once more spare a thought for those underpaid flunkies and shop assistants obliged to tidy up the messes this millionaire fratboy circus continues to leave behind.

Jackass 3D opens in cinemas nationwide today; a shorter version of this review ran in today's Metro, and can be read here.