Rude awakenings: "Sleeping Beauty"

On their old, late-night Movie Club programme, the critics Andrew Collins and Stuart Maconie used regularly to hand out a prize for whatever struck them as the Rum Film of the Week. The Australian novelist-turned-director Julia Leigh's Cannes-lauded oddity Sleeping Beauty - altogether little to do with the Disney animation, or really the fairytale it was based upon - would well qualify for that particular title. It may end up as 2011's Rum Film of the Year. Hell, it could even stand as Rum Film of the Decade, given its ripe peculiarity: this is a work that ventures beyond the arcane and outré to be something else (in the) altogether. It's very, very, very rum, and I think I mean that as a compliment.

This is the tale of young Lucy (Emily Browning), a student paying her way through college with work as, variously, a guinea pig in a medical laboratory, an office girl limited to running off endless photocopies while her boss looks disapprovingly upon her, and - by night - as a nightclub hostess, in which capacity she begins having sex (for money, we assume, although it's never shown) with a variety of generally unappealing middle-aged businessmen. Still, that rent still won't pay itself, and so Lucy chooses to advance to the next level (or descend further still) for her latest assignment: serving the wine at an exclusive gentlemen's club where model-types in peephole bras and crotchless panties offer up cordon bleu cuisine to old geezers in search of some Proustian rush by waking up next to nubile young things like Lucy. Interviewing for this, er, position, Lucy is told "there will be no penetration. Your vagina is a temple" - which is not something one usually hears at JobStart, say.

Jane Campion has her name on the poster, conferring some kind of feminist credibility on proceedings, but the set-up is otherwise pure Catherine Breillat. (Breillat, indeed, has filmed a costume drama with the same title, as yet unreleased in the UK.) Leigh's vision is markedly more voluptuous than Breillat's earlier treatises, which were aggressively dialectical yet spare (if not sparing) in what they showed, the better for the message to come through loud and clear. Sleeping Beauty, for its part, adheres to a mise-en-scène of country houses, silver service and Amazonian supporting waitresses; even the crotchless panties look pricey, for once. To some extent, this obscures what the film actually has to say: I wasn't ever sure whether Leigh's target was the grinding relentlessness of male desire, or an idea of female beauty as something fluid (Lucy changes her name twice in the course of the film), unobtainable, and finally deadly.

If we take what unfolds as literal and not metaphorical, then the film would appear to be pro-prostitution, claiming that if you have a body to die for, you may as well whore it out for all it's worth (easy to imagine some dubious style mag conceiving of a fashion shoot replicating the film's look); yet it also reads as anti-sex, regarding coupling as a menial task, as beneath Lucy as her wiping down of the grout in her grotty student bathroom. In as far as there is sex here, it has the smell of the laboratory or the workplace about it: Lucy's deepthroating skills are evident only in those scenes where she swallows a balloon on a long tube as a way of recording chest pressure. Only in drug-induced sleep does she come to get any respite, which I guess makes Leigh's film a reversal of the fairytale, where the heroine was waiting for a prince's kiss to wake her up - but I still couldn't honestly say whether this can be claimed as an actively feminist line, or just part of a rallying text for slackers, the work of a writer who's been abusing the snooze button a bit.

Two elements save the film from haziness and pomposity. The first is Leigh's compositional sense, which is self-aware and amused enough to deposit a filthy mattress in the alleyway the first time Lucy emerges from her house as an elegant lady of the night; throughout, there's a compelling disjunction between the boldness of the image and the vagueness of the ideas underpinning it - as though the whole film were being dreamt before our eyes (but whose reverie or nightmare is this, then?) The other is Browning, a rare former child star (Lemony Snicket) for whom the words "I want to do more grown-up work" clearly mean something, who gives the generally passive - indeed, oft-catatonic - Lucy occasional, and welcome, flickers of spirit and inner life.

Unlike the pale and fragile babydolls Breillat was fond of torturing, this is a girl who appears to exist at least some of the time in the real world: Browning does a credible dawn-hour walk of shame, and if the film could be reduced to a single image illustrative of its tone, it would be the embarrassed semi-smirk she gives as one of her fellow hostesses checks to ensure Lucy's lipstick has been exactly coordinated to match the colour of her labia. The hang-up the film has on such details suggests Leigh, like Lucy, is catering to an especially pedantic form of pervert, but in truth Sleeping Beauty is so perverse, so singular (and quite possibly so muddled) in what it does that it's impossible really to discern whether it's a failure or a success at this proximity, or after a first viewing: I was struck by it on some aesthetic level, but I wondered whether Leigh could or should have done more to challenge my gaze. As it is, the film is a gorgeously blank work, a hyper-accessorised question mark.

Sleeping Beauty is in selected cinemas.

Island life: "Retreat"

In Carl Tibbetts' effective Brit quickie Retreat, a couple struggling to recover in the wake of a miscarriage (Cillian Murphy and Thandie Newton) head away for a few days on a deserted Highland outcrop only to find the experience less relaxing than they'd hoped: military jets are frequently heard sweeping overhead, the generator soon packs up, and a selection of firearms are discovered stashed about the place. This is even before the arrival of a bloodied young man (Jamie Bell), who stumbles into the couple's cottage and begins boarding up the windows, convinced an airborne virus is set to hit the area in the very near future.

A fairly far-fetched set-up, then - the distributors have done well to get the film into circulation before Steven Soderbergh's starrier, globetrotting Contagion, against which it might well have appeared small fry - but Tibbetts and co-writer Janice Hallett develop it credibly, and the actors, presumably stuck on the same soundstage day in day out, give it further heft. If Newton initially appears no more than fetchingly distressed - her rear shot in close-up as a prize over which the two men will come to blows - she comes through strongly in the latter stages, and Tibbetts locates something unfamiliar in Bell, his brisk, no-nonsense movements - think Billy Elliot retooled for maximum threat - very skilfully pitted against Murphy's rather fey, wheezing metrosexuality. (Those distributors were also lucky to get Retreat out before the Straw Dogs remake, which operates from a similar home-invasion template.) No more than functional overall, it nevertheless moves appreciably, better managed than at least 75% of British genre fare - you hope it'd spur producers to give Tibbetts the money to do another, and encourage him to take a few more risks.

Retreat is on release in selected cinemas, and also available through the FilmFlex on demand service, before its DVD release on Monday.

Hicksville: "Footloose"

By anybody's standards - but especially by the standards of mid-1980s cheese - the original Footloose really wasn't that bad: directed with respect by Herbert Ross, and capably performed, it gave rise to at least a couple of era-defining pop records (Kenny Loggins' title track, and Deniece Williams' "Let's Hear It For The Boy"), plus the diverting sight of Kevin Bacon sticking it to the Man (or to the Farmer, presumably) by dancing atop a tractor. The film benefitted from that weird socio-temporal conflation which saw the 1980s replaying all the notes of the ultra-conservative 1950s: the idea of repressive small-town values being boogied around surely couldn't fail to strike chords with young viewers around the time of the Reagan administration, with its family-first and Just Say No policies.

Craig Brewer's much-delayed yahoo remake - first conceived as a vehicle for Zac Efron, then for one of the Gossip Girl guys - recognises at least the musical achievements of Ross's film, replaying Loggins's theme over its opening credits, but the latter-day teenagers we observe stomping their feet to it are dancing ironically, with smirks on their faces - and so busy smirking at their own hipster appropriation of the music that four of them promptly drive headlong into a truck. This is the cotton-milling town of Bomont, Georgia, a tiny berg whose very name should tell you the locals don't go in for fancy-pants behaviour, not least in the field of spelling; grief-stricken after this smash-up, the town's elders have closed ranks, seeking to protect their young by imposing a curfew and banning loud music and lascivious dancing.

Into this repressive atmosphere, there arrives out-of-town heartthrob Ren (Kenny Wormald), your hero for the evening. (We know he's the hero, because Brewer helpfully layers a countrified cover of Bonnie Tyler's "Holding Out For A Hero" over his first arrival.) Inevitably, Ren's quiff and sharp moves catch the blue eyes of local babe Ariel (Julianne Hough, something of a trainee Aniston), but this spark immediately sets him in opposition with her father, a Luddite preacher (Dennis Quaid), who rails against cellphones and ATM machines in his sermons. This is about as complicated as Footloose 2011 gets; elsewhere, it quickly becomes clear some of the original's innocence has shuffled off stage right.

Nobody makes these things for fun anymore; they do it for money, to capitalise on the recognition of a particular brand, or cash in on an emergent craze. So it is that Wormald crunks more than I can recall Bacon doing, alongside a crew whose jackets are plastered in product-placement logos; so it is that we get some line-dancing, to a number entitled "Hey Mister, Won't You Sell Me A Fake I.D.?", thrown in as somebody's idea of a bonus. Quaid can't bring himself to summon up the full-on fire-and-brimstone of John Lithgow's preacher in the original, so he too falls back on a half-smirk ("hey kids, I can't believe some of the things this guy is saying, either!"), which robs the film of its only meaningful antagonist.

Brewer is too busy pointing stuff out to the slower members of his audience to correct him. When Ariel first descends into the cauldron of the local stock-car arena, one middle-aged man is observed behind her taking a phone pic of her behind, because she's a hot piece of ass. On his first day at his new school, Ren is swiftly surrounded by female classmates twittering "he's cute, he's cute", because, apparently, he's cute. (In actuality, Wormald shares with the porcine Bacon the characteristic of not being quite as sickeningly cute as an Efron or Chace Crawford would have been.) By the point one of Ren's contemporaries is having to draw a figure of eight in the sand, to show what a figure of eight looks like, most viewers will have been led to the conclusion the American education system is pretty much screwed.

If you're looking for yet more evidence of the infantilisation of the American mainstream, you may also want to consider the way "Let's Hear It For The Boy" is deployed in the two Footlooses: unironically - to the point of introducing a note of homoeroticism between Bacon and his trainee dance partner Chris Penn - first time round, but here filtered through the squawking of a couple of six-year-olds, and their shiny Barbie tape recorder. Brewer, whose Hustle and Flow was given serious Oscar consideration not so very long ago, has some ideas about the kind of small town where a plaintiff in court might legitimately refer to the judge by his given name, but the thrust of the film seeks to rewrite the original by the rules of our current cycle of streetdance movies, whose few, rattling braincells reside very firmly in their feet: the finale, not so much 50s or 80s as cro-magnon, is nothing more than a punch-up in a car park.

It's a fine and worthy idea to have a mainstream multiplex product rise up against the way society now habitually mollycoddles its youngsters - Pixar recognised as much, in setting out on Finding Nemo - but while Footloose 2011 stumbles almost unknowingly across the potent metaphor of Bomont's kids being literally packed in cotton wool, elsewhere Brewer and his cast default on the hard work required in making teen-rebellion material that originated a half-century ago relevant for a 21st century crowd: there just isn't enough sweat, and Ren's triumph ultimately lies less in cutting loose than in cutting through one council's draconian health-and-safety legislation. I preferred the Fame rehash.

Footloose is in cinemas nationwide.

1,001 Films: "The Awful Truth" (1937)

Legend has it that The Awful Truth was one of those studio productions that, more than most, was made up as it went along, which explains its freewheeling energy, the improvisational asides, and those elements (a musical number here, a dance routine there) thrown in for no real reason other than "we thought it played good at the time". A peppily subversive film that gets funnier as it goes along, it now sparks nostalgia for the routinely classy Hollywood comedies of days gone by, when leading men were encouraged to show up for even mundane domestic scenes in dinner jackets rather than latex fat suits; it's hard to imagine anybody feeling the same way in 70 years' time about Little Man or Norbit.

Meet the Warriners (Cary Grant and Irene Dunne): a married couple whose mutual suspicions have finally got the better of them. Granted a 90-day trial separation in court - she keeps the pooch, he gets visiting rights - they hit the social scene all over again as singletons, only to find their love lives keep getting in the way of each other: he sees off Ralph Bellamy as a momma's boy from Oklahoma, but she faces a much tougher proposition in sabotaging Grant's affair with an heiress, until the brainwave of posing as her ex-husband's lush of a sister. Along the way, the much underrated Leo McCarey (Duck Soup, Make Way for Tomorrow) gathers together varying strains of comedy, from some delicious verbal ironies (Dunne's lawyer on the phone, insisting his client persist with her marriage even as his own wife nags that his dinner's getting cold; Grant declaring "nothing's going to hurt me" as a piano lid falls on his fingers) to the inspired heart-to-heart pastiche that seals the lovers' fate.

Dunne is wonderfully sassy, but this is likely to be best remembered as the film that first established Grant, previously a stooge to Mae West in She Done Him Wrong and I'm No Angel, as the pre-eminent star of screwball comedy, as essential a part of the cycle's furniture as Cagney and Bogart were to the gangster movie or John Wayne was to become to the Western. Grant tosses out the zingy one-liners with measured insouciance, but also performs a series of perfectly pitched pratfalls in a sequence that opens with him suffering jijitsu at the hands of a Chinese doorman and ends with his falling off a chair and destroying a chest of drawers. That such a patchwork, ad hoc film comes to feel as slick as it does is almost entirely down to the actor's ability to establish a rapport with anything set in front of him: Dunne, yes, but also an undersized bowler hat, an oversized nightshirt, a glass of eggnog, and the dog that - if the Thin Man series is anything to go by - was obligatory in all comedies of the early sound era.

The Awful Truth is available on DVD through Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.

At the LFF: "The Black Power Mixtape 1967-75"

Here's news of a coming together you'll find either unlikely or inevitable, depending on your sensibilities. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the ultra-liberal Swedish National Broadcast dispatched several of its reporters Stateside to file a series of reports on African-African lives and the growing Black Power movement. These reports' tone ranged from the broadly sympathetic to the outright fascinated; after all, interest in revolutionary activity certainly wasn't limited to the U.S., as the terror campaigns of the Red Brigade and the Baader-Meinhofs went to demonstrate. Yet this hands-across-the-Atlantic enterprise came at a particular, traumatic moment in American history, one marked by bloodshed both on foreign soil (in South East Asia) and at home, where 1968 alone brought the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy and two Black Panther leaders.

The footage, gathered in Göran Olsson's new documentary The Black Power Mixtape 1967-75, thus provides a potted history, nodding obliquely towards technological progress (roughly: the Sixties were in black-and-white, the Seventies in colour) while charting the movement's gradual adoption of a more militaristic stance, from Harry Belafonte through Bobby Seale to Louis Farrakhan. Individual clips cover a wide range of subjects: a deft profile of the cool charisma and verbal acuity of Stokely Carmichael, a key Black Power figure often overshadowed by the contributions of Malcolm X (already dead by '67) and Dr. King (who appears somewhat small and nervy in these reports, as though he knew what was coming), missives from the ghettoes of New York and Washington that seem to be engaged in the same kind of conscience-pricking as Cathy Come Home was in the UK, lingering on the grimy furniture and irreparably tangled blinds of poky, make-do slum accommodation.

Other clips capture the absurdity of the moment. J. Edgar Hoover denounces the Panthers' "Free Breakfast" program for underprivileged black children as "the biggest internal threat that America currently faces"; interviewed during his Algerian exile, Panthers leader Eldridge Cleaver compares his plight to that of the South Vietnamese; while Merrill Pannitt, then-editor of conservative-owned listings mag TV Guide, sparks a debate in insisting that the European media - including our plucky Scandinavian interlocutors - have become fixated on the "negative" aspects of American life, a decidedly poor choice of adjective from a figure doing his level best to appear the very model of the rich, clueless white man.

Any flimsy nostalgia (the wild hair and sideburns! The smoking!) is immediately stomped by a typically Nordic conceptual heft: for context, we have the likes of Erykah Badu, Talib Kweli, Angela Davis et al. narrating, describing what it is (if anything) these images say to them some four decades on, and establishing an eloquent, informed, sometimes angry or rueful dialogue between the past and the present, occasionally correcting or amending the good liberal intentions of the original footage. That footage - from a time when public figures appeared greatly less guarded on camera - is very nearly vibrant enough in itself; the observation of inner-city street life, with the exception of the litter and the fashions, could have been shot yesterday, which you may take as a form of social criticism. Given the title, it seems perverse that the only non-incidental music we hear should be relegated to the end credits (history and politics trump culture here), but anyone convinced we're living through 1968 all over again - witnessing the rise of an underclass (in the recent riots) and the travails of a black leader (this time, a President) accused of trying to brainwash America with socialism - will otherwise find much that sings out to them.

The Black Power Mixtape 1967-75 screens at the NFT on Fri 14 at 9pm and Mon 17 at 3.30pm, before opening in selected cinemas nationwide on October 21.

At the LFF: "Dark Horse"

The 55th London Film Festival begins this Wednesday, and runs until October 27, and I'll be running selected previews and recommendations here over the coming weeks. Regular LFF updates/reviews will be posted as part of my Twitter feed (http://twitter.com/mike_mccahill).

It may well be that with 2009's Life During Wartime, his apologia for Happiness, Todd Solondz felt as though he'd concluded a particular chapter in his filmmaking career, and that he could move on accordingly. His latest, Dark Horse, initially appears more emollient yet, as though the filmmaker had plans to make something with broad audience appeal: it even begins at a wedding, to the accompaniment of upbeat pop music, although it transpires that the writer-director's interest resides, as usual, with those at the margins at this particular event, busy as they are having themselves no fun whatsoever.

A shattering of the man-boy psyche so revered elsewhere in contemporary American comedy, Dark Horse comes to feel like an indie remake of 2006's Failure to Launch, albeit with a character who doesn't have Matthew McConaughey's charisma and confidence - who might more credibly be left behind by his contemporaries - positioned centre-frame. Abe (Jordan Gelber) is a doughy, deluded thirtysomething still living at home with his overbearing parents (Mia Farrow and Christopher Walken), working a spreadsheet-shuffling job for his pa, and spending much of his income on action figures and replica toys; even his preferred mode of transportation - a canary-yellow jeep - looks like something Hasbro might have manufactured.

He ploughs on regardless, perking himself up with inanely inspirational pop, hiding his frustration behind a facade of boyish bluster, and insisting - despite his early rejection by Miranda (Selma Blair), who had the misfortune to be seated next to Abe at the wedding, and is the recipient-victim of his latest schoolboy crush - that he remains "the frontrunner type, with certain qualities of the dark horse". It remains unclear whether Miranda, herself a stay-at-home type, has considered these in deciding to (in her own words) abandon her literary career, her hopes and ambitions, her independence and self-respect, in order to pledge her troth to Abe, in the absence of any better options; nor whether an older colleague of Abe's (Donna Murphy) has these qualities in mind in deciding to make our hero the latest target of her cougaring.

If, at first glance, Solondz looks to have shucked off some of the ambiguity of his earlier works - their ability to provoke heated debate about authorial tone, and who they were getting at, exactly - his comedy's becoming more deft: he knows he can get a laugh just from the framing of his mismatched lovers, or from blurring out the logo of a toy-store behemoth who clearly decided it wasn't a good idea to associate themselves too closely with the Solondz brand. He looks, too, to be growing softer with age: we notice the tenderness directed into Miranda and Abe's first kiss, even if it's immediately undercut by the former's sparing appraisal of same ("Oh my God, that wasn't terrible... it could have been so much worse.")

One might nevertheless have cause to question whether the move into the middle ground is entirely beneficial for this director, or indeed for Solondz newcomers. Dark Horse apes the bright, appealing colours of the modern romcom, but without the mocking flamboyance of a John Waters; audiences expecting a laughriot are going to be confronted with a lot of character business in which the only truly funny line is something like "you're such a post-Marxist cliché". I can't be sure how these newbies are going to handle the mental and physical disintegrations of the film's second half, wherein characters begin to flit in and out of Abe's unravelling life like imaginary friends, or spectres; the unintiated may be better sticking with The 40-Year-Old Virgin, a not dissimilar delayed coming-of-age tale that clung to good, honest dick jokes.

Still - given the borderline-autistic nature of some of his past work - it's encouraging that Solondz is making the effort to reach out, and he's getting demonstrably better around people, including the cast of actors who here appear to mesh seamlessly with his own once singular sensibilities: Blair's sad eyes are like a whole Solondz boxset in themselves, and Murphy's transformation from meek secretary to seducer once she's "off the payroll", is a mini-tour de force akin to Heather Matarazzo's Dawn Wiener in Welcome to the Dollhouse and Charlotte Rampling's venomous pick-up in Life During Wartime. Maybe the nail-bomb sharpness of the director's more incendiary films has gone, but Solondz remains an acute social observer, and on this evidence, may yet have a career ahead of him as a psychodramatist of some repute - an Ibsen of the American suburbs.

Dark Horse screens at the Vue West End on Fri 14 at 3pm, Sun 16 at 8.30pm and Mon 17 at 3.30pm.

For what it's worth...

Top Ten Films at the UK Box Office
for the weekend of September 30-October 2, 2011:

1 (1) Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (15) **
2 (new) Abduction (12A)
3 (new) Phantom of the Opera: 25th Anniversary Concert (PG)
4 (2) Crazy, Stupid, Love. (15) ***
5 (new) The Debt (15)
6 (new) Shark Night 3D (15)
7 (4) The Inbetweeners (15) **
8 (5) Drive (18) ***
9 (new) What's Your Number? (15)
10 (3) Warrior (12A) ****

(source: UK Film Council)

My top five:
1. Jurassic Park
2. Tyrannosaur
3. Melancholia
4. Warrior
5. Midnight in Paris


Top Ten DVD rentals:

1 (4) Thor (12) **
2 (1) Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (12) *
3 (3) Source Code (12) ***
4 (5) Limitless (15) ***
5 (2) Attack the Block (15) **
6 (7) 127 Hours (12) ****
7 (new) Blitz (18) **
8 (8) Unknown (15) **
9 (re) Never Let Me Go (12) **
10 (new) Insidious (15) ***

(source: lovefilm.com)

My top five:
1. How I Ended This Summer
2. Bobby Fischer Against the World
3. Le Quattro Volte
4. The Tree
5. Cedar Rapids


Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:
1. Groundhog Day [above] (Sunday, five, 5.55pm)
2. The Iron Giant (Friday, C4, 3am)
3. Romancing the Stone (Sunday, C4, 12.30pm)
4. Milk (Sunday, BBC2, 10pm)
5. Monster House (Sunday, five, 4.10pm)