Art films don’t have to be serious, but a lot of them are. Madness, suffering, death—at times these become depressingly familiar themes at film festivals. For this reason, the rare comedy film is welcome: comedy highlights of last year’s festivals were Matchmaking Mayor at Berlin and Sons of Norway in Reykjavik. Although you’re primed to enjoy them, comedies are a reliable choice, as they typically have to be original, as well as funny, to be included in the festival.

What if you could have a festival that showed nothing but comedies? And what if it cheered you up during the most depressing month of the year? That’s just what the charity ‘Loco’ has done this year. London’s very first comedy film festival is taking place this weekend at the BFI. It started last night, and you’ll have to be quick if you want to take part: it ends Sunday night, and tickets are selling fast.

Two of tonight’s films have been selected by Edgar Wright, who wrote and directed Hot Fuzz and Scott Pilgrim vs the World. He will be at the BFI to introduce screenings of his own film, Shaun of the Dead and Mike Leigh’s Life is Sweet. Alongside these two established talents, Loco will present its ‘Discovery Screening’ this evening: Black Pond, the feature debut of Tom Kingsley and Will Sharpe, and ‘All Consuming Love: Man in a Cat’, an animated short with a decidedly unusual premise.

Sunday starts with a Keaton-Chaplin double bill (Sherlock Jr and The Champion), followed by a 50^th anniversary screening of Go to Blazes, a British comedy about a bunch of jewel thieves who choose a fire engine as their getaway car. The festival concludes with its most unusual and intriguing event: the first-ever live reading of The Day Off. The script was written in the 1960s by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson (creators of Steptoe and Son), and intended for a film starring comedy legend Tony Hancock. Unfortunately, the film was never made, but maybe a modern adaptation will be in order if this weekend’s live reading proves a success.

Last night, the festival kicked off with two previews: a sell-out screening of The Muppets, followed by The Fairy (La Fée, 2011). The Fairy is set in the port city of Le Havre, and stars the film’s three writer-directors: Dominique Abel as ‘Dom’, a night porter at a cheap hotel, and Fiona Gordon as ‘Fiona’, a scruffy guest who introduces herself as a fairy who can grant Dom 3 wishes. Bruno Romy plays the perilously short-sighted owner of a local bar, ‘L’Amour Flou’. The film’s creators act alongside an excellent supporting cast, including Philippe Marz as troublesome British guest ‘John’, with ‘Mimi’, his beloved Westie.

The programme guide describes The Fairy as influenced by Michel Gondry, Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Jacques Tati. True, it does contain something of Gondry’s whimsical imagination, Jeunet’s eccentric and grotesque characters, and Tati’s near-silent physical comedy, but these are merely comparisons that help audiences to know what to expect. The Fairy has its own original spark, and couldn’t be confused with the work of any of these directors. Its comic situations are highly original, often laugh-out-loud, and at times daring: many gags made the audience not just laugh, but gasp with shock, or cringe in pain. While The Fairy pushes the envelope, its overall tone is rarely as exaggerated or baroque as either Gondry or Jeunet, and its storyline has more drive than Tati. As stand-up comedian Stephen K. Amos remarked in a surprise introduction to the film, the trailers really don’t do this film justice. Any one sequence from the film could reasonably stand alone as a comic sketch, but the real power of the film’s comedy only emerges when the scenes are linked together into a coherent whole, building on each other with their repetition and variation, enacted by an endearing cast of characters.

While The Fairy is a thoroughly enjoyable and original comedy the first time around, much of its appeal lies in surprise, so it’s probably not a film that you would want to watch again and again. Classic comic films often rely on verbal or physical gags that can be easily repeated: this way, we enjoy them again, mentally, every time we are reminded of them by situations in our everyday life (the perennial response to ‘Surely…’ in Airplane! for example, or The Young Frankenstein‘s use of ‘Ovaltine’). In The Fairy, there is very little verbal humour, and its physical humour is so extreme that it evokes cartoon more than reality—you will probably never encounter anything like it in real life. I still recommend this film wholeheartedly, though, for its genuinely funny gags, its originality, and last but not least, its lovely aesthetic, which splashes cheerful patches of colour onto a modestly washed out backdrop.

As for Loco itself, the festival is a fantastic idea, at the perfect time of year. A comedy film festival should have the potential to attract a broader audience to the festival experience. True, it’s not as though we can’t get comedy when we want it, on TV or at the multiplex. But the popularity of events like Secret Cinema has proven that people want not just content but a proper experience: a night out with friends, some live entertainment, and a chance to participate: Loco, with its parties, workshops, special guests and public screenings provides just that. I hope that it will be back again next year, hopefully lasting longer than just 3 days, and with a line-up that includes more contemporary international fare. As The Fairy proves, comedy can travel very well.

To find out more about Loco, visit their website.  To buy tickets, visit BFI.

At the screening I attended of Jan Švankmajer’s Surviving Life (Theory and Practice) (2010), there were two walk-outs. I was tempted to follow, but my love of the great Czech animator’s previous work won out, making me want to experience, if not enjoy, every minute of his latest film.

Newcomers to Švankmajer would do best to start with his shorts from the 1960s and 80s, live-action Surrealist animations of everyday objects. Some people find them disturbing, but if you embrace their sheer creativity and magic, these films can take you right back to childhood, evoking its fear of the unknown, love of repetition, and sense that anything might happen.

If I hadn’t already seen two of Švankmajer’s feature-length films, having seen Surviving Life I would have said that the director should stick to short films. His tendency towards variations on a theme arguably works best in small doses, so the theme never has a chance to become tiresome. Alice (1988) and Little Otik (2000), despite being 86 and 132 minutes long respectively, work superbly, perhaps because both are based on children’s stories, and find the right balance between live action and stop-motion animation.

Surviving Life, in contrast, incorporates childhood themes, but is a decidedly adult story which, at 109 minutes, is boring in its repetition. It tells the story of a happily married man in late middle-age. One night, he happens to dream of a beautiful young woman, and subsequently becomes obsessed with dreaming in order to keep seeing her. The tune of a waltz associated with his dreams is repeated ad nauseum. The dreams don’t include enough variation to make them interesting, and the secret behind them is not much of a surprise.

The film’s biggest problem is its claustrophobic style, which combines with the repetition to make the audience feel trapped. Instead of using the live-action animation for which he is renowned, Švankmajer animates photographs of his actors, allowing for the easy introduction of Surrealist elements such as giant eggs, priapic teddy bears, and Ernst-inspired women with the heads of birds. This approach lacks the compelling originality that usually characterises Švankmajer’s films: instead, it seems a regurgitation of 1930s Surrealist collage and Monty Python’s Flying Circus animation. The live action elements are much shorter, and confined to close-ups and extreme close-ups of objects and characters’ faces.

Surviving Life begins with a message from Švankmajer himself, as an animated photo standing in the middle of a photo of a street that serves as one of his film sets. He explains that he animated photographs of his actors in order to save on production costs. This sounds like a reasonable explanation, but the director goes on to say that he is giving this introduction in order to draw the film out to an appropriate length. The introduction can be justified as meta-film, and it is a treat to see Švankmajer in his own film. However, even as a joke, the idea of throwing in an introduction to make the film longer seems like an insult to the audience, especially in light of the repetitive narrative that follows. The audience at the screening I attended clearly wanted to go along with the director, and made a few attempts at ironic or appreciative laughter throughout this pseudo-comedy, but it sounded weak and hollow.

Confirmed fans of Švankmajer’s work won’t want to miss this film: the work of a confirmed master is always of interest, even when it’s not his best. Surviving Life still features recognisable elements of the Švankmajer we know and love: giant tongues, huge appetites, and a general enthusiasm for the earthy side of life. Švankmajer also deserves praise for attempting to carry on the project that the French Surrealists abandoned after Un Chien andalou and L’Age d’or: that is, to use communicate Surrealism’s message via film.

Surviving Life demonstrates how dreams and reality overlap and does so in a straightforward manner, not by tying narrative knots so that the audience simply confuses real and imagined worlds (as in Woody Allen’s Deconstructing Harry, for instance). At the same time, while Švankmajer’s message is more meaningful than Woody Allen’s, the Surrealists would have disapproved of the fact that Surviving Life only demonstrates their point, rather than putting it in action: the audience remains an audience, simply observing how one man’s dreams relate to his waking life. As a result, the film becomes egocentric: the audience may have trouble relating to the character’s obsession with his own inner life. Ultimately, rather than showing that dream life is relevant to waking life, and is on the same plane, Surviving Life shows a man who becomes increasingly detached from his present life through dreams which are more relevant to his past.

This year London’s Czech Film Festival, ‘Made in Prague’ celebrated its 15^th edition (10-27 November). The theme for 2011 was ‘Film and Literature’, and included hard-to-find retro delights such as the 1959 adaptation of Jaroslav Hašek’s comic novel, The Good Soldier Švejk, and Czech New Wave classics like Jiří Menzel’s Capricious Summer (1967), adapted from a novel by Vladislav Vančura. More recent productions included A Walk Worthwhile (2009), directed by Miloš Forman and his son Petr Forman, based on a jazz opera by Suchý and Šlitr, and Of Parents and Children (2008), an adaptation of a novel by prize-winning contemporary writer Emil Hakl.

Czech New Wave director Juraj Herz attended the festival to present his famously dark The Cremator (1968), as well as his most recent film, Habermann (2010). Based on a story by Josef Urban, it joins an increasingly long list of films examining the mass deportation of Germans from Czechoslovakia following World War II.

Clearly, the Czech Republic has a strong literary history, from Kafka, Čapek, Nezval and Hrabal to Milan Kundera. Václav Havel, Czechoslovakia’s last president following the fall of Communism, and first president of the Czech Republic, was an established playwright before he even entered politics. This year’s ‘Made in Prague’ festival showcased Havel’s directorial debut, Leaving (2011), based on one of his most recent plays. The film reflects his experience as a politician, his background in theatre and, unfortunately, his inexperience with cinema. Many plays have been made into excellent films, but this only works when the director has a good sense of cinema’s specificity: not just the special expressive capacities that cinema offers, but what it takes to make a good film. A play, recorded on camera, is not a film.

Leaving concerns Vilém Rieger, a politician who is about to leave office. It is clear that he is not quite ready to let go of power, and equally unwilling to relinquish of his ministerial mansion in the countryside. There, he is surrounded by his family: mother, glamorous but jealous trophy wife Irena, teenage daughter cocooned with her laptop and mobile phone, and grown-up daughter constantly pushing legal documents at him to secure her inheritance. While the staff divide themselves between catering to the family’s needs and preparing for the move, the great man receives three very different types of visitor: a cynical tabloid journalist; a reverential sex kitten of a graduate student; and the incumbent chancellor, whose bright, loudly patterned clothing reflects his vulgar character.

In its favour, Leaving boasts a number of well-known actors, including veteran Josef Abraham (I Served the King of England [2006], Dita Saxová [1968], Courage for Every Day [1964]) as ex-chancellor Vilém, and Havel’s own spouse, Dagmar Havlovà, in the role of trophy wife Irena. The film also seems to feature a characteristically Czech sense of the absurd: the set includes two ridiculous obstacles that the characters continually have to negotiate (a badly-placed rock and a large puddle), and the family itself is marked by a baroque, outdated air of aristocracy, which they are determined to maintain even in the face of a stark change in fortunes.

There are two principal problems with the film, though: first, none of the primary characters are sympathetic, making it hard for the audience to care about what happens to any of them. Vilém may be seen as a distorted reflection of Havel himself, a man who understands the challenges of life in office: so many good intentions, so little possibility of realising them fully. In spite of the grace with which Josef Abraham plays this character, Viém is at base a vain womaniser and reactionary, and therefore difficult to truly like.

The film’s female characters, meanwhile, fall correspond to one of two extremes: sex objects (his wife and the graduate student) or cold, rather austere women (his mother and daughters). All, however, are materialistic and calculating: while this could be said to show their shrewdness, at base it reflects the fact that these women depend on men for their material wellbeing. The figure of the absurdly sexualised graduate student is most objectionable: even when a woman devotes her life to the intellect, Leaving insists on her physical attributes above all. The film even parodies academic interests, as the student instantly switches her studious adoration to the new chancellor, making her yet another stereotyped female opportunist.

Ultimately this film parodies every character, though it is a bit softer on the Vilém’s teenage daughter: the only constructively resourceful character in the film, it is she who ultimately saves the family through a cross-cultural relationship (notably conducted in English, over her mobile phone and the internet). Perhaps Havel intended to present the European Union as the best means of escape from an insular confrontation between the outdated elite and a new generation of uncultured, corrupt parvenus.

The other problem with the film is that Havel seems hardly to have grasped cinema’s language. There are attempts to make the film cinematic: the use of slow motion, baroque angles and, most disconcertingly, racking focus over a short depth of field, which gives a bilious fisheye effect. The entire film takes place in the garden of the ex-chancellor’s ministerial mansion, with the mansion itself as a backdrop and a pond in the foreground. There are precious few departures from this boring setting: a handful of shots show another part of the garden, or the field or road just outside the estate. Essentially, the film differs very little from a stage play with a single set. Even the initially amusing physical obstacles mentioned earlier feel like stage props, with one anchored at the centre and the other at the side of the set. The script itself, with its insistent themes, stilted lines, and formal entrances and exits, feels as though it has barely been altered at all from its original form. It creates the claustrophobic impression characteristic of a film that has been badly adapted from a play. We are shut in a small space with a bunch of unsympathetic characters: I can think of few greater cinematic tortures.

Going to the cinema is one of many everyday pleasures to be had in Paris: the typical variety of films on offer, particularly in the Latin Quarter, seems like a 365-day film festival. On any given day, you could see the latest Hollywood release, new independent films from around the world, or a range of cinema classics. To see Buñuel, Bergman or Kurosawa on the big screen, there’s no need to go to the cinémathèque or wait for a new restored release: cinemas like the Accatone, the Grand Action and the Reflet Médicis in the 5^th arrondissement show films like this every day, and the they don’t cancel a screening if too few people turn up.

Any tourist can take advantage of the cinematic opportunities in Paris: if you don’t speak a word of French, you can go and see an English film (if it’s a new Hollywood film or a children’s film, look out for the letters ‘VO’ to make sure you see the ‘original version’, not one dubbed in French). If you understand some French, or are fluent in another language, you can watch a foreign film and read the French subtitles. If you’re fluent, or nearly and want a challenge, you can see a French movie: even if you don’t understand every word, Paris’s historic cinemas are so charming that you’ll still have a wonderful experience.

On a trip to Paris last week, I happened to catch actor-director Sylvestre Amoussou’s second feature, Un Pas en avant: Les Dessous de la corruption (2011). It was almost five years ago that I saw his directorial début, Africa Paradis (2007), a fiction film based on a highly original concept. Set in a future where Europe has become uninhabitable, the film imagines what could happen if there were a wave of European immigrants to Africa. Africa Paradis made its social commentary through a reversal of fortunes, showing white people treated as second-class citizens, taking on just the sort of menial jobs that are traditionally assigned to immigrants. The film was enjoyable as a comedy, making the audience laugh by turning a familiar situation on its head. At the same time, Africa Paradis was thought-provoking in the radical way in which it asks you, as a spectator, to put yourself in another person’s place (be that the role of the oppressor or the oppressed). The drawback of Africa Paradis is that it felt a little amateurish, so that it was difficult, at times, to become fully involved in the story.

In Un Pas en avant, Amoussou has created a film with much more professional production values. Like Africa Paradis, over-acting is the rule, but this adds to the film’s comic value, as though the actors and audience share the enjoyment of exaggeration, as in a soap opera. In terms of the film’s technical quality, compelling storyline and often artistic shot composition, Un Pas en avant is a much stronger film than Africa Paradis.

Amoussou himself takes the starring role in Un Pas en avant, playing both greengrocer Koffi Godomey and his twin brother Boubacar, a delivery driver. When Boubacar disappears, and the police investigation seems to be going nowhere, Koffi decides to start his own search for his brother. In the process, he discovers terrible corruption taking place in Benin, at the highest levels of the country’s government and police service, its NGOs and the French embassy. While this storyline has the potential to be confusing, the exposition is clear: the characters are well-differentiated, and the narrative is paced just right, allowing the audience to follow the unfolding intrigue easily.

As in his first film, Amoussou excels in taking serious subject matter and treating it with a skilfully balanced blend of sobriety and tragedy on the one hand, and humour and optimism on the other. Amoussou’s portrayal of the twin brothers is entertaining, the chief difference between them being that one has no hair while the other has quite a lot. There is also a solid dose of comedy in Koffi’s relationship with his wife, who initially makes fun of his efforts to play the detective. The African setting is also particularly enjoyable, in terms of verbal expression and visual aesthetic: the local linguistic expressions and the noises used to express disapproval; the beautiful traditional costumes that the characters wear; the simple but welcoming interiors, and the golden light quality in the exterior shots.

A friend who attended the screening had personal experience of the region, and pointed out that there was a clear effort to Africanise and idealise in this film. In reality, she said, it is common to combine an African wrap with a second-hand imported t-shirt. It is also unrealistic that not a single person showed signs of any past or present illness. That said, this film was intended for a mass audience, and so can be seen as romanticising everyday reality in the way of Hollywood cinema: we rarely complain of American cinema’s beautiful people or the mismatches between the characters’ modest jobs and their spacious apartments or stylish clothing.

Un Pas en avant arguably has more than enough reality in its storyline, which focuses on the way in which some of the most privileged individuals in Benin shamelessly take a cut of donations intended for the poorest. They siphon off a percentage of every food and medication donation that comes into the country. Even more troubling, the film shows how they are able to get away with it: while the majority is very much opposed to corruption, most people never know what is going on. When the average honest person does find out about corruption, those in power try to buy their complicity, and when that fails, readily resort to threats or even murder. Unlike in a Hollywood film, the audience can never be 100% sure that the good guys are going to make it: as the film builds towards its climax, it seems as though no one is safe.

A potential problem with Un Pas en avant is in the degree to which it confirms stereotypes about corrupt African leaders and lawlessness in the region. It is depressing to consider how much this fiction film may reflect reality, and it could discourage people from donating to Africa, let alone visiting. At the same time, it contains a message of hope, in that it shows that  it is possible to speak out and take action against corruption, though very risky. The film implicitly asks every audience member to consider whether they would be brave enough to report corruption in these circumstances. One unexpected element of the film is its handful of openly didactic moments, reminiscent of Eisenstein, where customers at Koffi’s fruit and vegetable stall state their beliefs about the importance of voting, or their refusal to tolerate corruption. This is just one of a combination of characteristics which makes Amoussou’s work so distinctive.

Un Pas en avant: Les Dessous de la corruption is currently screening several times daily at the Espace Saint-Michel, 7 place St-Michel, Paris.

I won’t give too much away about The Skin I Live In (La piel que habito): unlike Woody Allen’s films, an Almodóvar doesn’t come along every year, so it’s important to savour them. Psychologists at the University of San Diego recently discovered that people tended to enjoy short stories more when they already knew the ending. I don’t know if the same holds true for cinema, but Pedro Almódovar’s most recent film would be an excellent test case. As an innocent first-time viewer, you are intrigued as the film uncovers its mysteries and surprises; armed with that same knowledge from the beginning, you would watch the film differently. For its sumptuous visual qualities and dark comedy, Almodóvar’s work has always stood up well to multiple viewings, but the twists in The Skin I Live In add another reason to watch this film more than once.

The Skin I Live In is the story of plastic surgeon Dr Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas) and his patient, Vera, who occupies a room in the doctor’s isolated villa/clinic in Toledo. From the top of her neck to the tips of her toes, Vera is enveloped in a flesh-coloured body stocking: although she is young, beautiful and lithe, it is clear that her body has gone through significant trauma. The calm and elegant Robert embodies contradictions of his own: after a lecture in which he outlines his pioneering work on skin grafts for burn patients, he receives a warning from the prime minister that research into transgenic therapy is strictly forbidden. The surgeon is clearly talented, but unconventional in his approach. His obsession with work is influenced by family tragedies involving his wife and daughter, events which may have driven him to madness.

An obvious reference point for the mad plastic surgeon film is Georges Franju’s Les Yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face, 1960), where horror derived from a doctor’s insane determination to perform a successful face transplant for his disfigured daughter. While featuring similar themes, The Skin I Live In is much less frightening than Franju’s film because of Almodóvar’s characteristic blend of comedy and humanity in the midst of adversity. Rather than throwing in moments of comic relief, Almodóvar typically draws out the unexpected humour inherent in life-or-death situations. In some of his films, this technique develops into madcap absurdity, but The Skin I Live In is slightly more sombre.  The film incorporates horror’s conventions of tragic situations that realise our worst fears, but regularly turns a knowing, ironic gaze on such circumstances: as a result, we giggle at tragedy that descends for a moment into melodrama, and laugh nervously as the worst possible thing that could happen, happens.

In addition to comedy, what saves The Skin I Live In from full-blown horror is that its central characters, both male and female, are very strong. Almodóvar has an admirable record of portraying, in particular, women who refuse to crumble: maintaining their individuality, they confront life’s challenges with practicality and common sense. The women in horror films, on the other hand, are victims precisely because they are weak, and while their defencelessness makes the violence seem more cruel, it can also paradoxically make it less important: in the feral world of the horror film, defencelessness naturally invites attack, like a gazelle invites a crocodile. Although The Skin I Live In, like Les Yeux sans visage, has its fair share of defenceless, suicidal women, the most important characters have a sense of self that makes them defiantly adaptable and resilient, exactly the antidote to horror’s terror through annihilation.

It’s a well-worn observation that the book is better than the movie. But what about the graphic novel? It seems reasonable to expect the transition from one predominantly visual medium to another to be smoother. It was pleasing to see Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis gain wider attention through the animated film adaptation she directed in 2007 with Vincent Paronnaud. While fun, that film still had nowhere near the impact of the original.

Satrapi recently paired up with Paronnaud again to direct a film adaptation of her shorter graphic work, Chicken with Plums (Poulet aux Prunes, 2011), this time using predominantly live-action rather than animation. Mathieu Amalric stars as Nasser-Ali, a violinist who decides it’s time to die when his beloved violin is broken. Neither his wife, his two young children, nor his brother can dissuade him. On his elective deathbed, Nasser-Ali recalls his past, above all his doomed relationship with the beautiful Irâne.

Chicken with Plums is a very strange film, but the directors first deserve praise for their remarkably creative approach. Even if the film’s parts did not hang together well, Satrapi and Paronnaud should be admired for their willingness to switch between starkly different aesthetic modes. The film’s dominant style is that of the period piece, a conservative mode which makes creative departures all the more surprising. The directors have reproduced mid-twentieth century Iran with an intimate, almost mystical atmosphere, predominantly green in hue: a sort of fairy-tale re-imagining of place that recalls Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Then, without warning, the film makes a brief departure into garish, mass-produced modernity: a flash-forward to Nasser-Ali’s son’s future life in the U.S., complete with obese children, junk food, and chihuahuas. While embarrassingly caricatured in its portrayal of the American lifestyle, this episode could be an Iranian response to the West’s equally stereotyped images of Iran.

Later, in one of the film’s most pleasing sequences, Chicken with Plums incorporates a colourful animated episode to illustrate a story that the devil, Azraël, tells to Nasser-Ali. Speaking of the devil, Satrapi and Paronnaud also open the doors to the imaginary within the film’s period setting: the giant, black, long-horned, bright-eyed Azraël, for example, or Nasser-Ali’s suicidal and erotic fantasies. These imagined elements, which can be easily incorporated in an illustrated medium, often appear literal-minded in a live-action film: unnecessarily grotesque enactments of every idea that passes through the character’s head. Here again, the film recalls Jeunet, but without that director’s sense of charm and nuance.

Aside from its uneasy baroque tendencies, there is the issue of the story itself, which is based on the life of one of Satrapi’s relations. In the context of one’s own family, it is easy to see how a story of lost love could be intriguing. In the wider world, though, romantic disappointment is all too common, making it hard to see why Nasser-Ali’s story should be of special interest to the public. Given that his love story is unremarkable, it makes it even more difficult to accept the story’s other details: that he agreed to marry a woman he didn’t love, and that he now decides to die, leaving his two young children alone with their overly-demanding mother. Perhaps Nasser-Ali was more a more likeable character in the original work. In any case, when it comes to stories with a more personal relevance, literature may be a more sympathetic medium than film.

Chicken with Plums was screened at the BFI London Film Festival.

The Kids Are All Right (Lisa Cholodenko, 2010) was a highlight of last year’s BFI London Film Festival. This year’s highlight looks set to be The Descendants (Alexander Payne, 2011), a film similar in many ways. At the dramatic centre of The Kids Are All Right was the desire of a lesbian couple’s two kids to learn more about their ‘father’ (sperm donor). As its title suggests, lineage is also a concern in The Descendants. George Clooney plays Matt King, the father of a family of mixed ancestry: half European colonialists, half Hawaiian royalty. The family’s ancient history is important in this film because a large tract of coastal land that has been passed down for generations must now be sold. It is up to Matt to decide whether to accept a lucrative offer from developers who will transform the virgin wilderness into a resort. Matt’s immediate family is a more pressing concern, though: his wife is in a coma after a power boat accident, leaving Matt to look after their two daughters, 17-year-old Alexandra, and 11-year-old Scottie. A workaholic, Matt no longer knows quite how to relate to his kids, but knows that he must do his best to stand in for their mother.

Like The Kids Are All Right, The Descendants takes a fresh perspective on modern American family life. Although Hollywood films commonly show kids misbehaving and being rude to their parents, the particular scenarios and language the kids use in The Descendants feels both more spontaneous and more authentic: Matt’s daughters and their friends say surprising things, sometimes shocking things, but not gratuitously. Alexandra’s boyfriend Sid comes out with some incredibly stupid statements, but has his funny and personable sides too. Sid also has his own sorrows to deal with: as is often the case in real life, such details are only revealed later, as we get to know him better. The Descendants is one of those films that is understanding towards all its characters, even the least likable ones, allowing every character their reasons and dignity. Matt’s father-in-law, for example, is aggressive and unfair in his criticisms, but just when he seems to have been dismissed as a grumpy old man, there is a candid shot of him watching over his comatose daughter in hospital, and the audience can appreciate the powerful emotions he must be experiencing.

In spite of their serious and potentially heart-rending subject matter, both The Descendants and The Kids Are All Right are highly watchable films: their engaging narrative, original comedy and, last but not least, big-name stars ensure their appeal to a broad audience. Last year, some people were complaining that aside from featuring lesbian parents, The Kids Are All Right was essentially a conservative film in its assertion of family values. The Descendants also centres on a well-to-do middle class family, valorises ancestry and presents a Hawaii where all residents are firmly in touch with the region’s specificity, from their dress and decor to their use of local greetings. At the same time, the film immediately challenges the romanticism commonly associated with warm climates: over shots of average people in Hawaii who are old, overweight, or in poor health, Matt introduces the film in voiceover, saying that when someone is ill, idyllic surroundings don’t change a thing.

One of director Alexander Payne’s previous successes, Sideways (2004), concerned a pair of middle-aged men going on a tour of California’s vineyards, not necessarily a subject that would interest everyone. The story of a family with a comatose mother also doesn’t sound like the most engaging film, but in both cases, with an outstanding script Payne manages to make the subject appealing. In The Descendants, he doesn’t achieve this by avoiding the pain of illness entirely: there are moments in the film that are very sad. Yet the film balances these moments with a lot of comedy, interesting dialogue, and character study. Moreover, he ventures into risky territory by allowing the family to criticise the mother, even though she is very ill and can’t defend herself. Again, this is not exploited for mere shock value: while it does give perspective, illness doesn’t erase a person’s mistakes. The Descendants recognises the spectrum of feelings that a family may go through in such a situation.

Have you ever wondered what it was like for spectators watching their first sound film? Michel Haznavicius’ latest feature brings home just how strange it would have been. For the most part, The Artist (2011) is a close imitation of silent film from the late 1920s: black and white, the only sound a piano or orchestral accompaniment, with inter-titles to convey dialogue and essential information about place and story developments. During one scene halfway through the film, and at the film’s end, voices and sound effects are suddenly introduced: the effect, after so many minutes of silent cinema, is dramatic.

The Artist is a self-conscious film in many ways: a silent film set at the end of the silent era, its protagonist is silent film star George Valentin, who will see his career sink with the introduction of sound. Meanwhile, his beautiful former protégée, Peppy Miller, replaces him as the sweetheart of the talkies. The cleverest scene in the film is Valentin’s nightmare, in which the world around him becomes sonorised while he remains mute. It begins when he sets his glass down on the table, and it makes a noise. Sound effects and voices begin to crowd in unbearably, until a leaf hitting the ground sounds like a bomb. In this, and the film’s closing sound scene, a modern audience is suddenly able to appreciate that sound could initially have felt like intrusive noise, rather than an enhancement of the film experience.

Haznavicius’ previous two films were also period pieces: OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies (2006) and OSS 117 – Lost in Rio (2009) were both 1960s James Bond spoofs starring Jean Dujardin as the suave, unreconstructed secret agent who always manages to save the day (by accident). While The Artist is set some 30 years earlier, and in the world of Hollywood rather than international espionage, protagonist George Valentin is a similar character: a somewhat oblivious, old-fashioned charmer, again played with comic perfection by Jean Dujardin. As Peppy, Bérénice Bejo (who co-starred with Dujardin in Cairo, Nest of Spies) is less believable: there is a general lack of restraint in her movements and facial expressions which marks her as characteristically modern.

The Artist makes fun of silent film conventions (the style of acting, the dramatic exposition, the trusty dog), just as the OSS films made fun of the Bond franchise. But The Artist is neither as funny nor as exciting as the OSS films. There are a few innovative comic set pieces, such as Peppy’s use of Valentin’s blazer to act out a romantic fantasy about him (included in the film’s trailer). Much of the comedy in OSS relied on dialogue, though, which is necessarily restricted in a silent film. Plot-wise, The Artist is also limited: the audience must watch Valentin become increasingly depressed as he realises his career has ended, while Peppy expresses her love by trying to help him as he once helped her. While you do expect a certain level of predictability in genre films (whether a pre-sound romance or a spy film), there is an overall lack of surprise in The Artist that deadens its effect: unlike the OSS films, it’s not one that you could watch again and again.

The Artist was screened at the 2011 BFI London Film Festival.            

Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Seth Rogen star in "50/50"

Making a comedy about cancer is risky business. Making a comedy about a young, attractive person with cancer is self-sabotage. People don’t go to mainstream movies to be bummed out, or to be offended by the trivializing of something that should bum them out. Director Jonathan Levine (“The Wackness”) has a simple solution to this dilemma. He didn’t make a comedy — or a movie about cancer. Contrary to the marketing, “50/50″ isn’t a laugh-a-minute raunch-fest aimed at teens and 20-somethings; it’s a sweet, balanced drama for adults about the utility and power of friendship and family in the face of life’s cold, indifferent realities. Sometimes relationships don’t work. Sometimes dear friends and loved ones die for no reason. Sometimes young people get cancer. But these facts, immutable as they are, are not immune to the marginalizing power of context.

Adam (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a 27-year-old public radio journalist in Seattle. His swanky pad houses his gorgeous artist girlfriend (Bryce Dallas Howard), his dapper wardrobe and all the hope and anticipation of a life that’s just getting going. But wait, what’s this lump on my back? Oh probably nothing. It really hurts though. Better get it checked out. How the fuck did I get spinal cancer? Or more accurately, how the fuck did I get spinal cancer? And so the battle begins.

“50/50″ could have easily been one of the worst films of the year. It tip-toes around so many potential pitfalls and clichés it’s a marvel it turned out as well as it did. Cancer movies are generally composed of a series of teary melodramatic scenes that serve only to teach the characters some pseudo-profundity and set up a sentimental payoff, usually in the form of a tortuous (for the audience) hospital bed death scene. That the screenplay was written by Seth Rogen’s real life friend, Will Reiser, who really had cancer is probably a major factor in making this movie feel so balanced, honest and non-manipulative. It never feels like there’s a lesson necessarily attached to the struggle, or that the filmmaker expects any specific emotional response from the audience. The fact that the principal character wrote the script makes it obvious he survives the cancer, but since the story isn’t driven by suspense, the effect is a positive one.

As good as the script is, it’s really the cast that pulls this thing together. Gordon-Levitt, after a stilted performance in “Inception,” is a welcome surprise. And though their scenes sometimes feel forced, the presence of fellow chemotherapy patients played by Philip Baker Hall and Matt Frewer, when it works, adds a pitch-perfect mix of levity and perspective. But, the real star of the show is Seth Rogen. His role as the goofy unflappable optimist with a heart of gold is the best of his career. It’s hard to imagine even the most ardent Rogen-haters won’t be won over by this, the most naturally likeable character I’ve seen all year.

The principal problem in Where Do We Go Now? is that the village is half Christian, half Muslim. Although all of the villagers have learned to live peacefully together, any perceived insult to one religion or the other risks destroying the equilibrium. The village’s women refuse to let this happen: when they learn of Christian-Muslim tension in other parts of the country, they will do whatever is necessary to prevent the men from finding out about it. While their motivation is deadly serious, the idea of women banding together to enforce peace is both funny premise and an ancient one, recalling Aristophanes’ Lysistrata in which women go on a sex strike to end a war. The methods adopted by the women in Labaki’s film are more diverse: one method actually turns Lysistrata on its head, as the women invite Ukranian strip-tease artists to the village to distract the men. The film’s dialogue is also both witty and original, and impeccably delivered by a cast which included many non-actors, most likely playing roles that were familiar to them from real life. The audience at the screening I attended were obviously having a grand time. This corresponds to the film’s reception at the Toronto International Film Fest: Where Do We Go Now? took the Audience Award, a prize that has in the past gone to such subsequent success stories as Amélie (2001), Slumdog Millionaire (2008) and The King’s Speech (2010).

For me, the film did not quite live up to the standard set by Caramel. Taking place mostly in one salon on one street in Beirut, the viewer could quickly become familiar with the space in Caramel. In Where Do We Go Now?, there was not an overall sense of space. Although there were a few long shots of the village from the outside, the hills that surrounded it, and the precarious stone bridge connecting it to the outside world, the film did not develop a clear sense of the village’s geography, so that the action seemed to take place in a disparate set of interiors (church, mosque, bar, and a couple of homes), as in a stage play. Similarly, while Caramel centred mainly on a group of 3 friends, Where Do We Go Now? had a much larger cast, making it difficult to get to know any of the characters very well. While the women’s different schemes were funny, there was not a clear sense of direction to the film: it felt more like a series of gags. The love story between Madame Amal (a Christian) and her sexy decorator (a Muslim) could have served as a unifying theme, but was not fully developed.

Another notable strength of the film was its three musical set pieces, all marked by different moods. The opening was the most self-conscious, and felt like it could have come straight from Herzog’s Pina (2011): all of the film’s female characters, dressed in black, limp  and sway towards the camera, thumping their breasts, in a dramatic funeral cortege. The film’s next musical scene is much happier one, marked by white rather than black. While reminiscent of Bollywood insofar as it abruptly introduces a romantic song and (sort of) dance, it is realistically integrated as Madame Amal’s dream of a romance with her decorator. The film’s final set piece is also realistically motivated: as the women work together in the kitchen, preparing a selection of very special pastries for the men, they sing a very catchy song.

In spite of the narrative and spatial flaws in Where Do We Go Now?, Labaki should be commended for having made this film. Aside from being immensely enjoyable for the audience, the film takes a daring approach to inter-religious tension. It suggests that most people have so many concerns in common (love, family, food, entertainment) that it is natural for them to understand each other and get along—it is those with too much aggression in their systems who seek petty pretexts for a fight.