“Cinema Six” is the definition of average, which is strange considering it was probably the most pumped film at the festival. You couldn’t walk an inch in the press lounge without stepping on one of their little yellow adverts. To begin with, it’s obviously Mark Potts’ first film, as narratively, it’s derivative of so many other, better, things. A lot of the emotional ennui that the filmmakers are trying to convey about working at a movie theater, particularly one that feels so run down and little visited – something that, yes, I can currently attest to as a popcorn pusher in my spare time – are culled from “Clerks” in a way that’s a little too far in the direction of laziness rather than homage. Its attempts at male conversation and camaraderie are part and parcel of the produce of Judd Apatow and his ilk – a lot of “fucks” and a lot of empty vulgarity about balls that doesn’t really feel natural, even though the film makes a great attempt at putting that impression forward.

Yet, while superficially it looks like a lovechild of the aforementioned — those movies at least made an effort to have an arc, to tell a genuine story about disaffected twenty-somethings who come to some real conclusion about their lives through trial and error — “Cinema Six” ultimately feels like a big, floppy let-down. The ending arrives suddenly and the most interesting moments, which should have comprised the better part of the narrative, happen in only the last few scenes. It feels like the director gathered a crew of people and rented out a movie theater and just let them goof off for a while with the camera rolling, and then realized he was making a movie and scrambled to fashion some kind of coherence out of the chaos. Yes, goofing off is what we do most of the time behind the concession counter. It’s not an exciting job. But, that don’t make for good cinema. Six.

****

“Compliance”
Director: Craig Zobel
Writer: Craig Zobel
Starring: Ann Dowd, Dreama Walker and Pat Healy

Craig Zobel’s “Compliance” was among the strangest screenings I’ve been to in my four and a half years writing semi-professionally. There was such a feeling of tension in the air – people were audibly responding to the screen in full sentences, and there were moments where it almost came to blows, as one gawky teenager continued to laugh in a room full of pin-drop silence until the whole theater rose up and intimidated him into shutting the hell up. This is perhaps the strongest compliment an audience can give a film intended to provoke intense reactions.

Shot in a claustrophobic and harried fashion, the film depicts the true story of the 2004 serial prank caller who posed as a policeman, made a mockery of the manager of a McDonald’s and sexually abused a young girl. The story is told with such a sharp sense of narrative precision that by the end, the rest of my party was asking me (the only guy who’d followed the story when it happened) just how true it was, because so much of it seems outside the realm of possibility. But, yes, this happened, and it’s to the film’s credit that it refuses to give the audience any distance from the events it portrays, because it forces us to watch the whole thing spiral out of control not as a quiet spectator but as an involved assailant, leaving us breathless because – up until the final twenty minutes – we’re refused exit from that manager’s office, and we’re left questioning after just where exactly it all went wrong. The answer is not in a specific point in the narrative, but in the compliant (haha!) minds of the people, all the people, involved. It’s an effective film made up of uncomfortable people not necessarily being forced into an uncomfortable situation, but going along with it of their own volition and – well, very human stupidity. And, that’s the point, and that’s why it’s so affecting, something the film knows and acknowledges with the last coda against black before going to credits: the events reenacted here happened seventy times in the course of a year. It wasn’t just a fluke of happenstance, and it’s not at all surprising to me to learn that this is being called the most divisive film out of Sundance.

But, to be fair, the manager and company who were at the heart of the incident don’t seem like the brightest people. There was a line that the filmmakers surprisingly didn’t keep from the original proceedings that would’ve only added to this subtext, from the girl who’s life was turned into a shambles at the heart of it all, when she was questioned as to why she even when along with it in the first place rather than raise ire and storm out of the restaurant. She said something in
response that was similar to: “I was raised in a house where you did what you were told, without question. So, that’s what I did.” With this soundbite in mind, the film could also be a pretty damned funny black comedy on the nature of blind acceptance – and, I could understand why that little fuck in the row in front of me couldn’t stop laughing.

****

“Faith, Love and Whiskey”
Director: Kristina Nikolova
Writers: Kristina Nikolova, Paul Dalio
Starring: Yavor Baharov, Lidia Indjova and John Keabler

Kristina Nikolova’s surprising and refreshing “Faith, Love and Whiskey” is a film my brother and I picked out of the festival book on a whim, partially because it felt like one of the notable movies of the festival and that it probably would do well to cover it in some measure or another.

At the outset, I had no real interest in seeing it, because the way it was being promoted was on all sides very much that of a conventional, empowering chick-flick. Indeed, even the words of the promoter at the beginning of the screening said as much, because it boiled down to, “you’re about to see a great film about women! And Bulgaria! And women in Bulgaria!”

But, a man can be wrong – “Faith, Love and Whiskey” is probably my favorite of the feature length films that I saw at the festival, this year. Not a little of that is due to it feeling like the only truly independent film at the festival, the only one out of the crop that I saw that made no real concessions toward the type of bland and disposable main-stream that so many of the others were aiming for.

It’s uncomfortably raw and real, and warm. It’s a such a beautifully naturalistic, unconventionally raw examination of relationships, of femininity and masculinity, combined with a photographer’s eye toward the landscape of Bulgaria, a strange and almost magical combination of the urban and the rural seeping into each other, where the boundaries are never defined between either.

It would really be pointless to talk about what “Faith, Love and Whiskey” is about in a narrative sense, because at its real core its about simple human things expressed with a feeling of great, palpable humanity and lyrical grace, and with surprisingly little in the way of dialogue. Most of what’s here is made known through a sort of constant visual collage of snippets – eyes, faces. Expressions. Winding roads. Glances. Glass bottles on a window sill, growing ever bigger. When there are words spoken, they’re either hushed tones of reluctant acceptance given pin-drop weight by their emotional importance to a scene or drowned out by the blaring music of the sweaty night-clubs that make up a good portion of the film’s background.

So much of this goes into what the film does so well, which is make a film that is actually “universal,” a buzzword that so many films make a claim for, by dealing in emotions and feelings rather than the artifice of genre, something I saw too many other films fall before than I’d like, this festival. That feeling of being romantically trapped, and wanting a last fling before its all concretized, and in that old dilemma it finds something more personal and complicated, being stuck between the comforts of a familiar and juvenile fling, or the burgeoning adulthood that marriage promises, and the feeling of hidden guilt when this marriage is crowed about by family in front of the other man’s face. The euphoria that comes with a reconciled love, and the unabashed shame when it turns out to be merely a temporary thing, and you end up being the one who has to leave the room. Days drift by, more and more until reality suddenly returns to returns the main character Neli back to the world she’s resigned herself to – but, just how reluctantly, we’re never made clear.

****

For more information on The 2012 Dallas International Film Festival go here.

After the last two weeks’ blogs on highlights of Toulouse’s Cinélatino film festival, this week will conclude with a selection of films which, in my opinion, should be avoided at all costs. First of all, Alejo Franzetti’s The Destruction of the Ruling Order (La Destrucción del orden vigente), which wanted to be a thriller/murder mystery. Unfortunately, wooden acting made it more like a failed comedy. From the very first moment, the film felt passé, the style of its music and title sequence vaguely evocative of Almodovar’s early work: a film of La Movida, 30 years late. It was as though the film itself were on ketamine, the protagonist’s drug of choice. Clara tries to find out how her boyfriend died. At the same time, she receives mysterious fake newspapers with headlines warning her to investigate her mother’s death—‘it was not a heart attack’, they say cryptically. Clara’s mane of blonde hair was the most versatile presence in the film, able to appear up or down, messy or controlled, nuances which eluded the actors entirely.

In the Sky (Al Cielo, 2012), meanwhile, was unwatchable not because there was so little action (which was also true), but because of the director’s literally nauseating style. Like Gabriel  Mariño, director of A Secret World, it seems that Diego Prado wanted to use the camera to suggest that the teenage Andrés is living in his own world. However, where Mariño trained the camera on his protagonist’s profile, Prado focused most often on the back of his protagonist’s head, leaving everything around him blurred. Combine this with a handheld camera following the character around, and it’s guaranteed that some spectators will feel sick well before the end of the film. The idea behind Al Cielo had great potential: the lead singer of the protagonist’s favourite punk band, Noche Nero, dies. Concerned that Andrés will become depressed and get into trouble, his mother pushes him to join a church youth group. He agrees to go, even though he clearly doesn’t fit in with the other kids and their earnest discussions. By chance, he does meet some people more like himself at the church: a punk band which is allowed to practice on church premises since one of its members regularly attends services. Andrés’s relationship with one of the band members is one of the few elements of beauty and hope in this otherwise disorienting and dull film.

Most banal of all, though, was The Last Elvis (El Ultimo Elvis, 2012, dir. Armando Bó). While it was technically professional, unlike the other two films it did not even try to do anything new, different or contemporary. It is the story of a man in his 40s, separated from his wife, and father to a 6-year-old girl. Rather than stepping up to his responsibilities, he indulges his fantasy that he is Elvis Presley, insisting that people call him by this name rather than his real one. The audience is subjected to his performances as an Elvis impersonator, which are not terrible but not specially good either. The film is intended as a comedy, but it is hard to have much sympathy for this selfish man: if the audience doesn’t care about the central character, it is hard to engage with the film as a whole. There have been great tragicomedies about would-be music legends: these prove that audiences can sympathise with characters who struggle, however absurdly, to live their dreams alongside their everyday reality—Anvil: The Story of Anvil! (2008) was a superb example. Most of us wish that our lives could be more glamorous, and try to follow our dreams in a small way. Elvis wants to do more, though, living his life exactly as if he were The King himself. The redeeming element in the film is his daughter, a wry and endearing little girl. Initially she is contemptuous of her father, but when fate forces her to live with him for a while, she immediately adapts, warming to both her father and his lifestyle, and demonstrating a heartbreaking degree of acceptance and affection for a man who has little love for anyone but himself. Where it ought to have focused more on the little girl, the film follows Elvis, cheering him on for his selfishness rather than condemning it. This is a film which divides opinion, though: while there are those who will agree with me that it is banal, the French critics’ jury at Cinélatino awarded their ‘Discovery Prize’ to The Last Elvis.

Two of cinema’s key advantages as a medium are its mastery of space and time, and its impression of reality. These two traits are not necessarily related: after all, in reality we often find ourselves stuck in one space for hours on end. Unlike theatre, though, cinema offers the possibility to change location frequently, and it is the norm for screen time to diverge from real time: cinema can cover days, months or years in just under two hours. When a film restricts itself to one location, it’s often a sign that it is based on a play. Since its beginnings, cinema has had to shun the notion of filmed theatre in order to establish itself as an art form in its own right rather than a recording device. For this reason, directors need to carefully adapt plays in order to make them cinematic.

Of course, there is no need to place limits on how a director use cinema to express ideas: there have been excellent, thoroughly cinematic films based on plays. They can take place in one room, with every minute on screen equal to a minute in real time: Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope is one example, where an apartment serves as the location for a murder followed by a dinner party. The director used ingenious long takes, allowing the camera to wind seamlessly through the apartment, creating effects that theatre never could.

Like Rope, Roman Polanski’s latest film Carnage is restricted to a couple’s apartment (with the exception of the title and credit sequences). The film centres on the meeting of two sets of parents. Michael and Penelope’s son was injured in a dispute with Nancy and Alan’s son, but the couples intend to discuss the matter in civilised way. Questions of blame and good parenting offer obvious potential for descending into argument, but equal tension arises from the two couples’ different lifestyles (Nancy and Alan very corporate, Michael and Penelope the opposite). Husband-wife recriminations also fester immediately below the surface.

Adapted plays can be claustrophobic films: it is precisely because the audience knows that film characters should be able to leave the space that makes it all the more upsetting when they can’t. Carnage demonstrates how much camera work can do to make a space seem larger: without tipping over into virtuoso shots, Polanski’s camera observes the apartment and the two couples from different angles, follows the characters along corridors and around corners, emphasises the different rooms which break the single space into many smaller ones, and includes windows and doors to keep the outside world close at hand.

While Carnage is able to magnify the apartment’s sense of space, it is unable to convince the audience that the characters need to remain there. On two occasions, Nancy and Alan are at the threshold of the apartment, or about to step into the elevator, when ‘coffee’ is used as a weak excuse to drag them back inside and prolong the discussion. In a play, the audience would be able to accept this convention much better, but in a film, it feels forced.

Above all, it is in the dialogue where the typical realism of film clashes with theatrical conventions, which suddenly seem artificial. The characters, their lifestyle and arguments realistically reflect contemporary concerns (developed vs. developing world, art vs. money, work-life balance, gender roles), but the declamatory tone of their speech, while normal in theatre, feels stilted on film. Whereas theatre needs to be more ostentatiously dramatic, playing to the back row, cinema is a more intimate medium. It is able to show the characters from close up, so their facial expressions can carry a symbolism, reducing this burden on words.

Yasmina Reza worked with Polanski to adapt her own play, The God of Carnage, into a screenplay, but it is hard to believe that many changes were made. It is possible that Reza and Polanski wanted the dialogue to be stilted in order to reflect the artificiality of the civilized fronts that the characters present to each other. Even so, they run the risk of being misunderstood: Carnage‘s dialogue sounds eminently unsuited for cinema’s mode of address.

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.