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.

Twenty years on, it is well worth revisiting Orlando, Sally Potter’s 1992 adaptation of a Virginia Woolf novel. Subtly convincing the audience that a person’s sex does not define them, the film achieves something which, in 2012, society is still far from accepting.

Orlando never grows old: when the film begins in the 1600s, he is a young man, and is still young when the film ends in the late twentieth century. The only difference is that Orlando is now a woman. Although changing sex certainly affects the way that Orlando is treated by other people, the film is remarkable in that the audience is prepared for this change, and experience it less as those around Orlando experience it, and more as Orlando him/herself.

From the very beginning of the film, the audience develops an affinity with Orlando and a sense of gender as something elusive and therefore of lesser importance than usual. As the film opens, the camera tracks in on Orlando, who is sitting under a tree. A voiceover narrator introduces the character, but when the camera finally reaches a close-up on the character’s face, Orlando turns his head to look directly into the camera and speaks, interrupting the narrator. Orlando is no longer ‘he’ but ‘I’: self (and personal experience) subtly asserts itself as more significant than gender. Less subtle is the fact that this male character is being played by a well-known female actress, Tilda Swinton, reminding the audience of how easy it is for adult women to pass as attractive young men. The narrator states from the beginning that there is ‘no doubt’ that Orlando is male, in spite of the feminine appearance that young men liked to adopt in Elizabethan times.

The gender bending continues apace. In another early scene, a minor character who appears much older and more virile sings in a falsetto a song about the beauty of Eliza, a queen who is now old and ugly. Queen Elizabeth, in turn, is played by Quentin Crisp: the fact that an old woman can be convincingly played by a man reinforces the point that signs of gender fluctuate with age. The Queen chooses Orlando as her ‘favourite’, another reversal of the more common scenario in which powerful men keep much younger women for their amusement. Elizabeth gives Orlando an estate to live on, with the humorous proviso that he not grow old: Orlando unexpectedly conforms to this stipulation, remaining the same age for over 300 years. Ironically, it is not age but a change of sex that forces him to relinquish his estate: as his advisors explain, in terms of property ownership being female is the equivalent to being dead.

Orlando’s sex change takes place overnight, as if by magic, during his ten-year diplomatic stint in an unnamed Middle Eastern country. Although Europeans once associated the Orient with femininity, the film does not reinforce the stereotype: if anything, it reverses it. When Orlando first meets his eloquent and manly Middle-Eastern host, it is Orlando as representative of the British aristocracy who appears feminine, with his powdered wigs and awkward waffling. Notably, Orlando is still a man when the city is attacked and finds himself ill-suited to fighting alongside his host. Orlando finally adopts the local style of dress, exchanging his ornate European dress for simple swathes of cream fabric, and immediately appears more modern and mature.

When Orlando returns to England as a woman, the reaction is predictably one of astonishment. She is still the same person as before: indeed, when she looked at herself in the mirror on morning of her transformation, she downplayed the importance of gender, saying that ‘nothing has changed’. For this reason, the change in the way others relate to her is all the more astonishing. Having seen Tilda Swinton dressed as a man for the entire film, the audience has the strange impression of feeling as though they are watching a man in drag when they see Tilda Swinton in a dress. She continues periodically to address the audience directly, however, emphasising her subjectivity, and that it is the person who matters, and their experiences, not their sex. The clothing of a woman in the 1700s and 1800s seems only slightly more fussy and restrictive than that of a man: instead, it is people’s attitudes to gender that makes her experience of life as a woman so different. She speaks to Alexander Pope, whose experience of uneducated and silly women makes him dismiss an entire sex: he cannot speak to Orlando as an equal, as he cannot see past her gender and consider her as a person. Orlando discovers that the only way for her to maintain her property is to have a son, which she does, by the twentieth century.

The end of the film brings its reflections on gender full-circle. The voiceover narrator is back again, this time noting that in the late twentieth century, women favour an androgynous appearance. Orlando now dresses in a modern unisex style, and rides a motorcycle. Her child is in the sidecar, and appears at first to be a boy. When they arrive at Orlando’s estate, the child is revealed to be a girl.

Orlando‘s treatment of gender manages to be both understated and radical: it is so natural in its treatment of gender fluidity that people who are rigid in their attitudes to gender appear unnatural. It remains a visually sumptuous and intellectually intriguing film.

Kirsten Dunst greets the apocalypse

“Melancholia” is Lars von Trier’s intelligent, melodramatic, achingly beautiful and wickedly funny new film. It tells the story of Justine (a transcendent Kirsten Dunst), a severe depressive, and her doting and practical sister, Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg). Justine’s depression takes the corporeal shape of a planet called Melancholia, which is on a steady collision course with Earth. In the film’s stunning prologue, Mr. von Trier tactfully relieves the audience of any suspense concerning Earth’s fate, allowing the tone to shift from an end-of-the-world thriller to a character and relationship study. “Melancholia” uses the premise of an apocalypse to expose the frays in familial bonds — specifically, the intricate bonds and dynamic between two sisters; a bond that is both affectionate and cruel, supportive and insensitive.

The film is divided into two parts named after each of the sisters. Although part one is named after Justine, the “melancholic” sister, this section of the film proves to be the most humorously absurd. Mr. von Trier is—gasp—having a bit of fun as we follow Justine through the grand charade of her wedding celebration. He has reined in all of his pals from films past to play members of the wedding party, including Charlotte Rampling and John Hurt as Justine’s backbiting parents, and Udo Kier the prim and fretful wedding planner. And despite Justine’s deep sadness during what is supposed to be the happiest day of her life, Ms. Dunst is luminous. Instead of portraying Justine as incessantly bleak, Dunst’s performance during this half the film is almost sphinxlike in its spontaneity. She does not skulk around in her wedding dress (although she does, at one point, gracefully urinate in it beneath the moonlight), but rather ventures in and out of the festivities like an elusive specter. And because von Trier has revealed the fate of these characters in the first ten minutes, the audience can empathize with Justine as she views her wedding with a growing sense of dread and indifference.

Part two is named for Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), Justine’s pragmatic but anxious older sister. Although Claire grows weary and frustrated with Justine’s erratic behavior, she understands her sister’s illness and knows how to take care of her. Claire’s relationship with Justine becomes increasingly complicated in the film’s second half, as Claire grapples with her own growing anxiety over the path of Melancholia while simultaneously caring for Justine, who has become incapacitated by her depression. In contrast to the darkly sumptuous aesthetic of part one, with an alluring Justine wreaking havoc in a wedding dress, part two is more subdued and more painful to watch; Justine has lost her enigmatic glow, and von Trier, who has long suffered from depression himself, depicts Justine’s descent with alarming candor. It has been suggested that Mr. von Trier uses female characters in his films to represent his own struggles with depression. If “Antichrist” was too vicious and misogynistic, his rendering of Justine’s inner turmoil in “Melancholia” is as upsetting as it is compassionate.

But part two is named “Claire” for a reason. As Melancholia becomes more of a threat, (the planet and the illness) Claire becomes fraught with worry that the end is near, and the sisters’ reactions to the planet begin to diverge. Justine begins to emerge from her depression and becomes more lucid, but is callous towards Claire’s distress. Justine feels a kinship with Melancholia; she embraces the planet as an actual representation and justification for her chronic illness. Yet, just as Claire strove to comfort Justine during her lowest points, Justine’s coldness turns into an intense stoicism, and eventually, into her own display of compassion, especially towards Claire’s son, Leo.

In “Melancholia,” the end of the world is not rendered with mass hysteria or with an overblown sequence of natural disasters, but rather with understated beauty. Bugs creep up from the soil, hail the color of pure white flower buds falls from the sky, all as Melancholia—massively exquisite in itself—looms closer and closer overhead. Despite its morbid theme, bone-rattling soundtrack straight from Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, and the fact that it’s a Lars von Trier film, the tone of “Melancholia” is almost soothing. Mr. von Trier proposes that the end of the world, like his film, may just be a thing of beauty.

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Vanessa is the press representative/blogger for The Plaza Cinema & Media Arts Center in Patchogue, NY. You can read her blog at stickyourthumbselsewhere.wordpress.com

How are you doing with your new year’s resolutions? Did you start this month with enthusiasm and optimism? We seem to enjoy this annual ritual of creating restrictions for ourselves. Some restrictions which seem to complement each other (like exercising and eating less chocolate) in fact serve to double the challenge (burning more calories while taking in fewer). Others (like working harder and maintaining good posture at the computer) really work against each other. Still, most of us make new year’s resolutions every year, and enjoy setting challenges for ourselves, and dreaming of success.

Creatively, challenges can work wonders. In 1960s Czechoslovakia, there was a temporary liberalisation of culture, but censorship remained in place, forcing the young Czech New Wave directors to find creative ways around these restrictions. Much contemporary experimentation comes as a way of dealing with restricted funding. But in some cases, directors can benefit from imposing restrictions on themselves. In 2003, Lars von Trier set a challenge for his friend, director Jørgen Leth: to re-make his 1967 pseudo-anthropological short, ‘The Perfect Human’, but with a certain number of ‘obstructions’ in place. The Five Obstructions presents Leth’s five re-makes, and documents the process of their creation. Every obstruction begins with a banter-filled conversation between the old friends, von Trier slyly attempting to come up with the most fiendish restrictions, and Leth for the most part accepting them with the stoic determination of an expert who will inevitably find a clever way around them.

Von Trier seemed to have several goals in mind when setting these challenges. In the spirit of artistic experimentation, he wanted to see how various restrictions on the re-make of ‘The Perfect Human’ would change the nature of the original film. He also appeared to enjoy acting as God, dictating how the remake would be made, without having to go through the agony of making it himself (except in the final of the 5 films, where Leth’s only job was to provide a voice-over and put his name as director on a film that was in fact directed by Von Trier—very Dogme). Von Trier’s own challenge was to devise the most obstructive rules for Leth. Their friendship helped von Trier as it gave him insights into Leth’s personality, as well as his artistic preferences: as a result, it didn’t take von Trier much effort to come up with obstructions that would push Leth outside his comfort zone. Von Trier appeared to take sadistic pleasure in this, but there was clearly a greater goal. Disrupting his friend’s usual approach to filmmaking, he hoped that Leth would make a different kind of film—’maybe even a bad film!’ as von Trier devilishly suggested. Ultimately, the experiment did not force Leth to let go, allowing himself simply to explore, without fear of mediocrity. If anything, the obstructions made greater demands on his sense of professionalism. Every time von Trier watched one of the re-makes that Leth had made according to his instructions, you expected him to snarl, ‘foiled again! Damn you, Leth!’, as his friend invariably used the obstructions to make the same sort of film he usually did, only better.

Some of the obstructions that seemed most certain to ruin Leth’s work turned out to make it even better. The first obstruction was that no edit should be longer than 12 frames (in other words, no shot could last more than half a second). The resulting film was not frenetically jumpy, as you might expect, but full of vitality: one of Leth’s techniques to calm the speed of cutting was to film the same subject from slightly different distances or angles, so that there was a sense of constant motion rather than an incomprehensible barrage of images. Knowing that they share a hatred of cartoons, von Trier also demanded that Leth make an animated version of ‘The Perfect Human’. This was the obstruction that seemed to disgust and discourage Leth the most, but he enlisted the help of Bob Sabiston, animator for Waking Life (2001) and A Scanner Darkly (2006): the result was a compellingly multi-layered, dynamic response to the original short, unafraid of animation’s infinite possibilities for exploring space, and unlimited strategies for aesthetic representation.

Of course, there were also obstructions that did not work out as either director would have liked. Von Trier spoke sternly to Leth when he made a film which did not respect one of his obstructions: he had told Leth to go to the most dreadful place on earth, and re-make the film there, starring in it himself, and evoking the place without actually filming it. Von Trier went to Mumbai’s red light district and re-enacted a scene from ‘The Perfect Human’, against a translucent screen which allowed viewers to see the crowd of women and children behind him. He classed this as a ‘liberal interpretation’ of von Trier’s obstruction, but von Trier insisted it had broken the rules, and imposed a punishment. He could return to Mumbai to make the same film, but respecting the rules, something which Leth said he could not do. The alternative punishment was for Leth to do a re-make exactly as he liked: the obstruction, then, being no obstruction at all, a terrible punishment for Leth who was depending on his friend’s challenges for inspiration. Confronted with the paralysing freedom of no restrictions, Leth did not make a bad film, but probably the least interesting of the five re-makes.

I didn’t expect to like The Five Obstructions, as my only previous experience of Leth’s work was his latest film, The Erotic Man (2010), which was visually dull, and ethically repellent. But The Five Obstructions was an intriguing documentary. It introduced me to one of Leth’s earliest films, ‘The Perfect Huan’, a beautiful black-and-white mock-discovery of humans, their bodies, and their habits, justly been described as ‘Surrealist’ for the way it makes the familiar seem new and strange. The original 13-minute short was interspersed in clips throughout the documentary, and was available to view in its entirety as an extra on the DVD. Leth’s modern re-makes of the film were quite different than the original, as they were in colour, and the restrictions resulted in markedly different styles, far more interesting than the approach Leth took in Erotic Man. While the misogyny of Leth’s most recent film was still present, visually the re-makes were fresh and full of life. This artistic renaissance, then, may have been a direct result of von Trier’s restrictions, an idea which makes The Five Obstructions one of the most intriguing films I have seen, in terms of thinking about the creative process. While it was enjoyable to watch the films that Leth made in response to the obstructions, it was equally exciting to listen in on the directors’ discussions, finding out which obstructions von Trier would come up with, and why, and imagining how they would affect the final film. The Five Obstructions is the sort of film that makes you want to think more deeply about the creative process, and experiment more with your own work.

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.

The London Iranian Film Festival is only in its second year, but already it boasts an enchanting and highly professional-looking trailer, as well as a varied line-up of films that blast open the old 80s stereotype of Iranian films as being superficially sweet studies of childhood in which social commentary was necessarily covert. It is of course important not to lose sight of the real censorship and official bullying of filmmakers that takes place in Iran, the most infamous example at the moment being Jafar Panahi. The London Iranian Film Festival has certainly not forgotten Panahi: it screened his new documentary, This Is Not a Film (In Film Nist, 2010), which records his struggle against the 6-year prison sentence and 20-year ban on filmmaking imposed by Iranian authorities last December.

The festival demonstrates the inspiring variety of contemporary Iranian filmmaking. Obviously, this year’s festival had to include A Separation (Jodaeiye Nader az Simin, 2011); although it already had a general UK release over the summer, it is a film that can be watched again and again, both for its acting and its intricate layering of truth and deception. The festival also included films which most London audiences will not have encountered before: A Very Close Encounter (Barkhord-e Kheyli Nazdik, 2010), a thriller about the criss-crossing relationships linking two women involved in a car crash, and Please Don’t Disturb (Lotfan Mozahem Nashavid, 2010) a low-budget comedy about an elderly couple afraid of the repairman, a pickpocketed cleric, and a woman threatening to leave her abusive television-personality husband.

I attended a screening of a film that, from its description, seemed to correspond more to the lyrical, child-focused Iranian films of the 1980s. The Other (Digari, 2010) concerns Reza, a boy of about 10, who lives with his recently-widowed mother. Reza goes on a trip to Tehran with Mr. Ebrahim, his father’s old friend and business partner, to sell the business’s van. Reza’s uncle is forcing Ebrahim to sell the van, but doesn’t trust him and so sends Reza to supervise. Mr Ebrahim, himself a widower with a 6-year-old daughter, would clearly like to marry Reza’s mother, but the uncle is opposed to the match. Reza himself is initially hostile towards Mr Ebrahim, but they grow closer over the course of the trip.

The Other is director Mehdi Rahmani’s first film, and in many ways it shows. The film’s technical quality is lacking: its colours are at once saturated and washed out, making the film look like it was made in the 1970s rather than just last year. This, combined with drab, worn-out surroundings means that shots of visual appeal are rare. The script, too, is not quite as unified as it could be: while the dialogue feels largely authentic and moderately interesting, it lacks momentum at times. The exposition is also a little confusing at first: luckily, the film’s plot and characters are restricted, so just by patiently listening to the characters, it becomes clear what is going on and what is at stake—rather as in real life.

With such reservations, I felt like I wasn’t really enjoying the film at the time. Over the hours and days following the screening, though, many themes and images kept coming back to me, making it clear that for all its roughness, this was a film that presented an authentic picture of present-day Iran, and had something serious to say about its social structures. It may have been the austerity and hardship that the film presented that provoked my initial negative reaction, as much as the film’s artistic weaknesses.

In retrospect, it is easy to see why this film won Best Children’s Feature Film at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards last December. On the one hand, The Other will have cross-generational and cross-cultural appeal through its focus on the difficult relationship between children and any adult who attempts to stand in for a missing parent. On the other hand, the film examines Iran’s particular situation with regard to women’s marital rights: aside from the example of Reza’s mother, who can’t remarry until her brother-in-law says so, Reza and Mr Ibrahim encounter a troubling example of family strife in the room next door to theirs at the hotel in Tehran. While The Other can be a troubling film to watch in terms of its portrait of life in Iran, its heartfelt authenticity will remain with the viewer long after the end credits.

For more information about past and future editions of the London Iranian Film Festival, consult their web site: http://ukiff.org.uk/

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.