This is the way, step inside
One cinema visit this week, marked with a *. More next week.
Innocence (2004)
A seven year old girl appears barely dressed inside a coffin in a room in a school building in the middle of some woods surrounded by a wall. There are five other buildings in the grounds, each occupied by five girls between the ages of 7 and 12. When the seven year old is discovered by the other girls, the first thing they do is clothe her, the second thing they do is exchange coloured ribbons in their hair which mark their ages. It is understood that the oldest of them will one day leave the grounds of the school, but it is not known what will happen to them. In the meantime, they will receive lessons in dance, biology and obedience from teachers who seem emotionally wounded and be waited upon by old women who barely speak to them. They will be isolated from their pasts and their families and encouraged to stay on the lit paths in the woods and not stray off into the forest. As with the majority of oddball, confrontational, foreign films I encounter, this started with an article in Sight and Sound some years ago, which I read and made a mental note that it sounded interesting and I should look out for it. Years go by, and HMV knock it down to £7. Perfect. As a longtime collaborator with Gaspar Noé, it should come as no surprise that Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s film is at the same time shocking and yet not shocking. Repurposing the notorious schoolgirl imagery of David Hamilton et al, Hadzihalilovic creates a world of exterior beauty and subterranean threat; the revelation of what the oldest girls get up to at night is deeply disturbing, but is not filmed that way. It is possible that how much innocence there is left in the viewer will be more of a factor in how you perceive this film than how uncompromising Hadzihalilovic is in the presentation of her imagery. The film’s ending may be hopeful, but that’s not how I read it. But I could be wrong. Make up your own mind.
The Oxford Murders (2007) *
There’s a category of movie known as the Europudding. To be explicit, this is a film produced entirely with European money from a variety of European sources from any number of European countries and funding bodies within those countries. Each one of those funding sources expects to have some national content within the final film; back in the 1960s this was the reason why German actors turned up in Italian Spaghetti westerns filmed in Spain for no other readily apparent reason than that an Italian-German-Spanish co-production required it to be the case. Since there can be any number of fingers in the pie, it will not surprise you to learn that the chances of a decent end result start to recede into the distance even more than they do with your average American blockbuster. The typical Europudding is a disaster like Charlotte Gray (2001), a UK-Australian-German co-production whose central premise of a woman joining the French Resistance in World War II France was somewhat undermined by unrealistically filming everything in English with the intention of reaching a wider audience, which wisely stayed away from it in droves, helping to bring down an earlier incarnation of Film Four in the process. The Oxford Murders isn’t that bad, but suffers from being an adaptation of an Argentinian novel filmed by a Spanish director set very much in England. There are any number of creaks around the edges, such as an airport scene very clearly filmed in a building interior a long way from a real airport with a single cheap-looking sign on a wall indicating the departure gate of Union Airlines, that well known British brand. The book has a fascinating premise that has only been adequately executed. It may be bold to present a film with any number of lengthy philosophical discussions on the nature of reality and hope to succeed with a mass audience, or it may be stupid. Points for trying though.
Control (2007)
A somewhat more successful co-production is the first film from photographer and video director Anton Corbijn, which focuses on the brief but influential and depressing life of Ian Curtis, lead singer of Joy Division. It is not the first time this story has been told, nor will it be the last, since the early rock death movie is almost a genre on its own: think of The Doors (1991) or Last Days (2005). The template is always the same: a young, charismatic figure achieves (or in the case of Curtis was on the cusp of achieving) international fame, sales and money in the world of rock, but is then almost immediately destroyed by indulgence in drink, drugs, sex and/or bad relationships, often with a mysterious, poorly diagnosed and badly treated medical condition stirred into the mix (Cobain’s stomach ailment, Curtis’s epilepsy). Death swiftly follows, normally in controversial circumstances that result in any number of outrageous conspiracy theories (though not, I think, in Curtis’s case). After their death, the artist commonly becomes more revered than they ever were in their lifetime (see Nick Drake) and the biopic beckons. Anton Corbijn brings both a satisfying intimacy and a fascinating distance to the story of Ian Curtis. Corbijn came to England to photograph Joy Division in 1979, and relies on Deborah Curtis’s biography of Curtis, Touching from a Distance, to fill in the gaps. What has become most apparent about Ian Curtis over the years is how absolutely normal and down to earth he was, how very Northern and unreconstructed he was as a man (he liked a drink, he liked a swear, he thought a woman’s place was in the home), how very extraordinary he was as an artist (the other band members recall how Ian would sometimes pick up on a riff they played during rehearsal and say, no take that and use it, that can be a song, and then fit his already written lyrics to it; Touching from a Distance includes all Ian’s lyrics and the poetry of them will always remain potent, insightful and chilling). Photographed in gorgeous, widescreen black and white, the camera mostly stands back from the action, studying it almost forensically, and the end, when it comes, has the same inevitability as the vocal of Dead Souls.