Back with a Bong

Just when I was thinking that the best guarantee of some privacy and isolation at the moment was a trip to the cinema, I actually found myself at a screening which almost resembled how things used to be in the old days: the place wasn’t exactly packed out, but it was still comfortably fuller than on most of my recent trips – the auditorium felt so crowded that I felt obliged to wear my mask, which hasn’t been the case previously. It was obviously slightly ironic that this should happen at a cinema which is about to close indefinitely due to lack of audiences, or films (depending on how you look at it). So, what secret had the Jericho Phoenix stumbled upon to lure in the crowds, given that there were only two of us at an Odeon screening of a commercial Hollywood genre movie the day before?

Well, it appears that if you really want to attract the punters, obscure foreign-language films from the early years of this century seem to be the way to go, for the Phoenix has been showing Memories of Murder (K-title: Salinui Chueok), the first major success of Bong Joon-ho’s career. When a previously little-known director wins a major prize, it’s quite common for the art house cinemas to dig up some of their older films (for instance, after Kore-eda won at Cannes with Shoplifters, the Phoenix revived After Life), but not normally for a full run. Did Memories of Murder do such good business at every showing? Oh well: strange days, as I’ve been saying since the middle of March. (It could be the high turn-out was due to the free popcorn being offered to every film-goer, a consequence of the place being about to close indefinitely.)

Memories of Murder is set in the mid-80s (the historical context does inform the story somewhat), in a small town in rural South Korea. Song Kang-ho (the father from Bong’s Parasite) plays Park, a local detective, who finds himself hunting a murderer after a young woman’s body is found in a drain. Finesse is not really a part of Park’s repertoire, and his approach is usually to decide who he thinks is the guilty party, contrive some evidence, and then get his sidekick Cho (Kim Roi-ha) to kick a confession out of them. This is not an ideal methodology for tracking down a serial killer, which is what they find themselves doing when a second body is discovered, and Park finds himself teamed up with Seo (Kim Sang-kyung), a cerebral detective from Seoul who is openly contemptuous of Park’s bull-at-a-gate approach to the case.

Unsurprisingly, the case Park has been trying to build against a scarred local youth with learning disabilities collapses, and the duo have to start again, trying to establish some kind of pattern – all the victims were dressed in a particular way, and the murders all took place on rainy nights. Could the playlist of the local radio station prove to be significant? How about some of the urban legends told by schoolchildren in the area? The detectives’ determination to solve the case increases as the killer strikes again and again, apparently with impugnity, but are they in danger of losing their objectivity with reagrd to the case?

Whatever else you might want to see about this film, it is not short of cheerleaders: its Wikipedia page currently suggests it is considered to be one of the greatest films of all time (not bad for a film I’d never even heard of until a couple of days ago), while Quentin Tarantino has also listed it amongst his favourite films of this century (which I suppose is the kind of recommendation which carries weight in some quarters). This is the kind of paragraph which seems to be heading for a ‘yes, but’ moment, and it is – however, only to the extent that I still think this is an involving and extremely well-made film, always certain to draw very positive notices.

The film is apparently based on the case of a real-life serial killer at work in South Korea in the late 80s and early 90s, but there is something quite universal about the story – indeed, given the acclaim Memories of Murder has received, I’m a little surprised we haven’t been treated to an American remake, as in many respects the film could easily work in another setting. You can see how Park fits into a distinguished lineage of corrupt small town cops from films dating back decades, and the friction between him and his bookish colleague also has a classic vibe to it. Strong performances from both actors give the film a really solid core, while Song in particular finds moments of black comedy that leaven the almost Stygian grimness of much of the story.

This is as gritty and bleak as any western crime drama, and its more sordid and repellent elements are handled graphically enough to make me suggest that this is not a film for those of sensitive dispositions, even though the level of actual violence is quite restrained. This is the kind of film where almost no-one seems without flaws or foibles, some of them quite serious. The cops’ building sense of frustration as one perverse inadequate after another proves not to be the murderer is almost palpable, and leads naturally into the climax of the film.

Here it takes a hard turn, in terms of genre conventions if not the actual plot: what has previous seemed to be a bleak police-procedural movie turns into much more of a drama, as the cops make serious mistakes that threaten not just the investigation but their careers. If the two of them eventually find a sort of understanding, it is under the bleakest and most downbeat of circumstances. I would imagine that many people may find the conclusion of Memories of Murder to be a disappointing anticlimax, but I think Bong just about pulls it off: this is more than just a detective story right from the start. Not an uplifting or escapist film, but a serious and ultimately satisfying drama.

(And when it was over, we emerged into the foyer to be greeted by a poster for No Time to Die proclaiming ‘Coming November’. Not November of 2020, though; if it turns out to be November 2021 – or even sooner – one wonders if there will still be any cinemas left to show it. I suspect films of Bond’s stature will always find a home; it’s the less-mainstream productions like Memories of Murder that will vanish from our culture if we lose the art house and independent cinemas. Lives matter more than culture, of course, but what is the value of life without art and stories? The cultural damage done by this virus is threatening to be every bit as severe as its economic impact, if not worse.)

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A Slice of Low Life

I almost get the sense that 2020 is a moment the world got stuck in and can’t get out of: in some respects, at least. The much-feted reopening of cinemas doesn’t seem to amounted to very much at all, with Tenet only having made about $36 million at the US box office after several weeks of release, cinemas are still closed in some major cities. (Yes, a paltry sum indeed – I should like to say, for the benefit of any moguls reading this, that if they would like to give me a lump sum, a mere 10% of Tenet‘s American take, I will happily never say a bad word about a James Corden-starring movie ever again. Everyone has their price, even if it’s a mere three and a half million dollars.)

As you’ve probably read, the studios have taken fright at this and suspended the release of any other substantial movies – the kind that the average cinema relies upon to earn its crust. People aren’t going to the cinema, so new films aren’t being released, so people aren’t going to the cinema even more. It’s hard to see where this will stop. The art house in Oxford closes again as of Friday, while the big commercial cinema is down to a three-day-week from the same point.

The bellwether in all of this certainly looks like the decision to postpone the release of No Time to Die from November this year until early spring of next. (I don’t believe in this notion of ‘cursed films’, but given all the travails this one has suffered, from losing Danny Boyle onwards, I’m almost inclined to declare an open mind where Bond 25 is concerned.) Eon have taken some stick for what unsympathetic commentators have decried as an act of cowardice, but I’m not sure I can bring myself to be quite so critical: the Bond movies are their main source of income, after all, and it’s in their interest to try to ensure both the films themselves and the manner in which they are released are as good as they can manage.

I’ve been musing on all things Bond-related recently, for a number of unconnected reasons, and this led me to (finally) watch Matthew Vaughn’s 2004 film Layer Cake, a film which has certainly ended up in the orbit of the Bond franchise, even if this wasn’t the intention at the time: back when it was new, everyone’s point of reference was Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, and the plethora of mostly underwhelming knock-off lairy gangster movies it went on to spawn.

The title of the film, lest you be wondering, is a metaphor for the hierarchy of the criminal underworld, which is the milieu in which almost all of it takes place. Daniel Craig plays an ambitious young professional – his name is never revealed – whose industry of choice is the drugs trade. He is. very pointedly, not a gangster – he is a goal-oriented businessman, with a plan to make his money and then retire. It seems like he knows all the angles and has the firmest of grips on what’s happening around him.

(Not entirely surprisingly, the film seems to have no moral qualms about depicting drug dealers, and indeed narcotics themselves, in a moderately sympathetic light – one of the few times Craig sounds morally outraged is when musing on the fact that, if convicted, he’d do more time inside than a rapist, the implication being that drug pushing is a trivial offence compared to sexual assault. Hmmm, well. It certainly seems of a piece with the non-judgemental view of drug users from the second Kingsman film, also directed by Vaughn.)

All this changes for the Craig character, however, when senior gangster Jimmy Price (Kenneth Cranham) puts the brakes on his plans to retire – at least until he’s done a couple of jobs for him. One of them is finding the errant young daughter of Eddie Temple (Michael Gambon), another businessman with a portfolio which is not 100% legal, the other is handling the disposition of a huge quantity of Ecstasy which a gang of small time criminals – these guys are basically idiots – have nicked from a gang of Serbians.

Craig protests it’s not really in his line, but Price is insistent: but things proceed to get worse and worse. It turns out there is more to the missing young woman than initially meets the eye: murky gangland politics are involved. It turns out that the Serbians, meanwhile, think Craig is responsible for the theft of their drugs – due to one of the gang of idiots shooting his mouth off – and have dispatched an assassin noted for the savagery of his methods to retrieve them. It’s almost enough to make a serious-minded professional contemplate violence…

I must confess to a bit of a dislike of the laddish gangster movie as inaugurated by Guy Ritchie, even though I’ve only seen one of Ritchie’s movies which qualifies as such – 2005’s baffling Revolver. It’s probably because of my exposure to all those knock-offs, some of which I have had the misfortune to see: 51st State, Love, Honour and Obey, and Rancid Aluminium (supposedly the worst film ever made in the UK: given this list necessarily includes titles like Sex Lives of the Potato Men and Peter Rabbit, the mind boggles as it has seldom done before).

I suppose my dislike really stems from that very laddishness of the films – a sort of crass hetero-normativity, coupled to amorality and the idea that violence and criminality is inherently funny. One point in Layer Cake‘s favour is that much of this is dialled down to the extent that it is simply background noise – although it almost goes without saying that this is still a very blokey film: Sienna Miller plays Craig’s love interest, and is almost wholly decorative, while Sally Hawkins plays ‘Slasher’, one of the gang of idiots. Nevertheless, the film does handle its subject matter and the consequences (mostly) thoughtfully – the nature of the drugs trade isn’t dwelt upon, but at one point Craig realises that the only way to avoid a lengthy prison term and the loss of all he’s acquired is to kill a man in cold blood, and the corrosive effect of this, and its aftermath, are considered and depicted at some length.

There’s something very familiar about this bit, in particular, especially nowadays: the dead, icy look appearing in Craig’s eyes as he accepts he has crossed a line and can never go back. If Layer Cake is remembered for one thing, it’s as the film that swung Craig the role of Bond, and you can see why – he looks good, handles the violence and the womanising equally well, and also can clearly bring the extra level of humanity to the part that Eon were looking for at the time. Yet it is a different character, less of a rogue than Bond, more cerebral – to begin with at least. (Interest for Bond-followers in the film may be added by the presence of Michael Gambon, who turned down the role in 1971, not to mention Craig’s several scenes with Ben Whishaw, while we can only hope that the presence of a young Tom Hardy in a small role is a portent of future pub-quiz questions to come.)

Craig is very good as a man who’s forced to get his hands dirty and come to terms with the fact that, when it comes to criminal politics, being the smartest man in the room isn’t always enough to get results. This is the script’s main thesis, which it puts across well enough – though a lot of it is the usual gangster nonsense, presented fairly stylishly. The rest of the performances are also rather good – Colm Meaney is also in the gang, as is George Harris, while Gambon is genuinely frightening as the senior man on the scene.

In the end I would say this was a good film rather than a truly great one – good performances and ideas are not quite elaborated upon enough in the script, and it does still fall into a few of the typical post-Ritchie potholes. Nevertheless, this is a superior, tough thriller, which deserves to be remembered on its own merits rather than as an extended audition piece for its star’s most famous job.

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The Mnemonic Man

Time runs in reverse, characters’ relationships remain clouded, the viewer’s brain ends up in a knot – are we talking about Tenet or Christopher Nolan’s 2000 movie Memento? The director’s work seems to be suffering from a case of deja vu, or perhaps it is stuck in a time loop. This was Nolan’s first ‘proper’ movie – his actual debut, Following, was made in black and white on a punitively low budget, resulting in a concomitantly brief running time. Nevertheless, it was successful enough to get him his foot in the door with Hollywood, and this is the result. No-one was yet likening Nolan to Stanley Kubrick at the time, but what is striking is the extent to which this film resonates with the much bigger-budget films he has essentially moved on to since.

Guy Pearce plays Leonard Shelby, a former insurance investigator with a curious affliction: he cannot form new memories. He forgets everything that happens to him unless he makes a point of physically writing it down – otherwise it just slips away in a matter of minutes. Vital information is tattooed about his person so he sees it whenever he goes to the bathroom. His pockets are stuffed with notes-to-self and polaroid photos (one of the things which slightly dates it – and may have made it seem a little odd even when it was new) is that it seems to hail from an era before the invention of the cellphone, let alone the smartphone, a device which – one imagines – might have a fairly dramatic impact upon the plot.

How has Leonard ended up in this rather unfortunate state? The last thing he remembers is a brutal attack on his wife and himself, in the course of which he suffered brain damage (hence his problems in the recollection department). Now he has a tattoo across his chest telling him the first name and initial of the man who apparently raped and murdered his wife (Jorja Fox). His overriding obsession is to find this man and kill him, even though – and this is pointed out to him, though of course he can’t retain the idea for very long – any satisfaction he gains from succeeding in his quest will necessarily be short-lived (he’ll soon forget he ever did it).

The movie follows Leonard over three quite eventful days in the pursuit of his quarry, in which he has various encounters with mysterious figures (to be fair, everyone seems like a mysterious figure when all you can ever know about them is what can be written on the back of a polaroid), including a barmaid (Carrie-Anne Moss) and a man claiming to be a cop (Joe Pantoliano).

What follows is essentially Christopher Nolan doing his usual thing of taking the tropes of a genre movie and putting a soaringly high-concept spin on them, usually involving the way the narrative is presented to the audience. There is a sort of faint and possibly misleading resemblance to the kind of Tarantino pastiche that everyone seemed to be making in the late nineties and early years of the new century: it’s a twisty-turny LA-set crime thriller, with an innovatively non-linear narrative structure. However, what Tarantino appears to have been doing as a gimmick is at the heart of how Memento functions as a film.

How do you put the audience in the position of someone with no-short term memory? Nolan’s solution is simple: most of the narrative of Memento is shown backwards – not actually backwards, a la Tenet, but divided into chunks which are then shown in reverse order: Leonard repeatedly finds himself in situations with no recollection of how he got there, which is a sensation the audience obviously shares in the circumstances. Obviously this presents enormous potential for plot twists and reversals, as Leonard is told one thing only for it to be revealed in a later (i.e., earlier) sequence that what really happened was quite different.

He is, as you might expect, an easy target for manipulation and deceit, and it’s a wonder he’s not more paranoid than appears to be the case. Nevertheless, he does come across as a lonely and rather tragic figure, obsessed with his meaningless crusade. At several points he even sets out to mislead and manipulate his future self into certain courses of action, indicating a degree of psychological instability which is actually rather concerning. Needless to say this is a movie which is heavy on the existential trauma, consistently returning to questions of identity and motivation. Without memories, how do you know what you want to do? How do you even know who you are? Leonard keeps referring back to his past life as an insurance assessor, but the implication is that the things he has done since the incident which damaged his brain are the acts of a very different man.

Nolan is therefore obviously hitting the viewer with a mighty double whammy of a film which is both structurally and thematically intensely complex – a friend said after watching Tenet that ‘it put a knot in my brain’ and I felt the same while viewing Memento. What is likely to make things even more of a challenge for the viewer is that in addition to the reverse-chronology element of the film (shown in colour) there is also a normal-chronology element (shown in black and white), interwoven with it. The relationship between the two is not immediately apparent, which just adds to the general sense of Nolan trying to drive the viewer nuts, but this does lead up to the bravura moment when the black and white image slowly bleeds into colour and everything suddenly becomes, if not clear, then certainly clearer. I don’t think this is quite one of those films demanding a second viewing in order for them to become totally comprehensible – but the facility to string the whole narrative together in conventional chronological order would certainly be a bonus, and I am amused to see that several of the movie’s DVD releases do present this as an option.

Your attention in this movie is invariably on the storytelling and direction, but it works as well as it does because of solid performances from the three leads, especially Pearce, who’s in virtually every scene. It’s obviously a challenging role, but he finds the pathos in it, and the humour, and an unsettling note of detached ruthlessness that sets up a memorably vicious ending. Or beginning. Or middle. It’s that kind of story.

What’s striking is how much this film anticipates the concerns which have driven virtually all of Christopher Nolan’s work since: his films seem to be obsessed with how we perceive time, and the interface and relationship between reality and our memories of it. You could even argue that Leonard’s pathological quest for justice anticipates that of Bruce Wayne in the Batman movies. Nolan has, obviously, moved on to much greater things in the two decades since this film was released, but the raw material remains the same, as does – on the whole – the quality of the results. This is one of those films which feels like a young director laying down a marker – in this case, a director who more than made good on the promise he showed here. An essential movie for Christopher Nolan fans and a great, intelligent thriller in its own right.

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Beyond the Fridge

So here we are, with the world seemingly on pause for the foreseeable future, and the main challenge of each day being how to fill it. I could be learning another language, or practising the ukulele; maybe writing another terrible, unpublishable novel, or working on my long-mooted guide to running Lovecraftian role-playing games, Terror Without Tentacles. But I’m not. Instead I find myself watching obscure Vin Diesel movies that I happen to have missed the first time around.

I’ll be honest with you, for all that I occasionally refer to him as ‘the great Vin Diesel’ (it is meant with affection if not complete seriousness) I have never been a completist when it comes to the artist formerly known as Mark Sinclair. Didn’t see Pitch Black at the cinema, nor the first four Fast & Furious movies, nor xXx – I think you’re getting the point. In the circumstances it’s not really surprising that a minor film like F Gary Gray’s A Man Apart slipped through the net.

This movie was originally released in 2003 (but more on this later) and opens with a brief sequence describing the vast quantities of narcotics smuggled over the US-Mexican border every week by the drug cartels. This is narrated by a tranquilised-sounding Diesel and it’s hard to tell whether it’s more like a Trump campaign video or an advert for cocaine. As a means of establishing the mise en scene, though, it is reasonably effective.

When Vin eventually pops up, he is playing Sean Vetter, member of a cool, unorthodox squad within the DEA. After seven years they are about to finally collar senior drug lord Lucero (Geno Silva) inside a rather peculiar club or nightclub (Lucero seems to have no problem with groping various scantily-clad dancers in front of a crowd of his cheering employees and their families). The bust goes down, and Lucero is successfully nicked, but not before Vin has to chase down his getaway car on foot (heavy traffic congestion in Mexico City, plus the fact that Diesel was carrying a lot less bulk twenty years ago, mean this is slightly less ludicrous than it sounds). Cheerful Vin repeatedly asks his boss if he can go home and see his wife.

Yes, Vin has a lovely wife (played by Jacqueline Obradors) who is a maker of scented candles, and a cat (played by a cat) who is not. Various scenes ensue making it quite clear just what a devoted and loving husband Vin is, and the general effect is as if they had painted a large bullseye on Mrs Diesel’s forehead. So it proves, for it seems that with Lucero in jail, a lethal new drugs kingpin known only as ‘Diablo’ is taking over the business, and (I know this doesn’t make a great deal of sense) Diablo decides to take out the man responsible for disposing of his predecessor. In the ensuing hit, Vin is shot and wounded and his wife killed (their cat vanishes out of the movie at this point, but I fear the worst).

Vin wakes up in hospital to discover that his wife has not just carked it, but been buried while he was in a coma. This upsets him a bit, and his performance of distraught grief is such that the audience will probably find it quite gruelling too. A preposterous scene ensues in which Vin is let out of hospital (his serious bullet wound disappears from the movie along with his cat) and driven to the cemetery after dark by his long-suffering partner (Larenz Tate) to visit the grave. Well, item number one on Vin’s agenda is now to get his revenge on Diablo for making his cat disappear (and killing his wife too, probably), but can he keep his volcanic vengeful fury under control long enough to do it?

The first thing that strikes you about A Man Apart is just how young and slim Vin Diesel looks in it: positively baby-faced and whippet-like. (For much of the film he wears a goatee, which is a pretty good look for him.) The reason for this is that while the film was released in 2003, it was actually made a couple of years earlier (it’s hard to find out for sure exactly when, but apparently a court case concerning the film’s original title of Diablo was in progress in 2001) and then sat on the shelf, only earning a run in theatres after The Fast and the Furious and xXx confirmed Diesel as a genuine star. The thinking seems to have been that this film would have vanished without trace without a star name on the poster, and I can see where they were coming from, because A Man Apart is not much cop.

I very rarely bail out of a movie part-way through, even at home, but in this case I did come close, about half an hour in. By this point it was clear that A Man Apart was not going to be any good, but neither was it going to be bad in a particularly interesting or entertaining way. It’s just mediocre in virtually every department. At the heart of the film there seems to be a distinct lack of certainty as to just what it’s supposed to be – a tough action thriller about the battle with the Mexican drug cartels, or a more introspective character piece about a man driven half-mad by grief and the desire for revenge. It just about hangs together, but it’s a near thing.

There’s a phenomenon known as ‘fridging’, which refers to the tendency of female characters in films and other media to exist only so they can be murdered or otherwise brutalised by the bad guys in order to motivate the hero for the rest of the story (the title comes from a mid-90s issue of Green Lantern in which the title character comes home to find his girlfriend’s corpse stuffed in the refrigerator). It’s a trope we seem to be moving on from, but it is very noticeable that the main plot function of most of the women in A Man Apart (maybe not the scantily-clad dancers) is to be fridged. It’s that kind of movie – driven by the protagonist’s need for revenge – but Jacqueline Obradrors’ character is so obviously just there to be offed that you never really buy into their relationship, so it all feels very formulaic.

I’ve discussed in the past the difference between Escapist and Reminder forms of entertainment and the problems which can ensue when film-makers get the balance between them wrong or otherwise mix them up. In the end, most of the problems with A Man Apart arise from the fact that the film’s tone and setting are inescapably quite grim and depressing, and concerns serious social problems and issues, while the plot itself is shallow and simplistic, a-man’s-gotta-do stuff. The conclusion of the film attempts to subvert expectations and suggest some kind of moral victory for Diesel, but you just end up thinking what a weak climax it is after all that has gone before.

Now, having said all this, and bearing in mind I come here to praise Vin Diesel, not bury him, he is still very watchable in this movie: he passes the test of a genuine movie star by still having genuine presence and charisma, even in a bad film. One wonders exactly why it is that he has struggled so badly so sustain a career outside of one or two franchises (you know the ones I mean): is it simply that he really is as limited in his range as his choice of movies would suggest, or just that there’s something about him which has led to his being typed so badly? Whatever the answer, A Man Apart is not going to change anyone’s mind about Diesel and his career: this is a thorough-going dud.

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Adult Education

I have to admit the possibility that there may be people who have decided to Google for ‘Bad Education Movie’ in the hope of getting access to someone’s considered opinion of the forthcoming Hugh Jackman film (not actually on release yet, I think) – well, sorry, you’ve come to the wrong place. Nor is this the place to be should you (for whatever reason) be interested in the movie spin-off of the sitcom starring Jack Whitehall, which came out a few years ago (the temptation to say that if this is the case, you should maybe rethink some of your life choices, is almost irresistible). Seriously, they ought to do something about people re-using titles on films.

Anyway, the Bad Education we are here to discuss is the 2004 movie from Pedro Almodovar, originally known as La mala educacion. Not that this really does a great deal to eliminate potential confusion, as that’s just a direct translation into Spanish, of course. No Almodovar movie seems to be completely bereft of a certain kind of humour, but this is certainly one of his more serious films: perhaps that’s a big enough point of distinction. It’s not as if this is a film which it’s easy to mistake for anything else, though.

When I was writing about Talk to Her I ventured the suggestion that there was an undercurrent to it which was almost Hitchcockian in its tone and style – almost from the start, it seems that this influence has grown enormously, for the opening credits and music suggest nothing as much as an energetic pastiche of films from Hitchcock’s own late 50s-early 60s imperial phase. It takes a little while for this to show up in the actual story, though. Much of the film is set in 1980, and concerns (amongst others) Enrique (Fele Martinez), a film director looking for his next project. His ruminations are interrupted by the appearance of an old school friend named Ignacio (Gael Garcia Bernal). Ignacio is an actor and writer, looking for work, but he also leaves a short story entitled The Visit with Enrique – apparently it is a sort of roman-a-clef, partly based on their own experiences together.

The film then shifts its focus, apparently presenting the story of The Visit. This concerns fictionalised versions of Enrique (Alberto Ferreiro) and Ignacio (still Bernal), with the considerable difference that the Ignacio in the story is a transsexual nightclub singer, going by the name of Zahara. With the aid of her friend Paca (a brief but very big performance by Javier Camara), Zahara is out to get revenge on Manolo, the Catholic priest who abused her as a boy (the priest is played by Daniel Gimenez Cacho), intent on blackmailing him for the money that will pay for her sex-change surgery.

Obviously, this strikes a significant chord with the real-life Enrique, and brings back all kinds of memories of his childhood friendship – more than friendship – with Ignacio, a friendship which ended when Manolo had him expelled from the school they attended together. He decides to go ahead with the movie, even though Ignacio seems greatly changed to him, almost unrecognisable as the same person…

It all sounds relatively straightforward when you write it down like that, but Bad Education is really far from straightforward in terms of its narrative – I have skipped over some of the many ambiguities and sleights-of-hand in the plot; for instance, it’s not made at all obvious at first that Ignacio and Zahara are both played by Bernal. As the film progresses, it grows increasingly dense and subtle in its storytelling – there are, as you can see, lengthy flashback sequences, and also a film-within-the-film. Elements of these echo and repeat each other, and the line between the two is eventually elided, up to a point. This is a film you do have to give your full attention to, but Almodovar maintains an exemplary grip on what could have been an extravagantly confusing story.

Is it really valid for me to compare it to one of Hitchcock’s entertainments, though? Well, obviously Hitchcock never made a film as graphically explicit as this one, and it’s difficult to imagine him openly addressing material like transsexuality and child abuse, or even homosexuality, in one of his films. But, on the other hand, the tricky and repetitive structure of the film, the eventual appearance of long-buried blackmail and murder, and the fascination with identity – how well can you really know a person? How much can someone change, over time? – are all things one would easily associate with some of Hitchcock’s finest films. Pedro Almodovar has a reputation for making big, sensuous, emotional films dealing with issues of sex and gender, but it seems to me he has all the necessary tools in the kit to be considered a terrific director of thrillers, as well.

Nevertheless, this is one of his darker films. While there are some beautifully lyrically scenes early on, depicting the childhoods of the characters and everyday life in the school they attend, the tone grows steadily more serious as it progresses (Javier Camara’s big comic turn only appears in the early part of the film). There is still humanity in the film – the present-day version of Manolo, when he eventually appears, is a pitiable figure, and we are encouraged to pity him despite his terrible offences – but it is overall less optimistic and warm than in previous films, and the ending is inconclusive and ambiguous. Then again, perhaps there is no other choice here: the film is ultimately about the life-long emotional damage done by child abuse, and the ripple of collateral damage spreading out through the friends and acquaintances of those at the heart of it. Almodovar is too good a director to be excessively on-the-nose about this, but the shadows lie deeply on all the survivors at the end of this film, and the implication is clear. This is another well-acted, well-directed and exceptionally well-written film, dark and complex without feeling excessively grim or heavy: colourful and deft enough to be genuinely entertaining, but still a work shot through with a profound seriousness.

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Girlfriend(s) in a Coma

Pedro Almodóvar’s 2002 film Talk to Her (title en Espanol: Hable con ella) opens rather theatrically, which may not come as a huge surprise to anyone familiar with this director – the curtain rises and we are treated to a display of interpretative dance from Pina Bausch. Watching it are the two main characters of the film, Benigno (Javier Camara) and Marco (Dario Grandinetti), although at this point they know each other as little as we know either of them. Marco is moved to tears by the performance, a fact which does not go unnoticed by Benigno.

Slowly a narrative begins to form, piecemeal and out of chronological order. Marco is a writer, mainly of travel books, though the story from his point of view starts when he is sent to do a piece on up-and-coming female matador Lydia (Rosario Flores). After an unpromising start, mainly because both of them are carrying baggage from previous relationships, romance seems to kindle between them.

Bullfighting is a bit of a cliché in many people’s idea of Spain, and it’s obviously a controversial topic. All that aside, Almodóvar’s presentation of scenes set in the bullring is exceptional – they are beautiful and grotesque at the same time, colourful and vibrant but also laced with horror. That the danger is not all on the bull’s side is reinforced when Lydia comes off second best in a bout with a bull and ends up in the intensive care unit of the local hospital, in what seems to be a persistent vegetative state – in other words, a coma, and one there is virtually no chance she will ever emerge from.

Marco, who has never been the most articulate of people, has no idea of how to cope with this, but finds himself making friends with Benigno, who is a private nurse employed on the same ward. His duties only extend to looking after one particular patient: Alicia (Leonor Watling), a dance student who was involved in a car accident. Benigno is clearly a deeply committed and very caring nurse, who happily talks to Alicia about everything going on in his life; he is completely unlike Marco. And yet the two of them do become friends.

However, this is a friendship that is soon to be put to the test. Not all is as it initially seems in these relationships, and the story is about to move into some very strange and dark territory…

Yes, I know, if two Almodóvar reviews in a week was a bit irregular, three in a fortnight in really pushing it. Well, I warn you, they’re reviving Bad Education this week, and thank your lucky stars I’m away on holiday the week this revival season concludes with Volver. What can I say? Blame the late-summer interesting-movie drought. And while I know I’m ridiculously late to the party, I’m still kicking myself for not checking Pedro Almodóvar’s back catalogue before now: he deserves every bit of his reputation.

Talk to Her is, first and foremost, a really excellent movie, fully deserving of its reputation as one of the best made so far this century. However, it is also one of those films it is somewhat difficult to write about in detail without venturing into spoiler territory. I turned up to watch it with only the vaguest idea of what the story was about – the non-chronological nature of the plot means that the Wikipedia plot summary isn’t especially rewarding if you only skim read it – and the fact that it’s almost impossible to predict which way the story will go at any given moment is one of the pleasures of the film. You really want to know as little about the story in advance as you can manage.

So what can I really say about Talk to Her? Well, the first thing is that this is not quite the schmaltzy romantic melodrama it looks like it’s going to be – in fact, Almodóvar is relatively restrained when it comes to the plotting this time around; there are none of the outrageous coincidences that often pop up in his scripts. His subtlety and playfulness are still entirely intact, and you could argue that for much of the film he is cheerfully engaged in misdirecting the audience, turning their expectations against them. You are watching it and enjoying what has so far been an engaging and very well-made romantic drama, touched with elements of tragedy, and then suddenly and without your really being aware of it, the film has taken on something of the aspect of a psychological thriller – the kind of film that Hitchcock might have felt moved to have a go at, had he spent twenty or thirty years in therapy. Elements of the story which have previously been wholly innocuous suddenly look horribly suspect, and you question just exactly what kind of people some of these characters are.

It works as well as it does because of the brilliant performances given by the two leads – the two women in the comas are also good, but perforce have rather limited scope to participate in the film. Camara is very good in a hugely challenging part, managing to find all the subtlety it requires; Grandinetti has the tough job of playing someone who isn’t naturally very demonstrative, but finds the chinks in the armour that make it work. But the magic of the film is in the scripting and direction – as mentioned, there is a very black cheerfulness at work here, and an immense deftness when it comes to tone (just when you think you have the film figured out, Almodóvar throws in the eye-popping silent movie vignette).

But perhaps the most impressive thing about it is Almodóvar’s ability to retain his humanity and compassion even in a film which deals with topics as dark as the ones here. There is always room for subtlety, no-one is wholly good or bad, they are simply human and worthy of at least a little understanding. And beyond this, he even manages to conclude the film on a quiet moment of hopeful promise, something that would have seemed impossible only a short time before. As I said, Talk to Her is an excellent movie in every way.

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The Long Kong

Not for the first time recently, we went on holiday only to find our arrival coincided with regrettably unseasonal weather conditions: ‘WINTER STORM EXPECTED SUNDAY PM/MONDAY AM’ flashed every roadside information board all the way from JFK into Manhattan. Probably just a coincidence, and I suppose it could have been worse: it was only the first day or so of the trip, when we were taking it fairly easy and trying to get over the jet lag.

The prospect of spending the evening in the hotel room was brightened a bit when Travelling Companion spotted that the movie on BBC America was King Kong. This seemed (potentially, at least) a very appropriate film for the situation – it’s one of the great, iconic New York movies, and we were staying just round the corner from the Empire State Building. The only slight cause for uncertainty was that there was no way of finding out which version of King Kong we were going to be treated to, because personally I find that my mileage differs radically (I have written in the past about my very unfashionable fondness for the reviled 1976 version). Well, we settled down in front of the TV, and I have to confess that my heart sank a bit when it became clear we would be going through the experience that is Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake of this classic tale.

Surely everybody knows the basic plot of this archetypal fable: it is the early 1930s, and many Americans are struggling with the consequences of the Great Depression. Amongst them is vaudevillian Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts), who is out of work and struggling to even eat. Hope glimmers when she encounters maverick film-maker Carl Denham (Jack Black, playing the part as Orson Welles at his most Machiavellian), who whisks her off to star in his new movie, to be filmed on location on an uncharted island. Also shanghaied for the trip is earnest young playwright Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody). Soon enough (well, maybe not, but we shall return to this) everyone sets sail for Skull Island, little anticipating the unusual ecosystem that has survived there: arthropods of unusual size, relict dinosaurs, and a large gorilla population (there’s actually only one gorilla, but it is very large).

Well, the natives take a fancy to Ann and end up sacrificing her to the ape, known to them as Kong (Andy Serkis does the mocapping essentials). Even as her colleagues mount a desperate attempt to rescue her, Ann finds herself realising that Kong is not quite the savage beast he first appears to be, while Carl reaches the conclusion that the ape could be just what he needs to make his career – all he needs to do is get Kong back to New York. What could possibly go wrong with an idea like that…?

Peter Jackson is quite open about the fact that the original King Kong is his favourite film of all time – well, there’s nothing wrong with that, it is an essential classic and one of the foundation texts of the fantasy and monster movie genres. He initially wanted to make it in the late 1990s, when I seem to recall it had acquired the title The Legend of King Kong, but for various reasons the project got put on hold while he pushed ahead with his noted jewellery-related triptych.

Personally I would quite like to look into that parallel dimension where Jackson made King Kong before Lord of the Rings, as I think the version they have there would be very interesting and quite possibly better. For me the extant version feels very much like the movie equivalent of one of those brick-sized mid-to-late Harry Potter novels written when J.K. Rowling had become so successful she could do anything she wanted and nobody, it seems, was brave enough to suggest that more is sometimes less.

It’s hard to imagine that the pre-Rings Jackson would have been indulged in making a version of Kong that runs for over three hours, nearly twice the length of the original film. Certainly, the 1933 film moves along at a brisk clip and skimps a little bit when it comes to things like characterisation, but it’s a pulp monster movie and that is the source of most of its charm. Blowing the movie up to proportions even vaster than that of the title character changes it entirely, making it ponderous and a source more of bathos than genuine pathos.

It is, for example, an hour into the movie before they even arrive at Skull Island, and obviously more than that before we see any monsters: Jackson has cast a trio of hot young stars (Brody was relatively fresh from his Oscar win, making this a curious inversion of that phenomenon where successful young actresses are almost instantly cast in fantasy and superhero movies – cf. Halle Berry, Charlize Theron, Brie Larson, etc), but they struggle with a script that simply feels bloated – Peter Jackson and his collaborators clearly have their hearts set on making an epic movie, perhaps rather in the same vein as Titanic, but they struggle to find anything appropriately profound to say, and the film feels like it’s taking itself very seriously considering it is essentially about an island full of dinosaurs and a giant gorilla rampaging through Manhattan. It also feels like there’s an awful lot of filler (a subplot about Jamie Bell and Evan Parke’s characters doesn’t contribute much of anything and could easily be snipped entirely).

Despite being essentially a homage, the movie seems to have a curious and by no means uncritical attitude towards the 1933 film. There are, of course, a number of in-jokes and references scattered throughout it, but one gets a general sense of Jackson and his writers attempting to update and ‘fix’ the original story. This is fair enough: the 1933 Kong‘s presentation of the islanders is horribly awkward and dated, which the newer film acknowledges by modelling Denham’s ugly and garish stage extravaganza on these scenes. But again, this is hardly done with the lightest of touches.

The really successful element of the 2005 film, at the heart of the sequences where it genuinely feels as if it’s coming to life, is its handling of Skull Island itself: what’s a fairly generic ‘Lost World’ backdrop in the original has obviously been the source of much (maybe even too much) thought and imagination, with new species of dinosaur and creepy-crawly developed to populate it. The bits of the film where Jackson genuinely feels like he’s enjoying himself all derive from this, and diverge considerably from the source: the sauropod stampede, the nightmarish chasm scene, and the fight between Kong and the vastatosaurs.

The special effects are, of course, state of the art, but again one has to wonder about some of the creative decisions involved – it’s shorthand to describe King Kong as a gorilla movie, but the makers of most films involving this character have played it a little fast and loose when it comes to presenting the giant ape – the most recent Kong movie, for instance, opted to make him more bipedal and humanoid, simply because this suited the feel they were going for. The Jackson-Serkis Kong, on the other hand, is the most authentically gorilla-ish Kong in movie history, but it’s not really clear what dividend this pays.

What does feel like a definite misstep, motivated perhaps by that decision to go for a Titanic kind of vibe, is the choice to make Kong an almost entirely sympathetic character from much earlier in the film. It’s only comparatively late in the 1933 version, when it becomes obvious he is doomed, that Kong becomes the icon of pathos and tragedy he is best remembered as – prior to this, he is an ambiguous and often frightening figure. Jackson and company clearly want us on his side all the way through, one of their main tactics being to get Naomi Watts to do her sad-open-mouth face whenever Kong is in trouble (which she ends up doing a lot). The problem is that by trying to solicit pathos rather than thrills, the film usually ends up generating neither.

Despite all of this negative talk, I would still have to agree that King Kong is a case of a great director producing a magnificent folly more than an outright failure. There is all the material here for a potentially great fantasy film, but there’s just too much of it, along with plenty of other stuff which wouldn’t ever normally appear in a conventional monster movie. In the end, this is a lavish, impressively-assembled film, but it’s saddled with an inappropriate tone and a misconceived sense of its own significance that makes it a tough slog to get through.

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Chamber of Horrors

It is one of those inevitable, slightly regrettable truths that the overwhelming majority of people sitting down to watch Tommy Wiseau’s 2003 movie The Room these days are doing so with a pretty good idea of what they are in for, for it is only famous because of its astonishing shortcomings as a piece of art. They know they are leaving the sunlit slopes behind and entering the valley of the shadow: watching The Room is a bit like taking a combined hitch-hiking and camping trip through Afghanistan. It’s going to be a mind-expanding, gruelling, and probably interminable experience, but you can’t say you weren’t warned.

One can only imagine what it must be like to stumble upon The Room unawares and start to watch it with no knowledge of exactly what awaits. I almost envy that tiny group of initial viewers who benefited from that state of grace – although, on the other hand, settling into one’s seat in expectation of a conventional movie and then being exposed to Wiseau’s opus must have felt rather like going out for a country walk, bending over to look at a wild flower, and then receiving the impact of a charging bull in the nether regions of the person.

The thing is that the opening moments of The Room are, well, surprisingly competent, given the film’s notorious reputation. Credits play, background shots of San Francisco appear; one wonders if the film can really be quite as bad as it is supposed to be. Friends, it is.

The story is focuses on a saintly businessman named Johnny (played by Wiseau himself), who is an all-around great guy and beloved by nearly everyone who knows him. He is engaged to Lisa (Juliette Danielle), his long-term girlfriend, who is depicted as thorough-goingly manipulative, self-serving and callous. Despite affecting to love Johnny, Lisa commences an affair with Johnny’s best friend Mark (Greg Sestero); Mark is conflicted by this, but finds Lisa’s somewhat obscure charms to be utterly irresistible.

Will Johnny discover the affair? Will Mark decide to stop betraying his best friend and break it off with Lisa? Will Lisa leave Johnny, even though this will tear him apart? Meanwhile, Johnny’s youthful ward Denny (Philip Haldiman) has some problems with a drug-dealing gangster, which are never really explored or explained, Lisa’s mother is diagnosed with breast cancer, which does not impact the plot and is indeed only mentioned just the once, and there’s a moment where four of the main male characters decide to play American football in an alleyway dressed in tuxedos (this likewise does not advance the plot in any significant manner).

I suppose you can kind of just about make out the kind of film that Wiseau (who, in addition to starring and directing, also wrote, produced and financed the film himself) was trying to make: something vaguely akin to Reality Bites, a sort of ensemble piece about the lives and loves of a group of young people just starting out in life. To say the film is wide of the mark is a bit of an understatement: a lot of the time, it has that the-script-and-acting-isn’t-really-important feel of bad pornography, a resemblance which is only heightened by the fact that The Room features no fewer than five protracted and repetitive sex scenes.

If The Room is pornography, however, it’s pornography made by someone who is a bit unclear on the exact mechanics of the act and is too embarrassed to admit this (which I suppose is just another way of saying the sex scenes are actually fairly tame). Trying to work out why the film has five sex scenes, or indeed to discern the rationale behind many of its baffling creative choices, is the first step on a dangerous path, because trying to work out just what Tommy Wiseau was thinking when he came up with this sucker can only end in madness.

Wiseau has become a cult figure off the back of The Room, and a curiously cryptic and inscrutable one: in The Disaster Artist, a fictionalised account of the making of The Room (oh, yes, this is the state of modern culture), James Franco is content to just do a Wiseau impersonation, reproducing the man’s baffling hair, idiosyncratic mode of speech, and general air of being a human glove puppet remotely operated from another dimension – there’s no attempt to work out what actually makes him tick, or how anyone could have the necessary resources to make a film like The Room (it cost $6 million) but be so totally oblivious of their own shortcomings in terms of having any kind of talent.

I suppose this is why The Room exerts its strange power of baleful fascination over unsuspecting audiences. As I’ve said before, making any kind of movie is difficult, which is why the really, really good ones often feel like they have an almost-miraculous quality about them. Your chances of producing an absolute clunker also spike significantly if you start pushing the boat out in terms of your vision and the subject matter of your film – for example, the concept of alien invaders raising an army of zombies to conquer the world is one which is fraught with more pitfalls than most, which is possibly why it resulted in another famously bad movie. The thing is that Wiseau isn’t really trying to do anything that difficult, in terms of his actual story. He just gets almost every single important creative decision wrong.

The fact is that The Room doesn’t have many of the obvious flaws of other famously bad movies: there are no obvious continuity errors as such, or glaringly bad special effects. On a purely technical level it is actually fairly proficient (oh my God, I’m saying positive things about The Room: I’ve been doing this too long). But creatively… it is badly written, badly cast, badly directed, and badly acted, with ‘badly’ a huge understatement in each case. Characters and subplots appear and disappear almost at random, the main storyline is repetitive, the motivations of the people in the story remain baffling, and so on.

There’s not a lot of point in actually trying to review The Room objectively, for the fact that it is so very, very bad is intrinsically bound up with the fact that it has any kind of profile at all. Here at least the concept of consensus survives: The Room is not just terrible, it is famously, proverbially terrible. And obviously I would not disagree with this. But what I would add is that while The Room is never any good, it is also seldom boring (the sex scenes do drag on a bit), and the sheer nature of its badness also makes it quite mesmerising to watch. But not that often – if you have any sense, anyway.

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Excess All Areas

(How’s About This For Unfinished Business Dept.: No word of a lie – while getting ready for the current odyssey I unearthed from a dark corner of my luggage two sheets of aged, crinkled paper. They turned out to be a review actually written in Kyrgyzstan at some point in the spring of 2009, which I never got around to typing up and submitting to h2g2 (many possible reasons for this, none of which I care to dwell on). So here we are, better late than never – and it’s oddly reassuring to see that the core focus of my film criticism has remained unchanged in the last nine years…)

Hello again, everyone, and welcome to another edition of the film review column which proves that the words ‘unmissable release’ have become sadly devalued. As with our previous instalment, caveat lector – I’m talking about a movie I saw in a language I only have an elementary grasp of. That said…

In terms of being a tough movie to get a sequel out of, I suspect Beneath the Planet of the Apes still leads the field, concluding as it does with said planet vaporised along with every single character (or so it appears). I would have put 2006’s Crank somewhere on the same list, though, due to the ending featuring the fatally-poisoned main character falling two miles out of a helicopter into the centre of Los Angeles (thoughtfully phoning up his girlfriend to apologise on the way down).

There were of course three further sequels to Beneath the Planet of the Apes, along with two TV series and various other ephemera. The prospect of Crank becoming a similar multi-media institution strikes me as rather unlikely (not to mention deeply disturbing), but a sequel has duly appeared in the form of Crank: High Voltage, directed as before by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor.

Straight after hitting the ground, crazed psychotic Chev Chelios (perennial favourite hereabouts and Greatest Living Englishman candidate Lord Jason of Statham) is scraped off the pavement and slung in the back of a van by some Chinese gangsters. Impressed by his resistance to the adrenaline poison (the plot device driving the first film), they have decided to harvest his organs. Upon learning this, Chev responds in typically forthright style, but it’s too late: his heart has already been extracted for transplant into an ageing crime lord (David Carradine) and replaced with a battery-powered artificial one. The battery is wont to run low at the most inopportune moments, which only makes Chev’s quest to retrieve his heart even trickier…

By any even moderately civilised standards, the Crank movies are jaw-droppingly horrible – not actually badly made, just amoral, obscene, hugely violent, tasteless, profane, and thoroughly offensive. Crank: High Voltage is very much in the same vein as the original in that it is largely one headlong display of carnage and depravity on the streets of Los Angeles.

Any hopes of increased maturity this time round were dispelled by an early sequence in which Chev interrogates a somewhat-obese bad guy by inserting a lubricated shotgun barrel where the sun don’t shine. I am on record in these pages as disliking the Kill Bill films, in particular, for exactly this sort of thing, which makes my (guilty) enjoyment of Crank rather embarrassing.

So, how to defend it? Well, in addition to all the things previously mentioned, Crank: High Voltage is frenetic, ludicrous and bizarre (it’s even got Geri Halliwell in it), but it’s also frequently very funny (the great man shows signs of a comic touch that could probably be rewardingly utilised in the right role) and never, ever pretentious or under the illusion it’s anything other than junk entertainment. It’s consistently inventive and surprising in its storytelling, which is never confused (I particularly enjoyed the sequence in which Jason Statham turns into Godzilla. Honestly).

The directors deftly handle what turns into a fairly complicated story – the main thread concerns Chev and the increasingly improbable methods he uses to keep his heart going, but whirling around it like demented satellites are subplots featuring Chev’s girlfriend Eve (Amy Smart) who’s now a pole dancer, a rather excitable Chinese prostitute who’s also in love with him (Bai Ling), the twin of Chev’s original sidekick, who is also transsexual but, additionally, suffers from whole-body Tourette’s syndrome (Efren Ramirez)… you get the general idea.

As you may have surmised, this isn’t really a venue for nuanced acting, but everyone seems to do what’s required of them (well, I have my doubts about Ginger Spice, but that’s a matter of principle) and the great man does a nice job of making Chev distinct from his other franchise character, Frank Martin. (Though an in-joke where an old woman complains that she’s been molested by someone who looks like the guy from The Transporter had me rolling my eyes a bit.)

I couldn’t honestly recommend either of the Crank movies to anyone I didn’t know very well, but I hope I’ve given you some idea of what to expect should you decide to take the plunge. It will almost certainly exceed your expectations, though probably not in a good way. I wait with some trepidation the next sequel, which I note the film-makers’ have made much easier to arrange, though quite how they can sustain the concept for another full movie I shudder to think.

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Another Country

There was a time, nearly fifteen years ago, when I basically just got burned out as far as going to the cinema was concerned: catching every significant new release started to feel like a burden, I was acutely aware of the demands I was making on the people close to me in terms of constantly asking for lifts to and from the multiplex, and there were some other changes to the cinemas themselves which made it all seem rather less appealing. So I cut back drastically for the best part of a year, only seeing things I was really interested in. As a result there are some films which I recall seeing the trailers for multiple times, and remembering thinking ‘hmmm, that looks like it has potential’ about, which I never ended up going to see.

Another cutback looms, though for slightly different reasons: I am off to where the films are all dubbed into a foreign language for a couple of months, and long experience has taught me this is never the best way to meet a new movie. Needless to say I will be taking with me (ahem) a large trunk filled with DVDs to while away the quiet moments, and when I asked for suggestions as to what to put in the trunk, one of the suggestions was Wolfgang Becker’s 2003 film Good Bye Lenin! (even though, given my destination, a film entitled Hello Again Putin! might be slightly more appropriate) – this was one of the films that just missed the cut back in 2004, mainly due to it only getting a very limited release in my area (subtitled films always had a hard time in Lancashire – at one point, if you rang up to book tickets for one, the person on the other end would ask you if you were sure you knew what you were doing).

(Lest you be wondering, yes, it apparently is definitely called Good Bye Lenin!, rather than the Goodbye Lenin! or even Good-bye Lenin! you might expect. Just another sign of a film made by non-native speakers of English, I suppose, along with the fact that the subtitles on the DVD had rather more spelling mistakes than you might expect. What can I say, I’m never off-duty.)

So, anyway, I decided to watch this particular film before my actual foreign trip got started (eight days and counting). Mostly set in 1989 and 1990, it concerns a young man named Alex (Daniel Bruhl) and his family, who as the film opens are resident in East Berlin. Alex’s father apparently abandoned them and fled to the west some years earlier, and as a reaction to this his mother (Katrin Sass) has become a zealous true believer in the communist system. His sister (Maria Simon) is more pragmatic.

Alex himself is no fan of communism and opts to take part in a public protest one night, with two very significant consequences: firstly, he meets a rather nice young Russian nurse (Chulpan Khamatova) with whom he goes on to have a relationship, and secondly (and perhaps more importantly) the sight of him being arrested by the police and bundled into the back of a truck is enough to give his mother a severe heart attack. Poor medical attention results in her being in a coma for eight months, during which time the Wall comes down and the communist government collapses. Alex is warned by the doctors that his mother’s health is fragile and she should be spared any shocks or excitement – which will be tricky, in the circumstances.

So Alex embarks on a systematic programme of benevolent deception, getting rid of all the post-communist things that are cluttering their apartment and doing everything he can to maintain the illusion that nothing has changed in East Germany. Initially this just takes the form of transferring new food into old packaging, but it inevitably becomes more and more elaborate as time goes on. Can Alex keep his mother in the dark, even as the reunification of Germany approaches? And is he really acting for the best in deceiving her like this?

For a long time I was aware of Good Bye Lenin! and eventually came to think of it as ‘the Daniel Bruhl movie’, this being the film that really brought the actor to international attention: he has gone on to make contributions of various sizes to films as diverse as The Bourne Ultimatum, Rush, Captain America: Civil War and Alone in Berlin, to name only a handful. I’ve always found him to be an extremely watchable actor, and that’s the case here, too – he carries the movie with great aplomb, without ever doing anything too flashy or otherwise being caught acting.

That said, Good Bye Lenin! is a very accomplished film in many ways. The advertising for the film perhaps over-emphasises the comic elements of the plot, stressing the absurdist comedy of Alex trying to maintain the illusion of communism’s survival. There are indeed some very funny moments arising from this – at one point, Alex makes a cheery speech to his mother about time going by, but nothing really changing, totally oblivious to the Coca-Cola advert slowly unfurling in the window behind him – and there’s something quite fascinating about the alternate history he is forced to develop to explain all the changes happening in the city (Coca-Cola is finally acknowledged as an invention of socialism, while an economic crisis in the west has flooded the eastern bloc countries with refugees seeking a better life). Much of the humour is very understated and ironic, particularly Alex’s dry voice-over (at one point he explains how he embarked on his first mission to explore western culture, which plays over a scene of him visiting a sex shop in the west).

However, the film is never very far from a more serious moment, as perhaps befits this kind of subject matter. The film is really about the partition of Germany, and the consequences of its reunification, with the division of Alex’s own family and the heartbreak arising from this a metaphor for the divided country. And it’s very hard to escape the impression that the film is, on some level, motivated by nostalgia for some aspects of life in the old East Germany – it seems rather disdainful of the garish consumerism that filled the void left by the collapse of communism, especially famous brands like Coke and Burger King. Towards the end one of Alex’s faked TV broadcasts speaks of the westerners fleeing their materialistic lives, coming to eastern Europe in hope of something better, and you can almost imagine something like that happening.

I suppose you could argue that the film’s not-unsympathetic depiction of life under communism is part and parcel of the story, which hinges upon Alex’s mother and her love for the old system – the film views it with the same rose-tinted spectacles that she does. In the end the film stays ambivalent about the morality of the deception Alex perpetrates, as it does seem to keep his mother happy. Maybe the communist system was based on another deception, but it was not without its own kind of optimism.

In the end this is a thoughtful film, with moments of seriousness as well as humour, clearly made by people who know their cinema (there are a couple of cheerfully brazen raids on Kubrick, for instance). I wonder if perhaps you have to be German to really appreciate the emotional core of the picture, for it certainly feels like a film made in a country still trying to deal with its own recent history, but for everyone else this is still a well-made, entertaining, moving film.

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