LOCARNO FILM REVIEW: Urszula Antoniak’s ‘Nothing Personal’

Posted on August 24, 2009 by admin

nothing-personal x650By Ray Bennett

LOCARNO, Switzerland – Holland-based Polish director Urszula Antoniak’s “Nothing Personal” is an intensely personal and engrossing tale of a ferociously independent young woman’s involvement with a kind widower in a remote part of Ireland.

Lotte Verbeek (pictured) won the best actress prize at the Locarno International Film Festival as a resourceful woman hiking in wild country and thoroughly enjoying her solitude until she stumbles upon a beautiful house by a lake occupied by a genial man named Martin (Stephen Rea), who offers her food for work.

Oblique and enigmatic, it’s a film that will win audiences at festivals and in art houses and have a long life on DVD and Blu-ray as fans relish its performances and images, and ponder its deeper meaning.

The woman refuses to give her name or answer any questions about her life and is singularly uninterested in anyone else’s life stories. Having hiked and occasionally hitched a ride through wind and rain and camped out in fierce weather, she arrives at a destination she probably didn’t know she was seeking.

Curt and indifferent, she slowly allows Martin to offer more than just food as he agrees to her rule of no questions, and after a while she moves into a room in the house. Little is revealed about Martin, although he is clearly well off, dining well with wine at the table each night, besides being a capable gardener and outdoorsman.

Their odd relationship grows as Martin suggests that if he breaks the rule then he has to sing, and when he does, his rendition of a psychobilly country gothic number is hilarious. When the woman finally breaks her own rule, she sings quite beautifully.

The pair’s mutual satisfaction with solitude breeds respect and then a kind of love, and while curiosity about each other does crop up, events do not play out in a predictable way.

Rea is typically sympathetic, and Verbeek brings a unique character to life vividly. At 85 minutes, it’s a short film that, because of the increasingly absorbing characters, many will wish would go on much longer.

Venue: Locarno International Film Festival; Cast: Lotte Verbeek, Stephen Rea; Director, writer: Urszula Antoniak; Director of photography: Daniel Bouquet; Production designer: Jane English; Music: Ethan Rose; Editor: Nathalie Alonson Casale; Producers: Reinier Selen, Edwin van Meurs; Production: Rinkel Film & TV, Fastnet Films, Family Affair Films; Sales: Bavaria Film International, Holland Film; Not rated; running time, 85 mins.

This review appeared in The Hollywood Reporter.

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LOCARNO FILM REVIEW: Sarah Leonor’s ‘A Real Life’

Posted on August 22, 2009 by admin

a real life x650By Ray Bennett

LOCARNO, Switzerland – Sarah Leonor’s “Au Voleur” (A Real Life), starring the late Guillaume Depardieu, is an odd little picture that runs along like a somewhat dull tale of petty criminals but in the last third becomes something else entirely.

The fate of lovers who find themselves on the wrong side of the law is hardly new but these two end up on a small craft rowing down an idyllic river and while it probably shouldn’t work, good acting and an understated script hold it together. The film could well prosper in art houses and travel on the festival circuit.

Depardieu plays a small-time thief named Bruno who leads a ramshackle existence in a nondescript dwelling on the edge of a city, stealing a car here, breaking into a home there. For an hour, the film plods along as an ex-convict (Jacques Nolot) comes to share his place with the intention of going straight while one of his neighbor’s kids gets involved with some boys who buy the car Bruno stole.

At the local bar meanwhile, Bruno encounters easygoing Isabelle (Florence Loiret Caille, pictured), a supply teacher who says she’s just passing through and is more than willing for a short-term affair that soon becomes more complicated.

The rustic and idealized last part of the film is sparked when the police nab the boys with the stolen car and it tracks back to Bruno. Learning of his affair with the teacher, they go to the school but Isabelle breaks free and together they go on the lam.

The adjustment in mood takes some getting used to and there is incongruous use of American folk songs on the soundtrack but as Bruno and Isabelle float downstream, the simple freedoms offer more than they had imagined.

It could easily end up stilted and pretentious but even though their tranquil state is soon disturbed, the film suggests that these particular outlaws who have made one or two bad choices, really have the most ordinary human aspirations.

Venue: Locarno International Film Festival; Cast: Guillaime Depardieu, Florence Loiret Caille, Jacques Nolot; Director, writer: Sarah Leonor; Director of photography: Laurent Desmet; Production designer: Brigitte Brassart; Costume designer: Marie Cesari; Editor: Francois Quiquere; Producers: Michel Klein, Laetitia Fevre; Production: Les Films Hatari; Sales: Shellac; Not rated; running time, 96 minutes.

This review appeared in The Hollywood Reporter.

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LOCARNO FILM REVIEW: Filippos Tsitos’s ‘Plato’s Academy’

Posted on August 22, 2009 by admin

akadimia platon x650

By Ray Bennett

LOCARNO, Switzerland – Intelligent, warm and very funny, Filippos Tsitos’s “Akadimia Platonos” (Plato’s Academy) is a small tale of a proudly nationalistic Greek man who discovers that he might actually be Albanian, a situation that causes trouble for his family and friends.

With an ensemble cast of pleasing skill, the film addresses a worldwide problem with considerable insight, wise humor and a very delicate touch. It will do well at festivals and may make a splash on the art house circuit.

Antonis Kafetsopoulos plays Stavros, a 50-year-old man who runs a tobacco shop in a small square and spends his days idling with three friends who also run tobacco shops. His wife has left him but he cares for his widowed mother who has had a stroke and whose memory is fading.

Ignorant and lazy, Stavros and his friends boast of the heritage of Plato and Socrates but spend their time sitting, drinking and nattering with an occasional game of soccer. They look down on the industrious Chinese immigrants and taunt workers from neighboring Albania with the chant, “Albanian … you’ll never be Greek.”

One of them has acquired an English sheepdog named Patriot that his owner claims only barks at Albanians. Stavros disputes it and makes a bet that the dog will bark at one of the four Greeks and when he approaches it, the dog barks.

But it appears that’s because another man has approached, an Albanian builder named Marenglen (Anastas Kozdine) although the animal is not the only one to respond. Stavros’s mother (Titika Saringouli) appears to recognize the man and she calls out … in Albanian.

Director and-writer Tsitos gentles the story along as he draws the stranger into Stavros’s circle with small but telling moments and sly comedy. The Greek’s dilemma is illuminated by clever touches including a televised soccer game between the national teams of Greece and Albania and the local government’s decision to erect a monument to “intercultural solidarity” in the tobacconists’ square.

There’s also a smart background theme about the western rock bands that Greeks and Albanians have managed to hear over the years, which turn out to be much like most of the world.

Venue: Locarno International Film Festival; Cast: Antonis Kafetzopoulos, Anasta Kozdine, Titika Saringouli, Giorgos Souxes, Konstantin Koronaios, Panayiotis Stamatakis, Maria Zorba; Director, writer: Filippos Tsitos; Writer: Alexis Kardaras; Director of photography: Polidefkis Kirlidis; Production designer: Spyros Laskaris; Music: Enstro; Costume designer: Christina Chantzaridou; Editor: Dimitris Peponis; Producers: Constantinos Moriatis, Thanassis Karathanos; Production companies: Pan Entertainment, Twenty-Twenty Vision; Sales: Greek Film Center; Not rated; running time, 103 mins.

This review appeared in The Hollywood Reporter.

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LOCARNO FILM REVIEW: Xiaolu Guo’s ‘She, a Chinese’

Posted on August 21, 2009 by admin

she-a-chinese x650

By Ray Bennett

LOCARNO, Switzerland – Chinese filmmaker Xiaolu Guo’s “She, a Chinese” is an absorbing character study of a young woman from rural China who makes her way to the big city and then to England in a journey clearly intended to mirror that of her homeland in the modern world.

Beijing actress Huang Lu (pictured, right) is persuasive as Mi Lie, an adolescent whose innocence is robbed before she even sets out from her small village but whose dogged optimism helps her survive despite running into a string of men who offer only disappointment.

Slow in spots and lacking a fully thought through thesis, the film maintains interest because of the actress’s enigmatic but engaging skills. Backed by the U.K. Film Council and Film 4, the picture should get decent exposure in Great Britain and may make some headway on the festival circuit.

Mi Lei is a typical teenager who has never travelled more than five miles from her home until an assault by a local thug prompts her to leave for the big city where she gets a job helping out at a brothel. There, she meets a hoodlum named Spikey (Wei Yibo), who takes her in and is kind to her until he comes home one night with a knife in his back.

On a whim, Mi Lei hooks up with a guided tour to the U.K. where she jumps ship and gets a job at a massage parlor where she meets an aging widower (Geoffrey Hutchings) who marries her. But soon she meets Rachid (Chris Ryman), who runs a local Indian cafe, and moves in with him.

The woman’s experiences hold attention although it stretches credibility that she could have married without a birth certificate or other papers, and the fact that Rachid is an Indian Muslim is left largely unexplored. What the film really has to say about China’s fate in the modern world is not entirely clear.

Venue: Locarno International Film Festival; Cast: Huang Lu, Wei Yibo, Geoffrey Hutchings, Chris Ryman; Director, writer: Xiaolu Guo; Director of photography: Zillah Bowes; Music: John Parish; Editor: Andrew Bird; Producer: Natasha Dack; Executive Producers: Caroline Cooper Charles, Robin Gutch, Jo McClellan, Hugo Heppell, Suzanne Alizart, Will Clarke; Production Companies: Warp X, Tigerlily Films, U.K. Film Council, Film 4; Sales: Films Boutique; Not rated; running time, 98 mins.

This review appeared in The Hollywood Reporter.

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LOCARNO FILM REVIEW: ‘Julia’s Disappearance’

Posted on August 19, 2009 by admin

Julia's disappearance 2 x650

By Ray Bennett

LOCARNO, Switzerland – Sophisticated and insightful, Christoph Schaub’s “Julia’s Disappearance” is a romantic comedy about getting older that should charm grownup audiences keen for some wry laughs without sentimentality.

The film won the public award after its world premiere in the Piazza Grande at the Locarno International Film Festival and should do well internationally.

Schaub draws entertaining performances from an ensemble of talented players with a clever script by Martin Suter that examines the cautionary theme that as people get older they become invisible to others.

The Julia of the title — Corinna Harfouch, pictured with Bruno Ganz — has intimations of this phenomenon while on a Zurich bus heading to buy new spectacles. An older woman (Renate Becker) makes the comment when Julia fails to spot that she wants to sit down.

It turns out that Julia, while cultured and beautiful, is anxious about her 50th birthday, which she is supposed to celebrate that evening with a group of friends.

Julia's Disappearance 1 x650

The film introduces her friends in separate scenes before they gather at the restaurant and wait for Julia to arrive. There are also episodes involving two other birthdays on the same date and these characters are drawn into the story as the film progresses.

Julia, however, has disappeared in another sense too after meeting a charming stranger who introduces himself by asking her to model some glasses he’s buying for his daughter.

Swiss star Bruno Ganz plays the man who captivates Julia with effortless poise and he gives a master-class in the art of seduction by not attempting to seduce her. Their scenes together provide pleasing reassurance that the days of pure screen romance are far from a thing of the past.

While Julia and her stranger dally over drinks, her friends discuss the various pains and pleasures of getting older with sharp dialog and great timing. Stefan Kurt and Andre Jung are standout as a gay couple whose relationship has the same stresses and strengths as their straight friends. Christine Schorn also makes an impression as an 80-year-old who finds at her age there is no reason not to speak her mind.

Polished work by cinematographer Filip Zumbrunn and composer Balz Bachmann add to the pleasure of a film that suggests that getting older is not without considerable rewards.

Venue: Locarno International Film Festival; Cast: Corinna Harfouch, Bruno Ganz, Stefan Kurt, Andre Jung; Director: Christoph Schaub; Writer: Martin Suter; Director of photography: Filip Zumbrunn; Production designer: Susanne Jauch; Music: Balz Bachmann; Costume designer: Dorothee Schmid; Editor: Marina Wernli; Producer: Marcel Hoehn; Production, sales: T&C Edition AG; Not rated; running time, 87 mins.

This review appeared in The Hollywood Reporter.

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LOCARNO FILM REVIEW: Valerie Donzelli’s ‘The Queen of Hearts’

Posted on August 18, 2009 by admin

queenofhearts x650

By Ray Bennett

LOCARNO, Switzerland – “The Queen of Hearts” (La Reine des Pommes) is a frothy but lame Parisian sex farce about a young woman who cannot get over being dumped by her boyfriend and so sets out to sleep with different men.

Valerie Donzelli, who also directs and co-wrote the screenplay with co-star Jeremie Elkaim and Dorothee Sebbagh, plays Adele, who is made dotty by heartbreak and is given to breaking into song at odd moments. Elkaim plays not only her boyfriend but also the first three men she encounters.

Screened in the Filmmakers of the Present Competition, the film uses the boxy Academy-aspect ratio, which fails to take advantage of its Parisian park locations.

Donzelli strips down for fairly explicit sex scenes, but her tendency to either chirp or burst into tears tends to dissipate the eroticism. It clearly is intended to be funny, and some audiences, especially in France, might find it amusing, but for many it will grow swiftly tiresome.

Cast: Valerie Donzelli, Jeremie Elkaim; Director: Valerie Donzelli; Production company: Les Productions Balthazar.

This review appeared in The Hollywood Reporter.

 

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LOCARNO FILM REVIEW: Ho Yuhang’s ‘At the End of Daybreak’

Posted on August 18, 2009 by admin

at the end of daybreak x650By Ray Bennett

LOCARNO, Switzerland – Malaysian director Ho Yuhang composes some arresting images in “At the End of Daybreak,” his film of two youngsters who discover that their society’s rules leave little room for youthful mistakes.

A cautionary tale about how poor decisions can lead to tragedy, the film is likely to resonate more in home territory than internationally. It has appealing leads, and the director makes a point of keeping some nasty business offscreen, but his enigmatic ending adds to a sense that his theme of how bad choices can be fateful is not fully developed.

The trouble for the young couple is that Tuck Chai (Chui Tien You) is a decent lad, but he’s 23 years old, and his girlfriend, Ying (Ng Meng Hui, pictured), who also is well behaved and respectful mostly, has yet to reach 16.

The girl’s schoolmates are experimenting sexually, and when she encourages her boyfriend, nature takes its course. Ying’s parents discover that she’s taking birth control pills and demand to know with whom she’s sleeping.

Called to face the music with his hardworking single mother (Wai Ying Hung), the young man is horrified to discover that the girl’s parents want him charged with statutory rape. They appear to change their minds when his mother offers to pay them off, but when she goes to extremes to raise the cash, they say they will prosecute anyway.

The filmmaker draws good performances from his players, with both youngsters sympathetic and believable, and Hong Kong TV veteran Wai is persuasive as an abandoned woman who strives to do well by her son but too often turns to drink to escape.

There’s a shift in mood when the young man’s dilemma becomes apparent and he realizes he might face years in jail. Things get out of hand when his girlfriend says there’s nothing she can do to alter her parents’ decision.

Ho loses grip on the plot at this point, and though the events that play out are plausible, they are not as illuminating as he clearly wanted them to be.

Venue: Locarno International Film Festival; Cast: Chui Tien You, Wai Ying-Hong, Ng Meng Hui; Director, screeenwriter: Ho Yuhang; Director of photography: Teih Gay Hian; Production designer: Gan Siong King; Music: Pete Teo; Editor: Mindy Wong Vern Yee; Producer: Lorna Tee; Production: Paperheart; Not rated; running time, 94 minutes.

This review appeared in The Hollywood Reporter.

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LOCARNO FILM REVIEW: Babak Jalali’s ‘Frontier Blues’

Posted on August 18, 2009 by admin

frontier blues x650By Ray Bennett

LOCARNO, Switzerland – Intended to offer a droll portrait of eccentric characters living in the northern region of Iran next to the Turkmenistan border, Babak Jalali’s “Frontier Blues” will test the patience of audiences waiting for anything significant or even amusing to happen.

The film from Caspian Films is unlikely to attract much attention beyond a small element of the festival circuit.

The personalities and lives of the four characters whose lives on the barren steppes of the region are briefly explored might have seemed amusing on the written page but fail to come to life onscreen.

One spends much of his time in bed or wandering about with a tape player blaring Western pop tunes with his donkey. His uncle runs a clothing store with items that seldom fit his few customers. Another young man works at a chicken battery listening constantly to tapes that he hopes will teach him English.

The fourth character is an aging fellow who keeps a commercial photographer engaged with staged examples of the local culture while complaining all the while about his wife who ran off 30 years earlier. It all gets tiresome quite quickly.

Venue: Locarno International Film Festival; Cast: Mahmoud Kalteh, Abolfazl Karimi, Khajeh-Araz Dordi, Behzad Shahrivari, Karima Adebibe, Hossein Shams, George Hashemzadeh; Director,screenwriter: Babak Jalali.

This review appeared in The Hollywood Reporter.

 

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THEATRE REVIEW: Rachel Weisz in ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’

Posted on July 29, 2009 by admin

Streetcar 1 x650By Ray Bennett

LONDON – A knockout performance by Rachel Weisz as Blanche DuBois is the main reason to see “A Streetcar Named Desire,” running at London’s Donmar Warehouse through October 3. But the production has many other riches.

Tony-winning choreographer Rob Ashford turns director here and brings out all the poetry and drama of Tennessee Williams’ masterpiece set in sultry New Orleans just after World War II. Weisz has made herself alarmingly thin for the role of a woman whose vulnerability is as delicate as her needs are wanton and who is destroyed by a force that she can neither understand nor control.

Elliot Cowan is suitably muscular, loud and threatening as Stanley Kowalski, the husband of Blanche’s lovestruck sister, Stella, played well by Ruth Wilson (TV’s “Jane Eyre”), and Barnaby Kay makes her suitor Mitch appropriately stolid. From Blanche’s arrival at her sister’s dingy two-room apartment, rendered evocatively by set designer Christopher Oram using wrought iron and a spiral staircase, it’s apparent that this dreamy lost waif will clash with her violently territorial and crude brother-in-law.

Weisz is exactly the right age for Blanche, and though she can do nothing to make her radiant features appear faded, she conveys acutely the woman’s sense of loss and desperate need for emotional nourishment. She increasingly is delusional, but her love of artifice and style is apparent, and it is clear why she is catnip to certain men.

Ashford brings in characters from Blanche’s life to underline the grip the past has on her fragile imagination and cleverly uses the same actor (Jack Ashton) to play the delivery boy she toys with and her late husband in dream sequences. Blanche’s sorrow is the result of seeing the boy she married blow his brains out after she caught him in the intimate embrace of an older man. With her home gone and her teaching career in tatters, she arrives to sponge from her sister with lies about her past and future, only to run into the immovable Stanley.

Weisz brilliantly succeeds in a role that was originated by Jessica Tandy on Broadway in 1947 and played in 1949 in the West End by Vivien Leigh, who went on to win her second Oscar for the Elia Kazan movie version opposite Marlon Brando.

Brando’s shadow looms over any production of Williams’ masterpiece, making life difficult for the actor playing Kowalski, and so it is for Cowan. He gets the strutting-thug part of Kowalksi right but misses the vulnerability and insolence and doesn’t really succeed in showing why Stella loves him, nor why he finds Blanche such a threat.

It’s a stalwart performance, though, in a terrific production, and Weisz makes it unforgettable.

Venue: Donmar Warehouse, runs through Oct. 3; Cast: Rachel Weisz, Elliot Cowan, Ruth Wilson, Barnaby Kay; Playwright: Tennessee Williams; Director: Rob Ashford; Set designer: Christopher Oram; Lighting designer: Neil Austin; Music/sound designer: Adam Cork.

This review appeared in The Hollywood Reporter.

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‘McCabe & Mrs. Miller’ villain Hugh Millais dies at 79

Posted on July 17, 2009 by admin

millais x650By Ray Bennett

LONDON – Hugh Millais, who utters the fateful line that changes everything for John McCabe in my all-time favorite movie, Robert Altman’s “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” (1971), has died aged 79.

As the menacing Butler, who comes to the town of Presbyterian Church “to hunt bear” with two gunslinger sidekicks, he toys with McCabe (Warren Beatty), who has turned down an offer for his business.

Impressed by the men’s ruthlessness, McCabe is now willing to make a deal. Butler listens to McCabe and says, as if insulted, “I don’t make deals.”

Millais, who starred with Susannah York in Altman’s “Images (1972) and with Christopher Walken and Tom Berenger in John Irvin’s “The Dogs of War” (1980), had a life bigger than the movies, as his obituary in The Times makes clear:

“Hugh Millais led a varied life as a film actor, yachtsman, calypso singer, oil-man, design consultant and cook. He spent much of his life travelling, and landed himself in more than one mini-revolution.

“He was a noted raconteur who loved nothing more than to place his mighty frame — he stood 6ft 6in tall — on a high bar stool, pick up a guitar and sing. He was reckoned to drink a bottle of rosé every day of his later life.”

Here’s The Independent’s obituary for Hugh Millais

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