Indie

Repulsion and Happy People

Three Two more from the Film Festival! Something old, something new, and something informative…
[Bellflower was going to be included in this group… It’ll be coming soon instead…]

Repulsion

Repulsion is early Polanski and definitely ‘classic’ enough that it’d usually fall way outside the focus of this blog: I tend to lean away from writing about the classics, if only because plenty of people have already written plenty of words about these films - what’s left for me to add? So I’ll be brief…

[There are a couple of nice reviews to be found at Korova Theatre and Radiator Heaven]

Repulsion is a thriller in the old, almost forgotten sense of the world. It thrills. Every single person watching jumped at least once in the film, as poor Carol’s hallucinatory nightmare threw shocks and scares at her in fits and starts. Polanski throws in a wonderful mix of the increasingly repulsive - an uncooked rabbit left out to gather flies and rot - the imaginatively uneasy - a crack in the wall that threatens repeatedly to burst apart - and the threat of real violence - sexually aggressive men pounce at Carol from every corner, some real, some imaginary. It’s edge of the seat stuff that is propelled by a pulsing score and a camera that hovers voyeuristically around doorways and windowframes, beckoning the viewer into Carol’s paranoid fears.

So little of her condition or the realities or origins of her fears is explained that you leave the cinema desperately untangling plot elements in your head, guessing and re-guessing which of the more plausible elements were imagined and which of the more outlandish were real. Great stuff.

Happy People - A Year in the Taiga

This documentary of Siberian life came with a “Narrated by Werner Herzog” tagline - surely as good a guarantee of an interesting film as there can be. Thankfully, it doesn’t disappoint. We are taken, in a fairly straight-forward manner, through a calendar year in the lives of the trappers/hunters of a a Siberian village in the Taiga. Herzog contributes, as you might imagine if you’ve seen his (fabulous) Encounters at the End of the World, some perfectly dead-pan humour and a fair bit of admiration for the trappers. Occasionally, his wistful reminders that, out in the wilderness, they are free of government, free of taxes, free of bureaucracy, etc. etc. is a little too heavy-handed, but for the most part, his narration fits the documentary well.

Far more impressive than anything Herzog can provide are the demonstrations of traditional skills (especially the making of skis and the hollowing of a dug-out canoe), the rugged philosophy of the trappers and, above all, the sheer beauty of the landscape. The rive they live by and hunt around is an enormous sheet of ice for most of the year and comes slowly to life around May, looking something like a glacier rolling down a valley but much, much faster, carrying enormous chunks of ice as it flows. For the next couple of months it’s navigable by boat, but after that it turns back to ice and becomes the domain of the snow-mobile. Happy People is a fabulous watch and, although occasionally too sentimental, it’s a fascinating window into lifestyles we rarely see.

Why You Should Watch The Tunnel

A week and a bit ago, The Tunnel, an indie Australian horror film was released for free online. The creators have taken a daring approach to film distribution, attempting to cover the $135,000 production cost of their film by selling individual frames on their website, releasing a deluxe DVD and organising a couple screenings. A lot has been said already about this side of the project so… let’s ignore it all together and focus on the actual film.

The Tunnel is a pretty damn decent ‘found-footage’ style movie. As such, comparisons to other similarly styled/gimmicky (delete-as-per-your-taste) are absolutely inevitable. Amongst such competition, by my reckoning, The Tunnel mounts a pretty strong defence and, whilst it’s by no means the best around, it certainly holds its own. And kicks Paranormal Activity all over the park (although, in truth, that isn’t exactly hard…)

The unique selling point in this case is the presentation of the story as a documentary, with talking-heads style interviews with several of the lead characters involved in the story. This, as should be immediately obvious, has a fairly massive downside… You. Know. Who. Survives. I’m not giving anything away here at all (I do seriously hope lots of people will watch this) but, given that we expect people to die in horror films (that’s what happens!), the fact that the film makers show us two of the four lead characters talking to the camera from the start leaves the audience to draw some fairly easy conclusions!

Minor documentary-gripe aside, they do succeed in setting up a genuinely intriguing story. With contemporary fears over water-shortages, the New South Wales government have come up with a new plan to use the miles of abandoned train tunnels that run underneath the city for water storage. For various reasons, this leads to our starring group of intrepid (and possibly implausibly stupid…) band of journalists to go exploring in the dark. Sadly, they’ve told no-one they were going (they clearly haven’t seen 127 Hours). And they’re staggeringly under-prepared and under-equipped. Even Theseus took a thread with him when he went into the labyrinth!

Needless to say, all sorts of tragedy, violence and scary noises ensues.

Again, I don’t want to go into too much detail about what actually occurs. The camera wiggles, night-vision comes and goes, screams and cries echo through the tunnels. It’s stylishly and competently put together and puts their sub-Sydney environment to good use. The only criticism I can really level at the film, however, is that with such an interesting background story created for the film, much of the detail and interest gets forgotten about from around halfway through. They’re not the only ones who do it - District 9 forgets entirely about its mockumentary format from about 30 minutes in - but it did leave me wanting a little bit more from the story. I’m not the kind of viewer who likes to be spoon-fed an easy solution, but having interested me in the story, to forget about it was a bit of a let down. Perhaps, like the creators of [REC], they intend to reveal a lot more of the story, the causes, etc. in a future instalment. Perhaps they don’t.

Either way, The Tunnel is a well-made, decently paced and enjoyable film. It’s interesting, genuinely creepy in places and leaves you wanting more (or though not in an entirely positive way). Oh, and did anyone mention that it’s free?

Who cares what I think? Head over to VODO and grab your free copy
or go and buy the DVD.

The Idiots

[NEAR THE END THERE ARE A FEW SPOILERS! ]

I’ve not seen a lot of Lars Von Trier’s films (Antichrist, *shudder*) and generally know more about him from interviews and reviews than from his films. What I do know, however, is that clear meanings and easy answers tend not to be big in his films. The Idiots is a perfect case-in-point and, whilst I would never say I want a director to be heavy handed, to spell things out in an overly laboured manner, I do sometimes, just sometimes think that, when you finish a film and think, “uh….. what?”, the director has actually failed slightly.

The basic set-up here is that we follow Karen and her time with ‘The Idiots’ who are a bunch of white, middle-class hippies in Denmark who are living together peacefully enough in a commune (well, Stoffer’s uncle’s house) and get their kicks by prancing around in public pretending to be mentally retarded. They call this ‘spazzing’.

Now sure, top marks for potentially offensive material but this is nothing unique in itself. In fact (and yes, I realise it’s actually a later example) the League of Gentlemen springs to mind as a comparison (Legz Akimbo theatre group have a day pretending to be disabled). The difference however is that whilst the League of Gentlemen’s characters are awful, horrible people who you watch whilst peeping through your fingers, unsure whether to laugh or cry, the characters of The Idiots by contrast are sympathetic, funny and friendly (for the most part). They have a good time “spazzing” and then go home to laugh about it.

Ah, ok then. So if we’re not groaning at the characters’ sheer insensitivity we must be laughing at their targets, right? After all, this is a projected social-attack. They pretend to be retarded to draw responses from the people in society, to demonstrate how poorly most people know how to react or engage with the mentally handicapped, right? This is about sticking it to the man!

Hardly. Although lead Idiot, Stoffer, firmly believes they are challenging societies values, von Trier goes out of his way to make it clear they are a long way from that. Most of the people we see reacting to the Idiots are a little awkward, sure, but generally pretty nice. If anything, Stoffer must have been fuming and just how accepting their victims were. In an excruciating scene in which Stoffer dumps his pretend-idiot friend in the hands of a group of Hell’s Angels and scarpers, the director shows us extreme and selfless kindness on the part of the bikers; it becomes clearer and clearer that the cold, unsympathetic, economy-lead society that the Idiots are kicking against are simply all too accepting.

So what is the point? Well that’s less clear.

Let’s turn briefly to the more simple goods and bads: the acting is simply fantastic. You don’t have to understand, agree or approve of a film to notice the acting and, whatever you think of the Idiots, there is no doubt that von Trier was working with a fabulous team of actors; they’re just so credible it’s er… incredible (!). Similarly the (wonderfully unconventional) sex-scene is simply brilliant, jaw-dropping and unforgettable. I don’t want to say too much and spoil it but let’s say it involves lots of people and a bit of running around the garden…

Where the film falls down however are the unexplained or implausible points. For such a well acted film, the occasional structural hole is just irritating. For one, much of the film is shot as a documentary. We have interviews with the Idiots looking back at being Idiots yet the story has no real close. This is simply irritating (and very similar to the drifting approach to documentary that plagued District 9) as it makes no sense; if we can talk to the characters afterwards it doesn’t follow that we leave the story and such an undecided ending. There are certain characters missing from the interviews - why? what happened to them? why doesn’t anyone finish their story? This is not ambiguity; this is a set of lazily loose ends that go nowhere.

[THE NEXT PARAGRAPH CONTAINS SPOILERS]

My major problem with it though is, when all is said and done, not a very major problem. It only sticks out so much because it is the last scene in the film, from which we fade to black and so it obviously hangs around in the memory. In it, we see Karen go home to her family and pretend to be an Idiot there. It turns out that she actually joined the Idiots the day before the funeral of her child and had been hiding from the reality of it ever since. Ok. So a woman disappears the day before her child’s funeral? What do you do? “We thought you were dead” says Karen’s sister… so why wasn’t there a police hunt for her? Since when did almost-certainly-depressed women vanishing before a very depressing funeral get shrugged off with a “oh she’s probably just dead”? Seriously? I totally understand that part of the point was the uncaring, heartlessness of her family but you still don’t just presume someone’s dead and do nothing about it. Even more impressively, her piggish brute of a husband jumps to the staggeringly illogical conclusion that, seeing as she is, in fact, alive, her disappearance for two weeks from the funeral and her family demonstrates that she “didn’t care about it very much”. If this were a less realist film, if the characters and reactions were all so implausible I might let this slide as but in this context it just sticks out as patently unrealistic and silly. No-one could come to the conclusions her family and husband come to.

If that seems like a bit of a rant over a comparatively minor point, well, it is. But it’s a point that did irritate me and certainly lessened my enjoyment of the film. Generally, however, it’s an enthralling, interesting and funny film which is definitely worth watching. You do feel slightly uncomfortable afterwards when you realise that, without any clear message, your enjoyment of the film is derived mostly from watching people pretend to be retarded but… perhaps that guilt is the point?

[no screenshots, sorry]