Canvas by Grolsch: Russian Film Culture Under the Putin Regime - In Dialogue with Andrei Kartashov

I spoke to St. Petersburg-based film critic and editor Andrei Kartashov about the current cultural climate in Russia, and its influence on the Russian film industry. You can read it here. 

Grolsch Film Works: Bible Bashers + Assorted Religious Freaks

   I wrote about all the priests, nuns, and religious freaks that have been populating our cinema screens this year, from Noah to Calvary, over at Grolsch Film Works. 

Canvas by Grolsch: Greek Historical Memory Onscreen

   I wrote about Greek and Greek diaspora cinema in the postwar era, and you can read about it here!

London Film Festival for Verité Film Mag: Alice Rohrwacher's The Wonders

   I reviewed Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher's second film, The Wonders, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes Film Festival, for the now-defunct Verité Film Magazine. You can now find the review here:

A lyrical film of endless emotional generosity, The Wonders is the second, Grand Prix-winning feature from Italian director Alice Rohrwacher. A coming-of-age tale with none of the requisite moments that the label entails, it concerns a twelve-year-old girl, Gelsomina (Maria Alexandra Lungu), who lives on a farm with her family in a dry, sparse portion of the remote Italian countryside. The quiet and dutiful eldest sister, she's her father’s golden girl.

Her father (Sam Louwyck) is the foreign-born, stern patriarch of the family, who together practice ancient beekeeping rites and produce organic honey. Sometimes he’s an insensitive tyrant, but mostly he’s a greying, comically irate man prone to shouting and wearing very small pairs of Speedos. It's his bad luck, given the hard graft of the family business, to have fathered only girls. Gelsomina helps tend to the bees and processes the honey, and she is followed, almost constantly, by her chubby, incorrigible sister, Caterina, and two chattering, dark-haired little ones, who jump in puddles and trail behind mischievously. The family live an isolated, almost out-of-time existence, and as a result, are incredibly close-knit.

One afternoon, the girls and their father stumble across a commercial being shot for a local competition named ‘The Countryside Wonders’. A glamorous TV celebrity (played by a forever elegant Monica Belluci), stars in the ad. Gelsomina is clearly bewildered and stunned by this beautiful apparition, who places a sparkly clip in her hair. With her big-city manner, poise and style, she symbolises everything that is enigmatic and sophisticated to a rural girl on the cusp of womanhood. Set up for local farmers, the competition offers a television appearance -- along with a cash prize and a luxury cruise. This is a terribly exciting proposition to Gelsomina, who has no inclination of just how out of step her family is with contemporary Italy, and how jarring the experience will be given their steady, Etruscan traditions.

“Unsparing close-ups encapsulate the trials of youth growing up within the context of a dying old world”

While the rural, antiquated setting might seem positively alien to many viewers, the universality of Gelsomina’s gawky in-between age is not. With burgeoning teen-hood, Gelsomina is beginning to lose interest in the dusty, repetitive work on the farm and developing a growing fondness for boys, particularly a delinquent foster child who is hired as a farm hand. Teenage mistakes lead to adult humiliations, all channelled through the sloe-eyed, watchful gaze of expressive young actress Maria Alexandra Lungu. She observes her surroundings with a kind of vacant surprise, as if half-seeing everything newly for the first time.

Lungu's strange stillness and Rohrwacher’s unsparing close-ups encapsulate the trials of youth in a dying old world. Accordingly, there is a growing chasm between father and daughter where it was once airtight. Spell-binding despite being a touch protracted, The Wonders redeems itself of any meandering by virtue of being so deeply affecting.

London Film Festival for Verité Film Mag: Leviathan Review

   You can read my full review of Leviathan, this year's Best Film winner at BFI London Film Festival, for Verité Film Mag, below:

     A wide-reaching political allegory that squarely targets the aggression of the Putin regime, Leviathan is the award-winning fourth feature from director Andrey Zvyagintsev. Rarely utilising close-up, Zvyagintsev’s camera gazes from the middle distance. Using the visual language of the epic, his wide shots capture the remote, windswept seaside environs of working-class Russia. The  simplicity of these compositions facilitate a searing intimacy with the characters, enlivening what might otherwise have seemed didactic. 

Kolya (Aleksei Serebryakov), is a hot-headed mechanic whose land is being appropriated by the local government for construction purposes. Kolya’s teenage son and put-upon younger wife, Lilya, (Elena Lyadova) are resentful and terrified of losing their home, which will be bulldozed under the government’s plans. The crooked mayor who orchestrates this legalised robbery is Vadim (Roman Madyanov), who compensates the family with only a sliver of what the property is worth, leaving them financially bereft. 

Kolya’s old army friend, Dmitry, (Vladimir Vdovichenkov) is a hotshot Moscow lawyer, and out of close friendship, Dmitry offers to help Kolya appeal the decision on his land. He offers cool assurance and neatly articulated arguments by comparison to Kolya’s lumpen, emotional response and on first appearance, Dmitry seems the far more capable and sensible of the two. 

“A film of systemic corruption and inebriation. Tension stings with each gulp of Vodka”

Yet, as the ensuing legal quagmire proves, coolly applied logic is potentially dangerous. Mired in local influences and anecdotally tied to the Orthodox church, the appeals hearing is inevitably a failure, a public official rattling off indecipherable legal jargon, flatly denying any intervention on Kolya’s behalf. Mayor Vadim, human refuse of the worst sort, later visits Kolya’s home, belligerently drunk and gloating about his success. A corrupt, venal man with a portrait of Vladimir Putin on his office wall, Vadim is guilty of any number of terrible deeds. Cleverly, Zyvagintsev leaves us to wonder about the specifics. 

In Leviathan, what begins as a direct take-down of Russian bureaucracy mutates slowly into a forsaken family drama. The plot could be said to contain elements of melodrama, but only if you stripped the dramatic moments of all their artificial tenor, peeling the layers back to their most basic, wounding humanity.

It’s an appropriate emotional temperature for a director whose films are structured and told in beautifully pared-down, elliptical, visual prose. Seamlessly transitioning between scenes without effect, information is consistently withheld from the audience then matter-of-factly stated in conversation. Too smooth to be startling, too commonplace to work as generic twists, there’s an impression of characters constantly on the verge of spilling their guts; unspoken words always on their lips, but routinely stymied. Either through Zvyagintsev’s sudden ellipses or their own inability to communicate, these individuals are isolated from each other in terrible ways, the brittle semblance of community imploding violently on the egotistical whims of those with money and influence. 

Canvas by Grolsch: Women's Lib on Film

     I wrote about women's lib in American films of the '70s. You can read what I said here. 

Grolsch Film Works: The Editor Review

          You can read my review of giallo parody The Editor here, at Grolsch Film Works. 

Canvas by Grolsch: Transcending the Horror Film

    I'm interested in movies that straddle the line between generic horror and something far more deep-rooted - things like Freaks, Come and See, and Titicut Follies. Read what I had to say about them and about the kind of horror they elicit at Canvas. 

Mayhem Horror Film Festival 10th Anniversary

 

Photo courtesy of Peter Bakewell

October 30th kicked off the 10th Anniversary of Broadway Cinema's Mayhem Horror Film Festival, and amazingly, it's come and gone already. Prior obligations ended up preventing me from seeing as much as I normally would have, but the programme was really varied and exciting, and I wanted to provide a brief overview of some of the highlights. Programmers Steven Sheil and Chris Cooke really made an effort to do something special for their 10th anniversary, and they've included everything from '70s-throwback slasher films to vampire parodies to 50's oddities in their selection.

Excitingly, Mayhem has more plans for 5-7 December. They've paired up with the BFI to take part in its ongoing Sci-Fi season, 'Days of Fear and Wonder' - and will be screening some gems around the theme of 'The Created Woman'.  Their screenings will include Solaris, The Stepford Wives, Metropolis, and Weird Science.To that end, Mayhem will be branching out to explore the female body as a symbolic site of transformation, anxiety, and fear of sexual difference.

Back on the subject of this year's Mayhem Festival, here are some of the things I managed to check out:

Astron-6 Shorts:

Matthew Kennedy, Conor Sweeney, and Adam Brooks - otherwise known as The Canadian filmmaking collective Astron-6 - were in person to introduce and discuss their work on Thursday evening. It began with a little anthology of their short films, all filmed with an '80s VHS aesthetic but a very 21st-century self-awareness. The subjects of their parodies range from the zombie film to the Troma horror, with trailers for imaginary films like Bio Cop, featuring a grotesquely squidgy-faced mutant forced into a uniform. These playful DIY films poke fun at a huge range of sci-fi and horror tropes, and star the filmmakers themselves, who also do their own special effects, stunts, writing and producing. With names like 'Objectified Woman #3' rolling through their credits, Astron-6 aren't ever going to be accused of being earnest or highbrow. For that we can all be thankful.

The Editor (2014) Dir. Adam Brooks + Matt Kennedy 

You can find my full-length review of Astron-6's feature film at Grolsch Film Works.

The Town that Dreaded Sundown (2014), Dir. Alfonso Gomez-Rejon 

Borne from a 1976 cult horror film of the same name, and serving as a sort-of sequel to that work, The Town That Dreaded Sundown is a stylish, referential slasher film made by one of the producers of hit TV show American Horror Story. Based on a series of actual late-night murders on lovers' lanes in the early 1950's, the film is set in the aptly-named Texarkana, a small border town between Texas and Arkansas. The 'phantom killer' of innocent teens - who was never brought to justice - still mars the town's history, and it is this checkered past that encourages a copycat killer to go out on the prowl. A teenage girl who survives the killer's rampage starts digging into the history of the murders, and puts herself in grave danger by doing so. With precise, weathered production values capturing the look and texture of contemporary Texas, the film is expensively shot and requisitely twisty, but falls a little flat by the conclusion. As is often the case with slasher movies of this type, the preceding 3/4ths are much more fun than the reveal. 

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1973), Dir. Tobe Hooper

The 40th anniversary restoration of this low-budget, grisly masterpiece genuinely looked great - it avoided the trap of any pre-packaged digital cleanliness. As it goes, nothing can make this film feel less grimy. Hooper, who included real rotting animal carcasses on set, gives a texture of grubbiness and gristle to the film. And to say that a large chunk of the latter portion involves little more than hysterical running and screaming, there isn't a moment that isn't oppressively frightening.

One can't help but to see the twin woes of the early 1970s - the Vietnam War and economic recession -  creep their way into the film. There is, of course, a portrait of dispossessed slaughterhouse workers looking to continue the family tradition - right down to their eerie recreation of domestic bliss. From the cheerful front-porch facade of Leatherface's family home to Marilyn Burns' invitation to a grotesque dinner, something is deeply amiss in those much-avowed 'hearts and minds' of the American public.

Ultimately, Marilyn Burns' catatonic eyes and incessant screaming are the most disturbingly memorable elements of the film; they worm their way into your skull. A simpering madman pursues a brutalised innocent; and the final few shots show a man tilting at windmills. With the imprecise brute force that it entails, Leatherface swings away wildly when there's nothing left to destroy. He will pulverise anything in his wake. It's clear that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre's twisted black heart has an allegorical impulse at its centre; and Hooper's vision of his nation's moral degradation is as blisteringly traumatic as it was in 1973.

Canvas by Grolsch: The Photographic Eye of the Auteur

In the lead-up to the release of photography doc Reely + Truly, directed by Tyrone LeBon, I wrote about famous auteurs who bookended their cinematic careers with extraordinary photography work. You can click here to read about Stanley Kubrick, Dennis Hopper, and others.