Cast: Jane Fonda, Michael Sarrazin, Gig Young

Director: Sidney Pollack

Screenplay: Sidney Pollack

Running time: 2 hrs 7 mins

Genre: Drama



CRITIQUE:


1969 was a light-hearted year for films. At least the Academy Awards thought so. Favouring over buoyant studio entertainments such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Hello, Dolly! and The Wild Bunch, nonetheless impressive classics, none of the films really showed true grit (no pun intended for John Wayne’s acting prize for True Grit that year)and audacity than that year’s most overlooked movie, which is Sydney Pollack’s gruelling, disturbing work They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?


The twilight of the 60’s saw revolutionary films that purified and emboldened the voice of the counterculture, with Easy Rider’s freewheeling drug escapade and filth and Midnight Cowboy’s sneering on stereotypes. But compared to Pollack’s work, these are weightless subject matters. Indeed, Cowboy have depicted a touching friendship amidst a tragic destitution, which won an Oscar Best Picture along the way, but hardship was never portrayed as intense as desperate, deprived souls flinging themselves to a remorseless dance marathon which can cost them their lives for the cash prize of $1,500. This is during the Depression era of America, where people scrape for a living, fall into endless bread queues and money is very scarce. They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? does not only exemplify to what extent humans can put their selves into at the times of crisis, but it also spits at the face of capitalism and the ruthless exploitation of humanity all for the sake of entertainment. We can only guess why the Academy favoured a lighter fare to this dark, depressing allegory of the zeitgeist.


But this should not prevent the film to be seen as truly a disquieting piece of filmmaking. Ordinary, poverty-ridden folks sign up to be contestants in a Chicago ballroom dance marathon. This is not exactly Strictly Come Dancing as much as Dancing To Death, where each couple have to dance all the time, at all cost, without sleep, rest or whatsoever, and even strut through their daily meals. The most harrowing part of the contest is the “Derby”, wherein couples have to race around the hall in five whole minutes like chickens in a cockpit arena whilst the audience cheer shrilly. It’s a disconcerting sight, but also one that could evoke anger from anyone who watches it with an ounce of humanity.


We witness the central protagonist Gloria Beatty, played to a compelling turn by Jane Fonda, an aspiring actress who is actually very rough-hewn on the edges, sarcastically bitter and world-wearily cynical, go through the contest with all spits and burning rage with the show itself. Yet she allows herself to be a part it. From the rest of the contestants, she’s the only one who really understands the ethos of the show and only the wants the money out of it. Fonda channels this wrath with a controlled performance, and lets her anger simmer underneath. And she does this excellently, veering from resentful to poignant the next minute, with sub-plots of her failed past life coming to the fore. This contest was her only hope. With her tolerance of her partner, an irritatingly naive farm lad Robert (Michael Sarrazin), she sustains herself throughout, but only to discover later on that none of the show truly sees what it is all about – a Sisyphean toil for nothing.


VERDICT:

A dark, often remorseless, depiction of Depression-era dance marathon. This isn’t Strictly Come Dancing as much as Dancing To Death, with a startling coda that says a lot about the ethos of show-making and the zeitgeist. Sidestepping its narrative flaws, it’s a bold piece of existentialist work, with an enthralling, fiery central performance by Jane Fonda.




RATING: A-

Cast: Oksana Okinshina

Director: Lukas Moodysson

Screenplay: Lukas Moodysson

Running time: 1 hr 49 mins

Genre: Foreign/Drama



CRITIQUE:


Films that emerge out of the Swedish turf have their own inherent bleakness in them. This is not without truth as Sweden has the highest suicide rates all over Europe, and let’s not forget that this is the land of Ingmar Bergman, the Father of Swedish miserablism. In Lukas Moodysson’s grim and unrelenting Lilya 4-Ever, one might have to stay far away from sharp objects or vertiginous heights post-viewing, for the depicted portrait of an abused 16-year old girl douses out all hope. Shot in the barren wasteland of Estonia and Sweden, the tragic heroine is abandoned by her mother, forced to live in squalor, thrown into prostitution and cruelly flogged to old men wanting that quick, easy fuck. The ugliness in this film is unbearable, and Moodysson documents with a stripped-bare, unpretentious cinematography that aptly provide the film’s social grit and realism. But it is not without momentary beauty – Lilya befriends a local outsider, the younger Volodya, and this friendship is studied with tenderness, albeit punctuated with the pangs of broken childhood. They sniff glue and run around rooftops in slow-motion. This is escapism in its heartwrenching form.


VERDICT:

For all its flaws, Moodysson transforms a rather proverbial storyline of a teenage prostitute into something with socio-political weight. Lilya 4-Ever is, above all, an indictment to an immoral trade that ruthlessly exploits children’s flesh. It’s also a very dark, depressing movie with a blistering central performance of its lead Oksana Okinshina.



RATING: B+

Cast: Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Danielle Darrieux, Emanuelle Béart, Fanny Ardant

Director: François Ozon

Screenplay: François Ozon

Running time: 1 hr 51 mins

Genre: Drama/Comedy/Musical



CRITIQUE:


The plot of François Ozon’s 8 Femmes is so purposefully implausible that you’d be rolling your eyes throughout its Technicolor patina: eight interrelated women are stranded in a snow-bound country mansion when the master of the house is murdered, stabbed in the back whilst asleep. All of them become suspects and begin to interrogate each other – and soon, a deluge of double-crossing, backstabbing and bitchfights ensue as family revelations and skeletons in the closet aren’t revealed as much as laid bare. It’s really Agatha Christie, but only with maximum kitsch. And if you’re taking this seriously, gnawing and spitting on its ridiculous plot machinations, you’re entirely missing some good campy fun.


Obviously Ozon’s intention is not realism, but rather a self-conscious superficiality of this material. 8 Femmes is a gleeful melange of a handful of genres – musical, whodunit, murder-mystery, comedy, melodrama and family soap-opera – genres that shouldn’t work well together but are pulled off effectively. Compare this to Billy Wilder in steroids. The theatricality, ensembles, vibrant colour palettes hark back to the 1950s Hollywood Technicolor musicals of MGM, which Ozon clearly, and ironically, pays homage and lampoons at the same time, where characters suddenly break out into a spotlight-hued musical number. Ardant’s Pierette embodies a sultry femme fatale with her red-draped jazz number, and Catherine Deneuve’s Gaby gets a breather and a strut with her classy emerald body-hugging ensemble. Here, amid the fracas, head-butting and ambiguous lesbian innuendos, each one pause and gets to sing. It’s a bonkers concept, a songbook of French pop songs recycled to tongue-in-cheek farce.


But the strength of the film really lies on its superlative casting. Convening as many French cinematic icons, like a roll call in France’s Hall of Fame, who are game enough to parody their selves and still end up gloriously delightful to watch, each one stages their own marks of their performances, most prominently Isabelle Huppert’s deliriously jittery spinster, throwing paroxysms of tirade at every opportunity and then draws an unexpectedly devious character arc as she gets a Gilda-esque makeover. And what could be better to watch Deneuve breaks her glacial cool when she literally smashes a wine bottle on Darrieux’s head?


VERDICT:

High camp, pure kitsch, but scrumptious, irresistible entertainment. François Ozon mounts a superficial production with overt theatricality, genre machinations and film-book visual self-consciousness, but only to deliberately peel layers of the characters’ façades and reveal the many different facets of the female psyche.




RATING: B+

Cast (voices): Ed Asner, Jordan Nagai, Christopher Plummer

Director: Pete Docter

Screenplay: Pete Docter, Bob Peterson

Running time: 1 hr 39 mins

Genre: Animation



CRITIQUE:


For having opened the Cannes Film Festival this year, there’s something exceptionally rare about Pixar’s tenth feature-length film Up. Not every year the French cineaste considers a Hollywood commercial feature to premiere at the melting-pot of high-minded cinema, let alone an animated film, the very first in the festival circuit’s history to do so. But Pixar earns its kudos. For throughout the years, the studio has ostensibly graduated from a children’s playground to move into the sophisticated world of animation. Clearly, from the company that brought us cutesy toys, furry monsters, clownfishes and rodents for central characters, it doesn’t take a leap of genius to recognise that they have grown up and has ventured into a more adult-oriented territory. WALL•E was Pixar’s first audacious step – a tale of a solitary robot in a dystopian, nihilist landscape is something that would skirt around a child’s mindset. Now, with more derring-do, Pixar has conceived Up – featuring a lonesome, silver-haired curmudgeon as its protagonist. That alone rarely happens to a studio built around the flights and fancy of the fantastical.


This unlikely hero, retired balloon vendor Carl Fredricksen, is bordering senility and dementia, and literally marooned in his Smarties-factory-coloured house amid a rapidly shifting, steel-and-concrete modernity. At first, he may appear to his neighbours as a miserable old git, but when he later pumps a gobsmacking horde of balloons through his chimney, with an inspired flourish, we’re rooting for this old fella. It’s one of the most magical, awe-inspiring sights you’ll ever see in cinema, one that complements nicely with Albert Lamorisse’s iconic French short The Red Balloon. This is Carl’s stamp of rebellion and call for adventure to Paradise Falls in South America, a dream of a haven that has been tucked away for a lifetime.


As it is a film about following dreams and fulfilling a life’s promise of adventure (this is Pixar’s motto), it’s easily forgiven then that Pete Docter, who understands depth from folly in his Monster’s Inc., decides to appeal to the studio’s commercial nature by bringing out a bonkers prehistoric bird named Kevin, a cross between Road Runner and a loveable parrot, and a pack of collared talking dogs who all try to be funny and ends up rather annoying, like bad thugs employed to fill the screen. It borders the ridiculous and the whimsical, but Pixar has to have something to keep the tots cheerful. Thanks then to a plucky, persistent sidekick Russell, an eager-beaver Boy Scout that boasts more badges than a decorated general. His awkward relationship with the pensioner protagonist starts from wacky to silly and to the downright touching portrait of friendship that transcends years and generations. His quiet confession in a campfire about his absentee father, with Carl’s transformation of paternal affections, is lovingly portrayed. Sentimental but never mawkish. Hence this picture also transforms into a crowd-pleasing buddy movie that’s worthy of a Butch Cassidy and a Sundance Kid, but with zeppelins and airborne combat.


But beneath Up’s colourful palette, masterful animated tricks of whizzbangs and show-stopping sequences in pursuit of Paradise Falls, there lies a beautifully told, bittersweet tale of melancholy, real-life sadness and the inevitable truth of losing a loved one. It’s not a surprise then that the most poignant moments are the ones with the sparsest of dialogues. There’s something wonderfully old-fashioned in the film’s almost-wordless prologue, squeezing decades of life memoir in a five-minute montage, harking back to the silent eras, also masterfully evoked through last year’s WALL•E. It’s an opener that would instantly shatter hearts. Essentially, at its core, Up is a love story that surpasses mortality. Carl’s deceased wife Ellie is the driving force of the adventure, and every single shot of an empty chair, a vacant table and a forlorn house in a distant, floating in the sky, Ellie is omnipresent to Carl’s existence. When Carl discovers Ellie’s adventure book, it’s an ultimately moving epiphany of a life well lived, of somebody who learned to appreciate the real pleasures of life over romantic desires. We also learn to admire Carl’s unswerving tenacity by tethering his floating house on his back, like an Atlas-figure burdened with the world, but also metaphorically alludes to a man who cannot let go of his memories. And Pixar invests so much in the central character that when we witness Carl somnolently gazing at his house being enveloped in the clouds, for a sheer rapturous minute, we somehow glimpse into a man who learns the art of letting go.


VERDICT:

Pixar's storytelling panache is to die for. Some minor weaknesses aside, of the commercial-appealing nature, Up’s storybook simplicity underpins a profound, slice of life tale, balancing reality with the triumph of imagination, and the melancholy with the zeal for adventure. It’s a beautifully moving tribute to anyone who has never given up on something. Awe-inspiring and literally Up-lifting.




RATING: A