The Idiots {1998}

Cast: Bodil Jørgensen, Jens Albinus, Anne Louise Hassing
Director: Lars von Trier
Screenplay: Lars von Trier
Studio: Zentropa Entertainment
Runtime: 117 mins
Genre: Foreign/Drama
Country: Denmark





It's always awe-inspiring when somebody in this earthbound existence steps up and does something completely out of the ordinary. Although Danish filmmaker-cum-provocateur Lars von Trier isn't relatively new to behaving like a wild child of world cinema today (if you're uninitiated to the von Trier canon, try seeing either Breaking the Waves or Dancer in the Dark, but for your good life's sake not simultaneously together, you'll be gagging for a strong swig of whiskey afterwards to send all the gloom and bitterness down from the back of your throat to the pit of your stomach), during his Dogme 95 manifesto-toting early days, he was a revolutionist, a trailblazer of pure, challenging cinema. A plumpy, Eastern European version of Jean-Luc Godard minus the signature Raybans and cigarette questioning every single Hollywood convention and advocating tenets of credible, intelligent filmmaking. The year 1998 saw this said cinematic revolution. Cannes was invaded by the Danes, with two liberal-minded films Dogme #1: Festen and Dogme #2: Idioterne. Two films that defied hard-fast rules of established cinematic techniques, observational works that employed lo-fi, home-video aesthetic, naturalistic use of setting and sound, and engaged with improvised performances. Realism, meanwhile, is the ultimate goal.

Yet despite sounding so simple ('Hookay, let's grab a videocam and start filming, dude!'), von Trier's entry to the "Vow of Chastity" aka the Manifesto, The Idiots, is far from simple. It's an elaborate, maddening, challenging piece of work. The title points to a gang of middle-class malcontents, educated and crucially aware of the zeitgeist, masquerading as an institution of the mentally handicapped. With intention and full recognition of their actions, they take the piss on society and its norms, and pull pranks on anyone as they drool and dribble and convulse their way through restaurants, pubs, streets and public swimming pools - and then retreat to their suburban estate like post-modern hippies, disdainfully sniggering at society's pathetic reactions to the handicapped
. It's without a doubt a provoking concept for a film, as we viewers laugh at the pranks pulled at the beginning, cringe at the crew's deliberate social experiments halfway and then later compel us to recheck society's inherent revulsion to anything abnormal.

Von Trier seems determined to suggest the poser here, what is normality? In the freewheeling attempts of the group, we see a dark mirror of the bourgeois superiority complex, patronising those that commit unruly social behaviours whilst this pack of anarchists feel much more superior about their actions in return. Normality is this group's number one enemy, as they all disregard etiquette and common decency, shredding clothes in public and even an explicit gang-bang sex with full-on, brief, upfront, pornographic penetration. Don't watch this with your puritanical grandma, she might die of heart attack. All of this is observed using scattershot camera, with a fragmented storyline that that shifts gear from one situation to the next, conveying a pseudo-reality show feel. But the laughs completely dissipate when the band is visited by Down's Syndrome patients, where the leader of the pack, charismatic yet nihilistic Stoffer, is appalled by the genuine innocence and twitchiness of the patients - a reaction that turns out exactly akin to those oblivious people they take the piss on. From then on, the foundation soon starts to crumble, and they begin to question themselves and their purpose. That they're nothing more but a group of social misfits who couldn't function in the so-called normal environment, and their spassing is their way to be involved in something, to be noticed, even in sheer disgust.

The Idiots, despite a difficult viewing experience, reveals some devastating truths and emotional cruelty of humanity, themes that would recur in many of von Trier's later works, most especially Dogville and Dancer in the Dark, in which the films' heroines are subjected to forms of social and psychological punishments. And here, we witness this in Karen, the newest member of the gang, whose transformation from a shy middle-aged wallflower to a willing saviour of the group's final degeneration by volunteering to 'spass' in household environment is developed to a heart-wrenching effect. There's a riveting final shot that will have you either fuming in anger or sobbing your eyes between your clenched hands, depending on your emotional capacity.



The cinematic equivalent of a knife in your gut. The Idiots is altogether a complex, maddening, devastating, kaleidoscopic one-of-a-kind viewing experience. Compared to its more triumphant film-brother Festen, this is an underrated Dogme 95 work that lobs a searing, scathing critique to society, Hollywood and sanitised audience expectations.



Review by The Moviejerk © Janz

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Cléo from 5 to 7 {1962}

Cast: Corinne Marchand, Antoine Bourseiller, Dominique Davray
Director: Agnès Varda
Screenplay: Agnès Varda
Studio: Cinè Tamaris
Runtime: 90 mins
Genre: Foreign/Drama
Country: France





A woman, after hearing a rather grim tarot reading from a frizzy-haired soothsayer, emerges out of the room terribly upset. She descends down the staircase, beset with anxiety. But before she leaves, she checks herself in the mirror, ruminating "When you're beautiful, you're more alive than many others'. Wiping her tears away, she swept out into the glorious Parisian daylight. This is Cléo, a minor French chanteuse with three popular songs under her belt, and she's possibly dying. Throughout the film's entire course in pseudo-real time, hence from 5 to 7, we accompany her as she waits for the test result of her medical biopsy of her stomach cancer. What purports to be a documentary at the onset, the camera following this woman's foray into a personal odyssey, turns into a luminous, quietly touching, subtly intellectual cine-essay about the transience of life, and inevitability of death.

If that sounds a bit depressing, don't fret. It's not all gloom-and-doom. In fact, this beautifully designed central conceit ironically breathes life to Agnès Varda's masterful work, where a sense of foreboding and uncertainty hangs resolutely for the entire film, making everything the heroine's wilful actions attain a gravity to them. At the exterior, she's frivolous, pretty and chic and she spends the first half of the film engaging in capricious preoccupations - shopping for hats, being pampered by her PA, and cavorting with her distant lover. But after an achingly painful breakdown with a Michel Legrand-penned song (Legrand appears as the pianist), she sheds off this spoilt façade sans hair-wig and feathery frock, breaking free from the world of pretence and meaninglessness. What seems to be frivolity turns out to be a front, a cover-up to mask an emotionally shattered being faced with a cold, bitter truth of mortality. She soon wanders around the streets of Paris, seeking for some shred of meaning to her own existence.

Corinne Marchand gives a graciously nuanced performance as Cléo. In a superlative sequence in the Bois-de-Bolougne park, she starts strutting around the stairs as though in a musical in a self-plea for distraction and then subsequently descends into a melancholic self-pity. Nevertheless, there's a lightness of touch in Varda's approach, as she introduces a promise of romance, bringing vivacity to the final proceedings. Consider it whatever you want, may it be plot contrivance or a cinematic desperation to uplift things up, Varda handles the existential identities between
Cléo and Antoine, the soldier she meets at the park, with a quiet dignity, allowing the two characters to share an unfettered emotional and psychological candour. The result is magnetic. This pre-empts Richard Linklater's superb Before Sunset and Before Sunrise double-act, with a brief encounter that turns into something relevant. For the first time in Cléo from 5 to 7, we observe the heroine getting calm, free from anxiety.

This are feminist tones to the film, and only more remarkable since the magnitude of the French New Wave is ruled by masculinity - boys with guns, rebels of society, lovers on quarrel. Cléo from 5 to 7 is very much a nouvelle vague film, aware of its cinematic medium, as Varda uses jump-cuts throughout the film, elaborate camera set-ups, soft-focus lens during intimate moments, and even juxtaposes the scenes of tarot-reading in colour with the entirely black-and-white shots. She manipulates time, space and emotions here - and ultimately debunking the very idea established by the New Wave movement, that cinema verit
é is as pretentious as any other movements. Varda argues the cinema is, and will always be, cinema - open to manipulation of all sorts, an artist's plaything, a beautiful pretender emulating life but shall never achieve such ambition. She creates a vision of real-time life, but she soon puts it to hiatus before the final half-hour, with a sudden cut of
Cléo and Antoine staring into each other's eyes, an inspired final shot that rivals François Truffaut's freeze-frame of Antoine Doinel in Les Quatre Cents Coups, reminding us that this is reel-time she's fashioning. Life is more complex than that. The ending also suggests various things, whether
Cléo and Antoine will blossom into a romantic relationship or both of them will soon share a status quo, that she's indeed dying and that he's being sent to fight in a war in Algeria, thus his impending death. Nonetheless,
from
first frame to the last, Varda firmly contends
that awareness and acceptance of death only makes life much sweeter to live.



As profound and technically daring as any incendiary works of the 1960s French New Wave. Varda crafts a quietly thoughtful yet compelling portrait of femininity in an era dominated by the boys of the nouvelle vague. This belongs to a higher order of sophisticated filmmaking, which arguably ranks alongside Godard's A Bout de Souffle and Truffaut's Les Quatre Cents Coups.




Review by The Moviejerk © Janz

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Les Demoiselles de Rochefort {1967}

Cast: Catherine Deneuve, Françoise Dorléac, George Chakiris, Michel Piccoli, Gene Kelly, Danielle Darrieux
Director: Jacques Demy, Agnès Varda
Screenplay: Jacques Demy
Studio: Madeleine Films
Running-time: 120 mins
Genre: Musical/Romance/DramaForeign
Country: France





Let's be truthful - the musical genre is an all-too American affair. It's hardly surprising when you take a peek into every single 'Best Musical' poll around the planet and you'll be pressed to find that they're all American. Or at least financed by Uncle Sam's currency. So when a foreign musical comes along, it gets snubbed or flippantly pushed back into the depths catalogue oblivion. Which is a shame, because Jacques Demy's Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, his follow-up to the luminous Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, is an exuberant, joyous homage to the Hollywood musical genre - complete with romantic abandon, Technicolour bombast, radiant choreography and titillating songs - that for a momentary consideration, the Americans should be pleased with the cinematic gesture. Nevertheless, the collaboration of Demy and his wife Agnès Varda remains self-consciously French, that it's understandably too hard for them to betray the nouvelle vague which they belong to. The result is glorious musical filmmaking.

This may be Cherbourg's twin sister, but whereas Cherbourg is more technically daring as an all-sung romantic opera and bears a more melancholic, wistful tone, Rochefort is the exact opposite. Effusive, jubilant and formally reverent to the genre, Rochefort is essentially a film about dreams, love and hope. It's a tale about small-town idyll, where twin sisters Delphine and Solange (played by real life twins Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac respectively) yearn to leave Rochefort and hit the big-town Paris. The entire film takes place in a long weekend, and the roving narrative weaves upon the lives of the town's folks; the lovelorn mother, the quixotic sailor in search for his 'feminine ideal' (played by a very young Jacques Perrin), the besotted American visitor (Hollywood musical legend Gene Kelly in a cameo role), the toe-tapping twosome and the nostalgic piano dealer. Unlike the traditional Hollywood narrative, Demy does not focus on any protagonist, or the two heroines for that matter, but allows these miniature stories to mesh with each other in often complex intersections and teasingly beautiful interplay of time and missed opportunities. Rochefort is a French film through and through. It glorifies life yet never forgetting reality, and in the end, it seems to imply that we are all part of a bigger tapestry, and whilst shit happens, love will conquer all.



An exquisitely, eloquently made nouvelle vague musical. Where Demy's Les Parapluies de Cherbourg is a love song to lost love and broken dreams, his follow-up Les Demoiselles de Rochefort is a hopeful chanson to love found and regained where characters cannot help but sing their hearts out. This is French film magic.




Review by The Moviejerk © Janz

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Alice in Wonderland {2010}

Cast: Mia Wasikowska, Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham-Carter, Anne Hathaway
Director: Tim Burton
Screenplay: Linda Woolverton
Studio: Walt Disney Pictures
Running-time: 108 mins
Genre: Fantasy/Adventure
Country: USA




Once upon a time, a fair few had tried meddling with Lewis Carroll's literary apothecary, and the results were somewhat varied: some ended up plain mediocre, some poisoned by toxic cinematic waste, and many unfortunate souls forever banished to Dullsville. From the silents, to animation, to talkies, to brash Technicolour, to kiddie television (you can IMDB it, the list is bloody endless) - there is none that bring the visionary inventiveness and bravura to Carroll's children's classic that deserves the title 'great film'. That is, if you set aside Spirited Away, which is arguably Hayao Miyazaki's reworking of the tale, a Japanese Alice in Wonderland. Other than that, virtually zilch. So when Disney announced they're having a second stab at the much-influential fairytale with Tim Burton and Johnny Depp on the bandwagon, there's not much groaning as excitable lolloping amongst the Burtonian fandom. Perhaps Burton, the most zany, eccentric, Mad Hatter of Hollywood cinema, will bring us the Alice the mainstream has been waiting for. Perhaps.

As it seems, this is mere wishful thinking. Although Burton's signature visual touches are ever present (swooping cameras and post-modern Gothic otherworldliness to Underland's design), its narrative is pure Hollywood gossamer gloss, with the Mickey Mouse studio capitalising on a British national treasure to engage business with the 10-year old demographic. So we have a 19-year old Alice in this reimagining of Adventures in the Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by way of sequel, where Alice flees a stuffy Victorian engagement party and her fiancée-wannabe and stumbles down into the rabbit-hole the second time around to find that the primary-coloured Wonderland of her childhood days is now all dark and ominous Underland ruled by a tyrant, the Red Queen. What promises to be an existential, brooding, coming-of-age character-piece turns into something like Narnia on acid trip.

There are the famous, if obligatory, shrinking-and-growing sequences, and the oddball characters returning for a cinematic tea-party and so far, so pedestrian. Mia Wasikowska as nearly-adult Alice is fine and feisty, but somehow lacking the conviction needed for an empowered female of the Victorian period of corsets. Not until Johnny Depp's Mad Hatter enters the scene and chews them, with gap-toothed gameness. His Hatter is a work of both extraordinary performing dexterity and utter silliness, seesawing from a British dandy to a boorish Scotsman whilst remaining surreally loony. Adding to the lot is Helena Bonham-Carter as the Red Queen, a scream of a character throwing tantrums like a big child 'Off with their heads!', with a magnificently magnified head, a grotesquerie subtly inspired by Bette Davis' Queen in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex. Bonham-Carter, an omnipresent Burton collaborator (and wife), is obviously having a whale of a time, and so does Anne Hathaway as the royal sister White Queen, a dreamy Nigella Lawson doppelganger. Plus a bunch of British thespians lending their voices in passable fashion; Alan Rickman as the high-on-hooka caterpillar, Stephen Fry as slinky Cheshire Cat, Timothy Spall as the valorous hound Bayard, Michael Sheen as the Rabbit, and Sir Christopher Lee as the Jabberwocky. It's all tolerable, only until both sides of the warring clans form a climactic battle set in a giant chessboard the size of a stadium you'd want to smack yourself awake from this recurring dream, increasingly turning into a nightmare. Then the Mad Hatter starts break-dancing afterwards. That's the point where you definitely shriek yourself awake. Immediately.



Not so much Burtonesque as shoddy Hollywood plot-picking, roll-calling, re-wrapping moribund mainstream affair. You'd wish Burton haven't made this for Disney, as it feels like a Narnia déjà vu. Visually exuberant yet aesthetically uninspiring. Count this as another failed stab on Carroll.




Review by The Moviejerk © Janz

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