GREGOR CAMERON reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: Korea, take two.

A DIRTY thought makes the world spin around, but a decent moral sets a stable tone. There’s something very alluring about circling the darker side of human sexuality and Kim Dae-Woo’s film Forbidden Quest gets it just right. He leads us into the seedy world, involves us in the dialogue about the rights and wrongs of it, without ever descending into the deliberately prurient.

Taika Waititi is shooting The Volcano, a full-length redux of Two Cars, One Night, in March. The setting: beautiful Waihau Bay, where Taika grew up and Tama Poata/Barry Barclay’s awesome Ngati was shot. ALEXANDER BISLEY asked Taika five quick questions.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: Korea, take one.

KOREA has undoubtedly been making some of the great art/cult/commercial cinema of the last decade, assisted no doubt by the rigid quota systems (which unfortunately is being eroded), heavy investment, and a commercially sustainable population. The Film Society has decided to show a mini-collection of Korean films, from recent years, and provides a chance to see some Korean films which haven’t made the Film Festival or much of a dent on the local circuit. Driving With My Wife’s Lover mines similar territories to the great Hong Sang-soo, with a symmetrical(ish) structure, ménage-a-trois/quatre, and a beady depiction of contemporary Korean relationships. While it doesn’t have the resonance or overall sharpness of Hong, the film is a wry, fractured take on masculinity.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: priming Rain of the Childen.

VINCENT WARD is probably the closest figure to an auteur in New Zealand, which means even his noble failures (such as River Queen) are worthy of consideration. His visual palettes and the understated yet complex moods are brilliantly constructed, and he was able to maintain these tropes even within his mixed American career. Given the release of Rain of the Children, the Film Society in a nice piece of foresight, screened two of Ward’s earlier films – A State of Siege based on a Janet Frame story, and In Spring One Plants Alone, the documentary that forms the basis of Rain of the Children.

A roundup/recap of the current best and rest in film and DVD. In this installment: Underbelly, Donnie Darko: Collector’s Edition, The Chaser’s War on Everything, The War on Democracy, The Investigator, Secret Diary of a Call Girl (DVD); Up the Yangtze, Paris; 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Film).

With the long overdue release of Seasons Three and Four to DVD, HBO’s extraordinary The Wire continues on its rightful format. BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM extols the show’s progress to date. (contains spoilers)

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: life through a lens.

ROSS MCELWEE’s particular brand of angst reaches its apogee in Time Indefinite. A mix of philosophical ruminations, self-deprecating humour, and personal filmmaking, Ross McElwee’s tragicomic documentary carries on the storylines he set up in his previous work. And while the film does drag at points near the end (you feel like you know him and his family really really well after seeing all these films), this is a poignant and wonderful piece of work.

George Andrews/NZ/2008; R0
GA Productions, $49.95 | Reviewed by Andy Palmer

AT LAST we, as a nation, are starting to celebrate our intellectuals; those who have left their mark internationally outside of the sporting arena. Allan Wilson: Evolutionary is a documentary about a man who helped develop and strengthen evolutionary theory. Or, as the publicity puts it, a “groundbreaking researcher and a lightning rod for controversy, [who] revolutionized science and galvanized the scientific community”.

Steven Soderbergh/USA/2005; R4
Madman, $29.95 | Reviewed by Simon Wood

STEVEN SODERBERGH is the exception that proves auteur theory correct. No matter how diverse his projects in scope, they have to be superlative; the biggest cast, the most relevant political argument, the biggest stars. Now we have Bubble, the indiest film he could have possibly made.

Reviewed by David Levinson

IN The Dark Knight – Christopher Nolan’s second outing at the helm of the Batman franchise – the caped crusader may sport a fetishist’s dream of high-tech, tailor-made weaponry, but nothing unleashed on Gotham’s crime populace proves more alluring than the film’s grim publicity-hook: Namely, the fact that it marks the final complete performance by once-rising star Heath Ledger, whose career was tragically cut short by a sleeping pill overdose on completion of filming.

An election on the horizon, Alister Barry’s documentary expose (from Nicky Hager’s book) gets a timely rerun at Wellington’s Paramount Theatre, from September 18.

“SURE WE COULD play the race card, but how would we run the country on Monday?” Jim Bolger wisely said. Yet under Brash-Key the party of Doug Graham centred their 2005 campaign on exploiting and encouraging racism and bigotry. Alister Barry (Someone Else’s Country) skilfully adapts Nicky Hager’s dynamite book; like Orewa Speech author Peter Keenan’s email that he hates the race-based privilege line. Keenan described the slogan as ludicrous given Maori are at the bottom of the heap.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: brief encounters.

THE FILM SOCIETY’s playing of New Zealand short films this year has been a bonus. Too often, the short film has been marginalised as an art-form and within film criticism or exhibition (admittedly, I have neglected to cover the short films in my reviews). This also means short films are often neglected by the artists themselves – for many (and this seems especially true for New Zealand Film Commission funded shorts) it’s seen as a stepping stone for feature films. This means the shorts are merely an excuse to throw in as many ‘quirky’ camera angles as possible, or rely on clichéd or dull storytelling (perhaps the reason why Taika Waititi’s Two Cars, One Night was so good was because it understood what a short film should be doing). It’s a shame as the short film can be just as poignant or thought-provoking as a feature. The Film Society presented six “classic” New Zealand short films, and each had varying degree of success in justifying this classic label.

The Lumière Reader winds down its New Zealand International Film Festivals coverage for 2008 with a series of illustrations by LYNDON BARROIS and ADDOLEY DZEGEDE. The Festival itself (in condensed form) continues to tour these remaining centres: New Plymouth (Sept 4-17), Nelson (Sept 11-25), Greymouth (Oct 2-8), Masterton (Oct 15-29), Queenstown (Oct 23-Nov 5), Gisborne (Nov 6-19), Whangarei (Nov 13-26). The Editor’s Post-Festival Wrap will follow shortly (previous years’ reports can be surveyed here); in the meantime, Lumière’s 70+ film reviews, along with visiting filmmaker interviews, can be revisited via our NZIFF ’08 A-Z Guide.

Grooming and torture in the Middle East. By NINA FOWLER.

DIRECTOR Nadine Labaki’s debut feature is candid and charming. The plot is standard romantic comedy; the film as a whole a dusty, beautiful sweep of the lives of women in Beirut. Labaki herself plays salon-owner Layale, torn between her role as a dutiful Christian daughter and her troubled love for a married man. Beautician Nisrine (Yasmine Al Masri) faces a Muslim wedding night sans hymen. Jamale struggles to come to terms with her age; spinster Rose (Sihame Haddad) gets a last chance at romance. The supporting cast is familiar: cute cop, crazy old woman and handsome American. Where Caramel gets interesting is the intersection of these rom-com cliches with the reality of everyday life in Lebanon. Easy to identify with relationship and work troubles, less easy to relate to an armed soldier tapping on the window of your car.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: Bergman, in passing.

Persona’s opening sequence would probably have had Film Society patrons wondering if the technical difficulties that beset previous weeks’ films had continued with this one. The famous montage shatters the notion of cinema, the idea that we’re comfortably going to suture ourselves into whatever film is playing. And he starts with light (not really in a biblical sense) and splices in clips from the ‘beginning’ of cinema. He moves onto animation, slapstick comedy, horror, pornography (Fight Club wasn’t so anarchic in that respect). Film is instead imaged as a violent art-form, something which tears, destroys, kills. Bergman adopts the idea that cinema captures death – what we see is no longer living, it stopped living the moment it was captured by a camera – and all we see are ghosts of the original trace. Throw in explorations of the tyrannical artist, charting the alienation of human contact, and an emphasis on the frailty/constructed nature of the visual image and you have one of the all-time masterpieces of world cinema.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s brooding, inclement film noir. By STEVE GARDEN.

I LIKE good wine, but there’s a difference between tasting it and drinking it. Many wines are designed to impress at a tasting, but they may not drink as well in front of the fire. And of course, good wine reveals itself over time. At the risk of pushing a strained analogy, the New Zealand International Film Festivals can be like a tasting, but for me it’s always a taste of things to come. I return to many of the films again – sometimes often – and invariably there is much more to discover.

Eric Rohmer’s last wave. By STEVE GARDEN.

NO OTHER film in this year’s Festival arrived with more divided critical opinion than Eric Rohmer’s The Romance of Astrea and Céladon. Rohmer has intimated that this will be his last film, so critics and reviewers have looked to it for the kind of life’s-work summation that neatly enables them to acclaim the artistic continuity of one of the great auteurs. However, many haven’t been able to get past what they regard as its banal anachronistic superficiality. It’s unlikely that Rohmer set out to scuttle them, but this one-time critic has nevertheless produced a work that appears to challenge the cine-literacy of many film commentators. Admittedly, it isn’t immediately apparent where Rohmer is going with this relatively straightforward tale of a romantic misunderstanding that inevitably works out happily-ever-after. We’ve seen it all before, and we’re bound to see it many more times before we see nothing at all, but I wager that few filmmakers will manage such buoyancy and critical potency. Contrary to its seeming triviality, there’s a teasing sense of subtext behind every frame of this deceptively simple film.

Brief, belated impressions on three Festival films. By DARREN BEVAN, CALEB STARRENBURG and ANDY PALMER.

WHEN A film’s billed as 100 minutes of insanity, expectation is high. Hyperbole is one thing, Be Kind Rewind is another. From director Michel Gondry (The Science of Sleep, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), Jack Black and Mos Def star as Jerry and Mike respectively. The pair is a kind of goofy odd duo who are poles apart from each other. Jerry is a paranoid delusionist who lives in a campervan which is situated in the car park of a power station. He’s convinced this station is melting his mind. Mike, on the other hand, works in the titular video store (yes, they push a video store rather than a DVD equivalent) owned by Danny Glover, who brings him up on a diet of respect and the fact Fats Waller was born in the very store in which they work. One day Jerry tries to take out the power station with a grappling hook and some crafty camouflage. But as things tend to with any character Jack Black plays, it all goes awry and Jerry ends up magnetized. And when he ends up in the store, Mike’s stunned to find the entire stock is wiped because of his friend’s electronic eraser ways. Knowing full well that Glover’s character is relying on him to run things, Mike decides there’s only one way to revamp the entire video collection – by re-recording and recreating them.

Taking Turkmenistan to task. By MELODY NIXON.

THE SO-CALLED ‘holy book’ filmmakers Arto Halonen and Kevin Frazier explore in this rough, patchy documentary is the ‘Ruhnama;’ a hysterical and exploitative work put together by former Turkmenistan dictator Saparmurat Niyazov, or Turkmenbashy, as he affectionately called himself. In uncovering what could perhaps be the most esoteric of all subjects in geopolitics, Halonen and Frazier manage to successfully bring to light the intentions, consequences and – ever present in contemporary exposé docos – the multi-national corporate links behind the Ruhnama.

A second take on the Festival’s latest animation programme. By MELODY NIXON.

I HAVE a long-running fondness for Animation Now!. This series of collated animation shorts, brought together for the New Zealand International Film Festivals each year, showcases the latest in animation technology and brings whimsical, sinister and sometimes deeply creepy stories to life in the most vibrant of ways.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: introducing Ross McElwee.

THE FILM SOCIETY has opened its mini-retrospective of brilliant American documentary maker Ross McElwee with two of his earlier short-ish films: Charleen and Backyard. The recent spate of self-deprecating, confessional documentary-making (e.g. I Am a Sex Addict) have their roots in McElwee’s distinctive work. His essay-films merge the social and the historical into something, well, personal (though not necessarily about himself). His hilarious, incisive work reaches its peak with next week’s Film Society film Sherman’s March, but these two little films provide plenty of pleasure, and point to his later works’ idiosyncrasies.

Brief encounters at the Melbourne International Film Festival. By ALEXANDER BISLEY.

LE dysfunctional family! Like Kings and Queen, Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale is a truly outstanding film. Elegant and penetrating, A Christmas Tale grandly explores life’s messy unresolve. Desplechinian themes of family, art and mental illness are plumbed when Catherine Deneuve’s matriach Junon’s cancer demands a dysfunctional French whanau get together for Christmas’ ceremony.

Artisanal spirit in sound hands. By BASIL LAWRENCE.

I DON’T know about you, but whenever I see a Steinway grand piano – whether it be on the stage of the hallowed Carnegie Hall or in the corner of an alleyway bar –, it impresses of having always existed in its finished state; an instrument so stately one struggles to imagine it as a composite of specialised parts and labour, let alone a log fished from Alaskan waters. After viewing this down-to-earth documentary, however, it would be difficult to ignore the intricate artistry that goes into making what, musically-speaking, is much more than the sum of its parts.

Obscure objects of desire compete in Céline Sciamma’s teen milieu. By DAVID LEVINSON.

NOT COUNTING the crystalline emptiness of the teens who populate MTV’s möbius strip of “reality” shows, for most of us adolescence poses a frustrating paradox: Often, at the time, you feel too heady with angst to take charge of the freedom of being young, but from thereon must be subjected to vision after vision that mines that pain for poetic frisson. Water Lilies, by firsttime French director Céline Sciamma, is the latest offender that romanticises – and, by proxy whitewashes – the struggles of puberty, giving itself over to a kind of softcore pageantry.

Into the melting pot: gender, culture and identity. By JOE SHEPPARD.

THE CENTREPIECE of this year’s Festival was a celebration of local talent and ethnic diversity. Both the curtain raiser Take 3 and the main feature, Sima Urale’s Apron Strings, danced closely with the typecast roles that race plays in this country, but the stories ultimately championed the courage required to confront such obstacles and to assert individual identity.

Remembering a past marked by death. By CATHERINE BISLEY.

A DOG RUNS. One by one more dogs join it. They converge in a mass of slather and snarl. They race through terrified blue streets to Boaz. Twenty-six, he tells Ari in an early morning bar. I couldn’t kill people so they had me shoot dogs. There are always twenty-six dogs in my dream because that’s how many I killed. Don’t you have flashbacks to Lebanon?

New Wave German Cinema; Run Yella, Run! By JOE SHEPPARD.

CHRISTIAN Petzold’s estranged and troubled young female leads have graced the Paramount theatre lately in The State I Am In and Ghosts, and Yella protagonist Nina Hoss could easily have been celebrated alongside the other Fräuleinwunder in the recent Film Society season of Pool of Princesses, Requiem, and Longing. Here German reunification casts a long shadow over Saxony-Anhalt, the bleak former-Eastern state where economic recession has destroyed Yella Fichte’s marriage and bankrupted her ex-husband Ben. Yella flees west to the opportunities of Hanover, trading the shelter and hard-earned cash of a simple domestic life with her dad for hotel rooms, suitcases, and making money out of nothing. She is also escaping an ex who stalks and threatens her at every turn and whose actions, as they cross the Elbe on a friendly drive to the train station, recall Caesar at the Rubicon in terms of violence, calculation and irreversible consequences.

The multi billion-dollar industry that preys on the ocean’s most ‘feared’ predator. By CATHERINE BISLEY.

A SHARK is finned alive and tossed back in the ocean: unable to swim it sinks to the bottom, blinking. I went to Sharkwater, the debut documentary of Canadian Rob Stewart, in the hope of ridding myself of a Jaws-induced terror of sharks. Commoditised by Steven Spielberg, this common, yet statistically irrational phobia, has kept my sea going to a shallow and fear filled minimum. Now, with summer only six months away, I have made the firm decision to liberate myself from the chlorinated and, let’s be honest, urinated, surroundings of the Kilbirnie Aquatic Centre. When The Lumière Reader offered to assist in allaying my – previously mentioned – statistically-irrational phobia, I quite naturally leaped at the opportunity. And it worked. The fear was gaffed, finned and finally drowned at full fathoms five.

Synchronised swimming frames Céline Sciamma’s tale of cruel adolescence. By BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.

IT’S a cliché to state that adolescence isn’t necessarily easy, but if you take the Hollywood approach, it’s full of perfectly formed teenagers who eventually find everlasting love. Water Lilies takes the opposite approach: tumid emotions, barely-suppressed hormones, and unrequited infatuations appear the norm. The film looks at a love quadrangle, but one which is full of sharply defined characters who scramble for higher ground with self-interest and selfishness. Barely a trace of love is there.

The Dardenne Brothers revisit an underworld of human transactions. By DAVID LEVINSON. (contains spoilers)

FOR ALL their nominal prestige, there’s a welcome lack of pomp surrounding the event of a new Dardennes’ film. Maybe it’s because, unlike the Coens – whose in-house pecking order sees to the divvying up of writing, but not directing duties – the Belgian duo enact their craft under the same industrious anonymity that informs their characters. Whatever the case, Lorna’s Silence, their latest collaboration, opens on familiar terms – with a nod to Bresson: Mimicking L’Argent, we witness a cluster of Euros changing hands, unspooling a bleak scenario that finds the title character hitched to a junkie named Claudy (Jeremie Renier) in order to gain citizenship. Strictly a formal arrangement, the pair cohabit a flat in Liège, where – hair cropped boyishly close – Lorna (Arta Dobroshi) flaunts an obvious lack of empathy over her spouse’s struggle to give up heroin. (More salient, as it turns out, than her steppingstone existence as an alien-bride, is the one she pictures alongside her thuggish boyfriend Sokol (Alban Ukaj), with whom she dreams of opening a snack bar.) But Lorna, like Claudy, is just another pawn in a plot overseen by Fabio (Fabrizio Rongione) – a shadowy cab driver who, after removing Claudy via a forced overdose, seeks to marry her off to a mafioso known as “the Russian.”