Hong Sang-soo on the male condition. By BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.

TWO MASTERS at this year’s Festival have travelled over to Paris, and both have delivered exquisite pieces of filmmaking. The first, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flight of the Red Balloon has already been celebrated on Lumière (and will be in the future). The second, by Korean Hong Sang-soo is also truly wonderful, a sharp, hilarious take on relationships and loneliness – Paris captured through a brilliant artist’s eyes. And I’m not talking about Hong’s irredeemable protagonist. Hong has been (rather unfairly) called the Henry Miller of Korean cinema, however, ironically, Hong goes to Paris and loses all interest in sex (or at least, his character can’t get any). This is classic stuff, made by one of Korea’s premier auteurs.

Vanessa Beecroft’s infuriating adoption quest makes her a tortured artist at heart. By THOMASIN SLEIGH.

AT ONE STAGE in The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins artist Vanessa Beecroft turns to the camera and says “I feel bad for the father, I feel like I’m stealing his children”. “Well yes Vanessa,” I said aloud, “that’s because you are.” This documentary, directed by New Zealander Pietra Brettkelly, follows Beecroft while she is in Sudan photographing her latest body of work and attempting to get together the paperwork together to adopt Sudanese ‘orphan’ twins. Beecroft would have you believe that they are ‘orphans’ in desperate need of her motherly care, but it turns out they have a father. And Sudanese tradition dictates that on the death of their mother the children should be looked after by their extended family – which they have plenty of. The ‘orphan’ idea is just one of the delusions Beecroft constructs for herself.

The match is fixed in Masayuki Suo’s scathing courtroom ordeal. By TIM WONG.

MASAYUKI SUO’s I Just Didn’t Do It, an allegorical black hole generously described as “Kafkaesque”, has more in common with the social and political quagmires of David Simon: its nightmarish scenario about a wrongly accused man deals unflatteringly in the same cruel cynicism and institutional dysfunction of police procedural The Wire, replete with a Greco-tragic underpinning. Here, the target of rage is Japan’s draconian legal system, furnished with a 99.9% conviction rate, and so inflexible that lawyers are consigned to pressing their clients into a hasty confession. Never mind if the defendant is innocent, as is the case with young Teppei Kaneko (Ryo Kase), whose commute on an overcrowded train results in a molestation charge through mistaken identity. Harassed by interrogators, yet refusing to yield to pressure, he is held in custody for months during which the bureaucratic machine inches its way towards prosecution. Meanwhile, Kaneko’s friends and family garner the support of a similarly defamed man fighting his own battle in court, and the noble, if grimly realistic aid of a defense attorney (played by none other than Koji Yakusho).

A Latvian omnibus unified by four new directors. By BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.

COMPILATION films don’t often gel together as one feature. For the most part, directors approach their part with a singular vision, and when mashed-up with the other parts, an uneven tone and narrative usually results. Vogelfrei, a portmanteau film made by four young Latvian directors, demonstrates that a unified approach and a carefully plotted narrative progression can allow a multi-directed project to really work structurally and thematically. The film succeeds in allowing each director their own voice too, no small feat, and in the process, demonstrates that there is some very promising talent coming out of Latvia.

A vanguard of the Korean New Wave returns to cinema – without vengeance. By TIM WONG. (contains spoilers)

TWO TIRESOME trends – religion bashing, and in particular, Korean ultra-violence – are put to bed this year with the belated Secret Sunshine, a bright light amongst a procession of gangster and revenge pictures, which, by way of recent film festivals here, have appeared to hijack the entire annual output of a national cinema. With the exception of Hong Sang-soo and The Host, local audiences could be forgiven for thinking the makers of Old Boy have had a monopoly on film exports ever since, repackaging their flashy, yet increasingly soulless action pieces for world distribution. Such movies have found their way into this festival not necessarily at the expense of others, although it could be argued that had Lee Chang-dong continued to direct, his films would have supplanted the likes of A Bittersweet Life and No Mercy for the Rude by default. Now having completed his civic duty, Lee’s return to filmmaking can not some soon enough – 2002’s remarkable Oasis, his last outing prior to accepting the portfolio for Korean Minister of Culture, remains among the best films of the decade. Meanwhile, a quota of ditsy comedies, manipulative melodramas, and one-dimensional Kim Ki-duk movies wait in the wings, best kept at arm’s length.

In Paris, a Taiwanese master soars. By BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.

SOMETIMES it’s easy to forget just how poetic cinema can be. Flight of the Red Balloon is one of those rare films, an achingly beautiful paean to life, to escape, to humanity. Commissioned by Paris’ Musée D’Orsay and an homage to Albert Lamorisse’s The Red Balloon, this is Hou Hsiao-hsien’s first picture made in Europe. The film’s subtle pace may off-put some (I’m euphemising, there will be a considerable amount of audience members who won’t submit to the gentle, understated, complex rhythms of the text). But that’d be a shame – because they’d be closing themselves off to a masterpiece by one of cinema’s great filmmakers, and one of his most emotionally rich depictions of everyday life.

DAVID LEVINSON reports from the Auckland Film Society. This week: in recognition of Charles Burnett.

LA-BASED filmmaker Charles Burnett finally received due critical attention last year when his seminal thesis-film, Killer of Sheep (1977), was released from the purgatory of an uncleared soundtrack, and made to tour the festival circuit. Seen today – in a climate given to either Klumps grotesquerie, public-service campaigning or lurid tales-from-the-ghetto – the result is a relevation: Shot on scratchy 16mm, spare in its use of sound, and overwhelmingly sensitive to the minor uplifts and long-standing inertia of everyday life, Killer of Sheep casts a neo-realist look at the residents of L.A.’s Watts area – in the process nearly single-handedly redefining the limits of black domestic cinema.

Shane Meadows on boyhood and true romance. By TIM WONG.

IF This is England was Shane Meadows’ 400 Blows, then Somers Town is his Antonie and Colette, and Thomas Turgoose his Jean-Pierre Léaud. A casual buddy movie couched in Meadows’ fondness for adolescent relations, it centres on Turgoose – now slightly older, and slightly deeper in voice from the 12-year-old skinhead he so memorably portrayed – as a midlands runaway who befriends a lonely Polish teen in North London. Left to his own devices while father works hard and drinks late, the soft-spoken Marek (Piotr Jagiello) roams the city as a keen photographer, bonding with Turgoose’s out-of-pocket Tomo as they set about courting an attractive French waitress (Elisa Lasowki). Fashion disasters and comical odd-jobs await, courtesy of a charitable entrepreneur (Perry Benson) who, fearing for Marek’s safety, swaps the boy’s Man United strip for an Arsenal knockoff (emblazoned with “Terry Henry”), and provides the homeless Tomo with a place to crash. Their misadventures, dictated by the promise of romance, are not unlike those of Antonie Doniel, with the resemblance to François Truffaut’s breezy manchild odysseys qualified by a lightness that might’ve otherwise been eclipsed by Meadows’ darker tendencies. The naturalism of the two leads helps defy this, and just when you think Meadows is about to lurch the story towards violence, he refrains, forgoing tragic consequence for ecstatic wish fulfillment. Shot in unobtrusive black and white, the film’s modesty is its biggest charm.

Guy Maddin’s hometown phantasmagoria, a documentary within inverted commas. By TIM WONG.

HILARIOUS! Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg is an outrageous documentary tease, the Canadian’s most hysterical film to date. Ostensibly a paean to hometown roots, Maddin’s affection for ‘The Peg’ quickly turns south, and from within the frosty confines of a looping railcar, is compelled to reveal the truth about Canada’s ‘Gateway to the West’. A sleepy hollow as nocturnal purgatory, deviancy and absurdity lurks beneath the city’s wintry façade, with Guy, our tour guide, providing a lusty commentary on Winnipeg’s dark side: an unauthorized history, replete with shocking asides on brothels, hermaphrodites, man pageants, locker rooms, and other sexual mores. Amusing still, are Maddin’s autobiographical forays, where actors are cast in place of immediate family members (that’s Detour’s Ann Savage as Guy’s beauty shop mother), and long buried memories are exhumed and overanalyzed like a Ross McElwee film. Which is to say My Winnipeg is vintage Maddin, from the childhood anecdotes, to the insertion of ice hockey and ballet, to the lurid turn-of-the-century aesthetic: those grainy celluloid splashes, woozy cross-fades, brusque inter-titles, and extreme genital close-ups all contributing to the film’s drowsy, jokey malaise. Though angrily ensnared within a reoccurring dream, Maddin’s mock-umenting is not without fondness and good jest, and the director even turns fiercely protective at one point, lamenting the destruction of his beloved Winnipeg Arena, and the developers who’ve leveled the olde world charm. In a rare colour sequence, he films the demolition of the stadium, which refuses to topple even after the dynamite explodes – a sign, perhaps, that his beloved native city shares in his nostalgia, and has a life force all of its own.

Adapted from her acclaimed graphic novel, Marjane Satrapi’s memoirs are far from black and white. By JOE SHEPPARD.

Persepolis won the Jury Prize at Cannes last year and it was well worth the wait to see such an accomplished, accessible and utterly unique film at the Paramount in Wellington. Equal parts social history and Bildungsroman, the animated Persepolis was adapted from an autobiographical graphic novel by the Iranian French author Marjane Satrapi. The story goes that Alexander of Macedon went on a legendary bender in the Persian capital Persepolis, awakening the next morning to find smouldering ashes where the city used to be. Some six hundred miles north in modern Tehran, East again clashes with West as the rebellious and independent young Satrapi struggles to find her identity amid the turbulence of the Islamic revolution and the totalitarian theocracy of the ensuing years. Sent to Vienna for a liberal education, Satrapi had to grow up adapting to life in two vastly different cultures. The resulting film is an appropriate farrago of different ideologies and languages, genres, episodes and styles that cohere into a fascinating and moving impression of a chaotic upbringing.

New directors and old mavericks collide at the New Zealand International Film Festivals. By TIM WONG.

IN La France, a left-of-field war musical harmonised by twee interludes, the wonderfully unorthodox Sylvie Testud bends her gender for not the first time in her career – La Vie en Rose her last androgynous outing as Edith Piaf’s long-time cohort Simone Berteaut. Playing Camille, the forlorn wife of a WWI soldier, Testud masquerades as a man in order to join a company of inglorious French troops headed vaguely in the direction of her MIA husband. Within lean, pragmatic surroundings – a squad-based parable not unlike Fixed Bayonets or The Big Red One – director Serge Bozon circumvents the anticipation and cheap thrill of battle gore with the spectre of combat, and for all the film’s soft spoken whimsy and twilight surrealism – its willowy night-time sequences some of the most entrancing ever lit – there’s something disquieting, even faintly post-apocalyptic about its march towards a conflict which never presents itself. All in all, a strange delicacy among war movies, disengaged from both the cruel primitivism of Bruno Dumont (who would’ve turned the scene where Camille’s sex is revealed into a pack rape), and the showmanship of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s hyper-romances (A Very Long Engagement a bloated, pre-existing version of this film). Finally subversive, Bozon even emasculates the genre’s machismo by directing his grubby male cast to sing their musical numbers in the key of James Blunt.

TIM WONG discusses the new look New Zealand International Film Festivals programme, unveiled earlier this week.

UNDRESSED, the New Zealand International Film Festivals cut a lean figure in 2008; the corporate regalia of their former naming rights sponsor discarded as their redesigned programme looks to strike a new pose. Reformatted to a contentious A4 – already a talking point among those who prefer to travel compact – the taller, thinner hardcopy aims to trim the waistline of a programme now carrying over 170 films, although cynics are more likely to attribute its anorexia to budgetary constraints. Whether or not you approve of the makeover, it’s important to note the only real casualty of Telecom’s desertion has been the luxurious souvenir tome, with the festival’s capacity to import cinema – if ever there was any doubt – unhindered and at full strength.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: the thin blue line.

ONE OF the United States’ most important independent directors, Charles Burnett and his oeuvre is starting to get a bit of attention following last year’s re-release of his landmark 1977 film Killer of Sheep. The Glass Shield for example was buried upon release, and today, almost feels like it’s laying the groundwork for shows like The Wire – though admittedly, Burnett’s take is slightly more uneven and simplistic (but then The Wire has five seasons to work through its stories…). But Burnett’s tale of police corruption and idealism does contain some special kind of fury, right the way up to its pointed ending.

Through until the end of August, The Lumière Reader covers the 2008 New Zealand International Film Festivals in earnest. Coverage includes the ongoing review of films, daily columns filed during the festival by Auckland and Wellington correspondents, interviews with visiting filmmakers, and our concluding post-festival wrap. Check regularly the festival website, nzff.co.nz, for all programme, ticketing and regional information.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: animal instincts.

PAUL SCHRADER’s career took a nose-dive with Cat People. The genius writer behind Taxi Driver and Raging Bull and director of Blue Collar attempted to burn as many bridges as possible during the making of this film (including copious drug usage, and threats to put compromising shots of lead actor Nastassja Kinski into the film after she broke off a relationship with Schrader). Furthermore he was re-making an iconic (if slightly dated) B-Movie and Schrader’s version bombed upon release. It also features the truly awful David Bowie theme song. And to top it all off, the film print shown at the screening wasn’t in the best quality. Having said all that, the film is actually quite good.

Reviewed by David Levinson

EVERY YEAR parental-advice columnist Dan Burns (Steve Carell) migrates North to Rhode Island with his three daughters in tow, where they take part in a family get-together at their grandparents’ lakeside home.

Back in New Jersey though, Dan is left (thanks to the loss of his wife four years prior) unattended in the threatening landscape of the opposite sex – one prone to stony coups of silence; tectonic hormonal-shifts; and the sudden emergence of skimpy underwear atop the family washing pile. In the case of the latter, they belong to 15-year old Cara, contrary to Dan’s hopeful (and totally misguided) assumption that they’re 17-year old’s Jane’s; same goes for the boy who shows up to walk Cara to school, and who, vying to plug the welling threat of her sexuality, Dan warns she’s incapable of loving, given the nearsightedness of her age.

Carl Theodor Dreyer/Denmark/1925-64; R4
Madman, $34.95 ea | Reviewed by Brannavan Gnanalingam

DANISH director Carl Dreyer remains criminally neglected in popular film discourse. That’s despite the fact directors such as Lars von Trier want to be him, and directors such as Michael Haneke make use of his unique style of editing. As one of Europe’s premier filmmakers, his reputation has been largely downplayed due to his glacial output and his uncompromising style. Yet he deserves to be held much higher esteem – indeed, his collection of sound films, Vampyr, Day of Wrath, L’Ordet and Getrud, are some of the finest films ever made. And that’s not even considering another silent masterpiece of Dreyer’s, La Passion de Jeanne D’Arc. It’s about time that his movies have received the DVD treatment, and Australasian label Madman (through their Directors Suite imprint) have ported many of his more obscure short films; films that fill in the gaps between his masterpieces. But despite the extras, his features stand alone as some of the most potent and emotionally charged images committed to celluloid.

DARREN BEVAN previews the APO’s “Return of a Night at the Movies”, performing June 14 at the Aotea Centre.

AFTER 19 years of cinematic Indiana Jones silence, there was always going to be some trepidation about whether the new movie lived up to the gloss of the trilogy we all remembered when we were young. So at the Cannes Film Festival this year, it was no surprise that audiences packed out the screening of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull – but it was perhaps also no surprise that as the lights dimmed some members of the audience chose to sing John Williams’ original score aloud.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: an existential end.

I’M STILL convinced Antonioni’s films can be reduced to three shots and an ending. However, it is fair to say The Passenger is much more beguiling than some of Antonioni’s other work, and hasn’t dated anywhere near as badly. In fact, it’s probably the definitive Antonioni film – full of philosophical, metaphysical, and semiotic concerns. It was also a film that spent decades in limbo due to its star, Jack Nicholson, owning the rights and keeping it tight. For a highly complex text, it’s also plain silly and humourless, but that doesn’t stop it being one of the highpoints of film modernism. You’ll probably need to write a PhD on it to fully unpack it.

A roundup/recap of the current best and rest in film and DVD. In this installment: Street Kings, I’m Not There (Film); Mandela: The Living Legend, We’re Here to Help, Death at a Funeral, Barking Dogs Never Bite (DVD).

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: deserted youth.

ANTONIONI infuriates the hell out of me. There are some utterly amazing moments in his films – his use of space and architecture is simply remarkable, his visual sense makes me a magpie to his shiny images, and some of his artistic conceits appeal to the cynical prankster in me (mainly his endings, and his playing with narrative expectations). I also like some of his ideas, to be fair. However, he’s also as dated as rotten fruit, and he’s also the type of director whose films you can reduce down to three shots and a final scene – this’ll probably tell you everything you’ll need to know in the film.

Reviewed by Brannavan Gnanalingam

TODD HAYNES seems to be in a constant quest to not be pinned down to a particular style. He can move from the icily brilliant Safe, to the overheated Sirkian melodrama (the masterpiece Far From Heaven) with absolute ease. However, I’m Not There is quite something, the ultimate post-modern exercise chock-full of pastiche, myths, parodies. The film is a parade of chameleon identities, of musical and visual samples, a freewheelin’ farrago through time and space. The film works because of the sheer chutzpah of Haynes’ vision, even if it’s a vision that will infuriate many Dylan fans and non-fans alike.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: German devastation.

THE REAL-LIFE story of Anneliese Michel has inspired people from Hollywood’s The Exorcism of Emily Rose to Public Image Ltd., but Hans-Christian Schmid’s take on the events is austere and ultimately, extremely unnerving. The ghost of Fassbinder has haunted the German fiction films of the Film Society this year, and Requiem is no different – the drab surroundings, the intensity of the mise-en-scène, the ruthless view of institutions and bourgeois sensibilities were some of the great German director’s key concerns. Admittedly Requiem is much more sympathetic to its characters than Fassbinder was to his, but the film succeeds by showing the ‘extraordinary’ events through a gruelling realism. This isn’t a horror film, but a descent into madness. Of course, this approach wouldn’t have worked nearly so well without the astonishing acting performance of Sandra Hüller as the afflicted girl.

GAUTAMAN BHASKARAN previews the 61st Festival de Cannes, beginning this week.

IN A WAY, Cannes has managed to pull a rabbit out of the hat, and the selection of films is as good as it was in 2002. That year, we saw City of God, About Schmidt and The Pianist, and the edition that will open May 14 has some of modern cinema’s best helmers, such Clint Eastwood, Steven Spielberg, Woody Allen and Atom Egoyan.

At the Human Rights Film Festival, the trials of Ethiopian women who give birth. By BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.

CHILDBIRTH sounds painful enough, without having to worry about giving birth without any medical or institutional help. That’s precisely what happens to millions of women around the world, and the documentary A Walk to Beautiful looks at a particular consequence of this lack of care. Mary Olive Smith’s documentary examines the medical condition of fistula, which leaves many women in the world incontinent, leaking urine and faeces uncontrollably. The resulting societal discomfort at these women’s conditions leads to them being ostracised. And the sad thing is, it’s not too hard to fix, but countless women are forced to endure the discomfort and the shame.

Out of India, GAUTAMAN BHASKARAN considers the current Indian and Bollywood Cinema.

THE CANNES International Film Festival is undoubtedly the Queen of it all. Anybody who is somebody in the world of cinema loves to be there. To unspool on May 14, the Festival has had no Indian movie in Competition since 1994, the year Malayalam director Shaji N. Karun’s Swaham (My Own) was included. What is worse, there has been no Indian entry in A Certain Regard since Murali Nair’s Arimpara (The Mole) screened in 2003.

At the Human Rights Film Festival, Mexico’s objects of labour. By HELEN SIMS.

Maquilapolis refers to the huge industrial district in Tijuana, just past the border between Mexico and the USA. The factories of large, mostly US, corporations dominate the landscape. They attract internal migrants from all over Mexico seeing work. They function on the basis of mass production by cheap labour and substantial tax breaks granted by the government. Under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) raw products come into Mexico, are turned into items like televisions and pantyhose and then the finished items are sent back for distribution in the US. Although this system results in jobs for Mexicans, the “maquiladoras” who work in these factories, they see more detriment than benefit to themselves as a result of the workings of free trade.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: girls on film.

THE TIMING of screening this film probably couldn’t have better. In a week when the world’s media got in a tempest over fifteen-year-old Miley Cyrus’ photo shoot for Vanity Fair because she had the temerity to show her bare back (suggesting she wasn’t wearing a bra). The media got into a lather over the fact that Annie Liebowitz decided to photograph a sexualised fifteen year, drawing in puritanical and art-for-art’s-sake arguments from both sides. If Bettina Blümner’s documentary on three fifteen-year-olds, Pool of Princesses, is anything to go by, the media’s response to Cyrus is far too simplistic and superficial (not to mention sexist). Blümner captures that liminal space between childhood and adulthood in the documentary, the time when people are all too grown-up and self-aware, but still all too naïve and innocent.

At the Human Rights Film Festival, colonialism still rules. By BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.

LAST DECEMBER, I ended up in, of all the places in the world, Western Sahara. Its landscape is a remarkable visage, the ocean creeping up to a desert so vast that a whisper and a shout would be the same thing. But even here, the torrid, cruel landscape provoked such strong feelings of belonging for its inhabitants, that I couldn’t help but share the joy that the wonderful Sahrawis I was travelling with felt about their earth. And they told me about the tragedy unfolding in the impassive wilderness, of a people dispossessed since colonial times, and forgotten by the Western world. It is within this backdrop that Fecci and Bloeman’s documentary, Western Sahara: Africa’s Last Colony is made.

GREGOR CAMERON reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: enchantment.

WHAT A TREAT these Demy films have been! Peau d’Ane is Jacques Demy’s ode to the fairy tale and its place in the art of storytelling. Not for him is the sugar coated Disney pleasure factory and while his heroine is pretty (Catherine Deneuve), she is far from an innocent bystander in this adaptation of Charles Perrault’s original Donkey Skin – a variation of the Cinderella type of fairy tale. Demy never allows us to forget that, in this world of fabulous costumes and castles, we are in fact only following a story being used to illustrate some wider point. With its engagement with possible incest between father and daughter and that daughter’s choice to take charge of her fate there is a clear indication that Demy may be suggesting, through Perrault’s story, that becoming a victim can sometimes be a choice and perhaps those exposed to this story should take the point that we are all somehow culpable for our own fates. Clearly there are similarities in the way Demy intends this story to comment on the present age that Perrault’s Bluebeard story has been used in film – most notably in local times during the shadow puppets segment in Campion’s The Piano (1993).