Thursday 31 May 2007

Fur. Steven Shainberg 2006


‘Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus’ (Steven Shainberg, 2006)


Director Steven Shainberg is no stranger to the weird and arcane, his last feature being 2002’s ‘Secretary’. In, ‘Fur’ he palpates similar territory taking Diane Arbus, the controversial American photographer who has been both pilloried and praised in equal measure, as his subject matter. Unlike other ‘bio-pics’, Shainberg does not purport to give his audience factual accuracy; by focusing on what may have been Arbus’ catalyst for her extraordinary career, he presents the film as a piece of interpretive conjecture from the outset. Dispelling the myth that Arbus was a mere voyeur who exploited the disenfranchised, Shainberg suggests that it was within the abject and marginal that Arbus found her true calling; her sympathy for the freakish and strange is shown to be the result of her peripheral status within middle-class society making her photography an act of kinship and not objectification. Unashamedly pro-Arbus, ‘Fur’ gives us a real insight into the formation of a seminal artist whilst the powerful and emotive performances by Downey, Kidman and Burrell ensure that the film is consistently imaginative rather than ridiculous.

Mutual Appreciation. Andrew Bujalski. 2005


‘Mutual Appreciation’ (Andrew Bujalski, 2005)


Having only just received UK distribution, this may be your first encounter with the work of Bujalski; if so, you have a treat coming to you. ‘Mutual Appreciation’ represents the director’s second foray into the world of filmmaking after his impressive and critically lauded debut, ‘Funny Ha Ha’. Bujalski returns to similar subject matter here: the liminal, disaffected youth of thinking America. All the big existential questions are posed here but, unlike Richard Linklater’s affected and self-conscious philosophising, Bujalski places the quiet, unassuming and sometimes downright inarticulate thinker at the centre of this funny, engaging and unpredictable ménage a trois. It is Bujalski’s penchant for dead time, the sentence that trails off, drunken ramblings, seemingly improvised dialogue and simmering emotion that marks him out as a filmmaker of considerable merit with an aesthetic that hangs somewhere between the French New Wave and the sublime work of John Cassavetes. If you are in any doubt over the state of American independent cinema, you must go and see this film!

The Night Porter. Liliana Cavani. 1973


I think this is a really strange film and it has left me with an equivocal feeling. I don't think I could easily say whether I liked it or not and that's probably a very good thing. Aesthetically, it's dark and lugubrious. It's closer to Visconti's 'Death In Venice' than Bertolucci's 'Last Tango In Paris' (with which it seems to have been frequently compared). I suspect that the comparison with Bertolucci has to do with the subject matter: a sado-masochistic relationship between a Nazi concentration camp guard (Dirk Bogarde) and a young Jewish girl (Charlotte Rampling) is revived after the event to deleterious result. Yet the fascination / disgust with sex seems to have more to do with a Freudian repetitive compulsion than shock value or mere titillation. Half way through the film, I decided that the key to the central relationship was the fact that Bogarde's character is embroiled in a group who refuse to admit any guilt at the same time as knowing they are guilty of perpetuating atrocity on a mass scale; in the context of guilt and denial, his relationship with Rampling's character becomes one of both punishment and a way of working himself out of guilt. In many ways, Rampling's character is the more controversial of the two as she returns to the man who has made her a victim in more ways than one. In the extras, Rampling confesses that it was her character that sat most uncomfortably with contemporary viewers because it was thought that nobody would ever do such a thing...

The film is affecting because it explores the grey area between good and evil which is continually denied.

Wednesday 30 May 2007

Mon Dieu

Bonjour,
I am new to the world of blogging and thus a little shy of intrepidly posting the quotidian wears, tears and bores of my life for all to see. I am currently trying to print an academic article on Sofia Coppola's cinematic career to date. My main aim in doing so is to expose the substance below the style and, most importantly, to single-handedly salvage 'Marie Antoinette' from the opprobrius criticism it unduly received...all in a day's work! I've just gotten home from an exceedingly depressing talk given by academics to aspiring academics on the harsh realities of publishing. Given the fact that this talk was held by specialists in the field of Divinity, I can only hope that my article may be of more interest to the world than one written on the gospel accorrding to St. Matthew (unless it's the Pasolini film we are talking about, in which case, I will demur).
I'm probably going to turn this into a little bit of a running commentary on cinema: new film releases, old classics and any gems I may happen upon.
First up tonight is an evening in with 'The Night Porter' starring Charlotte Rampling.