To begin with i thought this was a documentary. Or maybe a docu-drama. But not a film film. Too improvised to seem scripted.

Turns out the “story” was improvised from a whole year spent in this real school, this real classroom, with these real kids. Kind of being like themselves. Only more so. Accentuating a few salient attributes to act out “in character”.

It’s a multi-ethnic classroom; everyone is from somewhere else other than France: Mali, Morroco, China, Jamacia etc. They don’t know French too well (don’t know their pluperfects from their subjunctives). They’re mostly under-achieving misfits. Not delinquents exactly but, well – just not comfortably fitted in to white society, marginalised and made different by virtue of their ethnic diversity.

It’s not an easy film to watch cus it hasn’t got those Hollywood hooks that derive facile sentimentality from “inspirational” Teacher films; ala Robin Williams doing his charismatically charming schtick – and transforming a load of underachieving dimwits into perfect students. This film is far tougher than that. The kids aren’t especially likeable, the teacher isn’t especially inspiring. Or charismatic. He’s fallible. You watch him struggling to keep these dispirit adolescents interested and motivated. It’s hard work. It’s not easy. It doesn’t seem particularly rewarding.

I liked the film though. Cus it got me there. Got me into that classroom. Observing with fascination: the trials, troubles, and travails of being with such a chaotic bunch of misfits. But i was thinking to myself: Thank God i’m not teaching them!

Dir: Laurent Cantet, France

7/10

Mom has died. Life is going on, but not going on as well as it did. Julien won’t play piano anymore; Emma doesn’t love boys anymore; Dad can’t write his kids books anymore. Grief is surreptiously stymying the good for life in them.

Lucien has got the hots for a bookshop assistants “bun” (not her buns – her bun, her chignon) But she’s not going to be available. Who is available is Alice, his childhood best friend; who steals sweets, smokes and gets pissed, is fucking an unsuitable blonde tart of a boyfriend.

Lucien would be more suitable. We see that, we know that – but will they? They get on so easily and intimately with one another. And Lucien is such a nice sensitive lad; he buys a book of poems for his dad’s birthday for christ-sake! (Good to have a dad you could buy a book of poems for i was thinking – no, lamenting – to myself)

Some of the attempts at humour don’t always work; the scene where Lucien co-opts a family friend to help him pick up Olga is supposed to be deliberately contrived, farcical; but it comes across as being abit fake, the acting not up to Chaplinesque slapstick. Dad watches b/w Chaplin movies to absurdly cheer himself up too – all abit too obvious.

Overall it’s a nice watch. The acting is appealingly understated,  the direction seemingly nonchalent, minimalistic. The mood wryly melancholic.

Lucien and Alice finally get it on, go to bed together (as we always knew they would) As Alice lies sleeping, Lucien goes over and sits at the piano. Maybe the lovely lad will start playing again. Or maybe not.

Dir: Jerome Bonnell, France

7/10

A chronicle of the difficult early  relationship of Ingmar Bergman’s parents – Henrik and Anna – in Sweden a century ago.

Anna’s mother intensely dislikes Henrik and wants to prevent then seeing one another: “You have deep and early wounds, beyond healing or consolation” she slams him with. Henrik’s mother loathes Anna: “Lord forgive me that i camnot love that girl”. They don’t only have matriachal opposition to their “association”; they appear to have a fundamental temperamental antipathy with one another: she’s a flighty, vivacious, capricious, Sanguine; he’s a dour, miserable, Melancholic. But they seemingly love one another (opposites attract and all that) and become fated to be sharing destiny come-what-may.

I don’t know about Henrik (Bergmans dad) There’s much to not like about him. A man riddled with flaws and inconsistencies. A pious man of the cloth who sleeps with both Anna and Frida (first fiancee). Has no sense of humour or fun, lacks spontaneity; Anna tries to get him to dance – he storms off, “I’m a great spoiler of games. That can’t be helped”. He’s a Misery Fetishist: “I’m best living on the extreme edge of the world” he laments after Anna has left him to go back to her moms.

You aren’t suprised that she leaves that Frozen North he has such a grim masochistic affinity with. You wonder why she loves him, or even needs him really. He needs her though: “He needs someone to like, so that he doesn’t have to hate himself so much” says first fiancee Frida.

“Henry, you must forgive me” she saying, but considering he’s a Christian priest he doesn’t seem too keen on forgiveness: “I’ll never forgive you for this” he says… then he’s calling her “despicable” and  “spoilt” shouting at her to leave….”I never want to see you again“….. or he invokes God to get what he wants… or he’s slapping her. She seems more capable than he is of expressing her heartfeltest feelings: “I’m crying because you trample on me and it hurts! You’re trampling on your most faithful friend, amd i’m crying because it makes me angry” she sobs. You don’t get that he’s the “good person” (his mother and ex) say he is. You get that he’s painfully flawed, emotionally dsyfunctional, a bit of a loser-loner saddo really (its all those early and deep wounds he’s got).

And yet. I didn’t despise him. Or dislike him. Maybe that’s to the credit of the actor (Samuel Froler) ; or maybe because of the psychological authenticity of Bergmans screenplay. You  aren’t allowed to take easy polarised sides: Henrik bad, Anna good. Everybody has got a bit of crap in them somewhere.

The film really got to me when i first saw it. The stonking rows they have with one another are seeringly shatteringly real. “I’m beginning to recognise my life. It’s coming back at last. I was dreaming. Now I’m awake” he says to himself after they’ve torn the romantic pretence off one anothers shiny pre-wedding masks.

I suppose by the end of the film, Henrik has had to get off his pious high horse of stagnant self-righteousness and get over himself: be forgiving. As Anna will be willing to forgive him also. To bear the disappintments they’ve hurt one another with, they have to dare to forgive. And grow – hopefully – into a maturer, kinder, kind of love.

Dir: Bille August, Sweden

8/10

A documentary by Werner Herzog about Timothy Treadwell, a wild-life bear enthusiast and self-claimed “kind warrior”.

Treadwell lived with wild grizzlies up in Alaska for 13 summers. He claimed to be protecting them. He got up close and personal, gave them cute names like “Mr Chocolate” and “Sergeant Brown“. He also befriended wild foxes; he can be seen cuddling up to”Spirit” and tickling her under her chin;“Ghost” runs off with his favourite hat.

Treadwell gets to be more fascinating to observe than the bears he’s filming. He seems like a bit of a fruity fruit and nut-case. He sounds like a girl. Then he sounds campily gay. “I’m a bit of a patsi“. He has little hissy fits to camera. Then he has big ranty tantrums; the whole of the fucking civilised world is against him. God is against him. Nobody wants him to do what he feels it’s his vocation to do: love and save bears.

“He tried to be like a bear, woof like a bear” says somebody that knew him. Herzog interviews various people that knew and loved or loathed Treadwell. Hanging in the air is the possibility that Treadwell might have had a morbid death-wish to be eaten by a bear, so as to become incorporated into bear-likeness, be at one with bear-spirit. Which would make his consequent death suitably fitting. Only problem was his girlfriend got attacked and eaten too.

There’s plenty to speculate upon. How nuts Treadwell was. Or how liberated (from stuffy societal “norms”) he was. How being with the bears for those 13 summers helped transform and save his life; for years he’d been killing himself with booze.

There’s an audio tape of Treadwells grizzly death. His camera was running, but the lense cap is left on. You can hear his girlfriend screaming apparently. Herzog doesn’t let us – or his previous girlfriend – hear it. “You must never listen to this. You must destroy the tape” he says gravely to her. But why was the camera on? Did Treadwell want to film being eaten? And he couldn’t get to the camera to get the cap off cus his head was in the bears mouth? Was he wanting to leave behind a chillingly melodramatic – and  macabre – record of the “enactment” that was taking place?

Herzog’s film allows you to entertain all of these possibilities. He gives a soberly restrained presentation of Treadwell, his appraisal reasonable, rational, respectful. “This landscape in turmoil is a metaphor for his soul” intones Werner portentously. He doesn’t sensationalise or sentimentalise the gory story. He allows Treadwell to be in front of the camera, be present in all his vainglorious silly sweet conceitedness.

I couldn’t help bu feel sentimentally sympathetic towards Timothy Treadwell. He seemed like such a sad lonely queer little boy.

Dir: Werner Herzog, USA/Germany

8/10

I watched this film on Channel 4;  Every 10 minutes there was a 4 minute ad-break. Grrr! I’m gonna send one of these Grizzlies over to sort them out.

This is the 6th Mike Leigh i’ve seen in the last 3 months (5 of them off of YouTube)

It’s got all the usual bittersweet Pathos. But it’s also got an edgy kind of street-corner “nous”.

Phil Daniels is what gives it edge; he’s the levva jacketted Cockney wide-boy older brother of dim younger bro Tim Roth (Colin) They live in a cramped flat in a grimy tenement block in Saff London with irritable Mavis (Ma) and useless Frank (Pa) All of them are on the dole. Can’t find work. Can’t be arsed.

“Wot you gonna do?” Nobody ain’t got nuffing to do. Except get on each others nerves, wind one another up, take the piss. Get bullied or be bullying. Gary Oldman comes in as Coxy, a bovver-booted off-the-wall skinhead punk to jab in his 10 pence of  sarky scorn and sour spit. The verbal sparring between Daniels and Oldman comes across as something they know about for real; practising being narsty bastards on one another – in lieu of getting a smack in the gob.

Wot you gonna do? Nuffin. It’s dahn the boozer to piss away your dole, dahn the laundrette to sit there bored stewpid, dahn the bingo desperate to win house. It’s workin clarss cultcha. It stinks of disaffected hopelessness (how many times have i used “hopeless” in reviewing a Mike Leigh film?!)

Nice Aunty Barbara gives Colin  a “little job” to do painting. She’s tried to “better” herself, lives in a nice semi-detached house in a nice middle-class area. Only she’s lonely, depressed, her marriage is sexless and loveless. She needs Colin around for some company. Mark puts the kibosh on that; sees her charity for what it is: pity.

As in most of these Mike Leigh films, the sad seam of pathos within his characters  becomes all too painfully real, painfully revealed; Aunty Barbara is slumped up the wall, pissed, lonely as fuck – not able to talk to her husband; he’s not listening to her, not understanding. They don’t love one another anymore. She’s on her own, alone, isolated. I looked into Marion Bradleys eyes and i could see my own separateness, aloneness, unlovedness. She’d connected to me. You always seem to get these deeply affecting “human” moments in Mike Leigh films – where you feel a deep hit in your heart where it hurts, and you start to well up with tears.

Phil Daniels got to me also. Yes, he’s cynical; yes, he goads “Kermit”, “Muppit”, “Dobbin” dimwit Colin; but he also feels brotherly protective towards him; yes, he thinks “Frank” and “Mavis” as so-called parents are a pair of saddo tossers. He can’t bear to be like them. And yet he is like them: another dosser on the dole, with no job, no purpose. As sad as they are.

Only he’s got his gob and his nous to keep him going, keep him moving anywhere as long as it ain’t nowhere. As long as it’s not slumped on that sofa like Frank.

He’s lost. But he hasn’t given up. Not yet anyway. Still gotta keep kicking against all those fucking pricks.

Dir: Mike Leigh, England

8/10

I’m going to give this a better review than i thought i would.

For about an hour i was more aware of the film techniquery than the film itself. It felt like all the experimentation going on was getting in the way, was too conspicious.

The camera speeds up, the camera slows down. There’s loads of this time lapse photography ala “Koyaanisqatsi” that gets to jar your sense of view, dislocate – deliberately – the perspective of normalised time you expect to have as a watcher of a documentary.

Actually, it’s not a conventional documentary. It’s not a typical travelogue either. This isn’t “Coast” educating you with all those sensible BBC facts of life.

This is “at you” with its quirkiness.

Possibly hidden inside all the filmic gimmickry is a small and slightly dull documentary (like” Coast”)

He – Andrew Kotting, the director – is travelling around the coast of Britain with his 90 year old gran Gladys and his 7 year old disabled daughter Eden. She’s got a brain disorder called Jouberts syndrome which makes her look and act like a deaf spastic; communication is done through sign language (makaton) I didn’t feel engaged by her cus she’s in such an isolated, cut-off, estranged world. Empathy felt difficult to find; abstract compassion easier. Kotting’s  old gran Gladys was a bit dull too. Sweetly ancient, in the way old Grannies are supposed to be – but not overly endearing or especially eccentrically quirksy of personality.

So my guess is Kotting had to contrive the oddity – by jazzing up the way it’s all being filmed, making the style of filming look quirky, eccentric, odd.

Mind you,  he’s on the look out for English eccentricities out there on the coast too; it’s an island  rimmed with Gurners and Moaners, Mouth Organists and Accordionists, Pagan Long-Sword Dancers, Lollipop Ladies, Award Winning Toilets Attendants – and madcap film-makers.

“Daddy is being silly” says Granny Gladys to great grand-daughter Eden. And he gets sillier and sillier; carries an armchair on his head up a Scottish glen for his old gram (to sit on presumably) Breaks his bleedin ankle being silly.

Bleak and windy is Scotland. And windy.

“We got to go back to that miserable place of England” says Gladys glumly to Eden. Actually Granny is getting a bit quirkified now: she’s wearing a blue tea-cosy as a hat.”Condensed milk is part of our Heritage” she says. Yep, she’s caught the odd-bod bug off her odd-bod grandson (by now he’s asking strangers if he looks like a monk)

There’s an interiew with the “fackin” owner of the “Kit-Kat Cafe” in Rye  (I’d interview somebody that had a Kit-Kat Cafe too) Kotting suggests a swim in the sea with all their clothes on. Daft.

I might have slowly warmed to the film by now. I might be needing to watch it again. I might be turning into a quirky oddball meself! I might end up in the next Andrew Kotting film. No, lets not call it a film; lets call it a “cinematic essay”. I mean, he is a Lecturer in “Time-Based Media” at Maidstone Univeristy for the Creative Arts. Stands to reason he ain’t gonna make yer normal bog-standard ordinary film.

It’s simply gotta be idiosyncratic. The idiosyncraticer the betterer.

Dir: Andrew Kotting, England

7/10

I saw this back in the 90’s. I remember Brenda Blethyn crying all over the place and being irritatingly self-pitying.

Blethyn is Cynthia, the weary middle-aged mom of surly Roxanne. Cynthia works in a cardboard factory, Roxanne is a roadsweeper. They ain’t exactly come up in the world.

Timothy Spall – Maurice – as Cynthia’s  steady-eddie younger brother has; he’s got his own wedding photo’s business; he’s got a stroppy cow of a wife – Monica – at home who can’t have children (one of the secrets nobody should know about)

There’s a melancholy Mike Leigh chamber music soundtrack – so we know the mood we’re meant to be setting ourselves in: minor miserableness.

Cynth had Roxanne out of wedlock. Turns out she had another bastard too, who got given away for adoption. The baby is now a proffesional woman, an optometricist – and black. Goes by the name of Hortense Cumberbatch (bit of intended inverted irony there) Hortense – Marianne Jean-Baptiste – is possibly the most straight, sane, boringly normal character i’ve ever seen in a Mike Leigh film. She’s like me and you! Meaning, she’s merely ordinary, rational, credibly believable. Not a tic in sight! A proper Adult person.

Lets leave the grotesque neurotic  exxageration, the parodic tics and mannerisms to dear old Bren (Blethyn) She’ll drive you up the wall with her “Sweed arts” and “Darlins“. Pathos slides  into pathetic and keeps sliding on down into almost unbearable sobbing self-pity. This is Blethyn doing a repreive of Glor (from Grown-Ups in 1980) Just as irritating, but more whiny. She’s got the hands twitchin and fiddlin. I can’t believe she got the Best Actress Award at Cannes for this.

And yet she got me at it too – cryin i mean! Eventually.

At this scene especially: Maurice has come around to visit, and she just can’t take it anymore, can’t take how lonely and unloved she is. “Give us a cuddle Maurice – please, Sweed Art!” she’s pleading with him. It’s heartbreaking.

“You love me dontcha?!” “Hold me tight Maurice – please!” she sobs into his fat gaping arms. Maurice doesn’t know where to put himself. He wants to love her. But he doesn’t know how to do it. Hasn’t been schooled in how to show or share the affection he feels (for her, and maybe his wife too – he comes across as kind-hearted, but emotionally stymied)

Hortense wants to meet her birth mother. So they do. Cue awkward embarrassment, more self-piteous sobbing, more leaking of pain from Cynthia. Hortense just sits there looking quietly bemused. “I must be a bit of a disappointment to ya. You been better off without me” blurts Cynthia. Hortense says nothing. Doesn’t buy into it. “You gotta larf Sweed Art. Else you’d cry” sniffles Cynth. Only there ain’t anything to larf about. This ain’t even remotely funny.

Hortense does the compassionate Adult thing. She wants to see Cynthia again. It liberates her mom. From being the Great Unwashed she becomes wanted, wantable. Needed. Necessary. Maybe  inside all that self loathing,  a little bit lovable.

At the end theres a Big Scene where all the  niggers come out of the woodwork (so to speak) It’s this scene that redeems the film of it’s minor irritating faults and wobbly excrutiating fallibilities.

“Secrets and lies. We’re all in pain. Why can’t we share our pain. I’ve spent my entire life trying to make people happy, and the 3 people i love the most in the world hate each others guts. I’m in the middle and i can’t take it anymore!” Maurice shouts in anguish.

Cynth has gone over to cradle Monica’s sobbing head in her arms; then she’s crying; then Roxanne’s crying. Then i’m crying!

It’s got to me. I’ve finally got into the bleedin heart of this sad little film.

We’re all in pain.

Dir: Mike Leigh, England

7/10

A messy slice of sleazy social realism. If you’re living in Napoli expect to be arbitarily shot at at any time – that seems to be the message.

The “characters” in this film have our eyes in the back of their heads watching out for them, just in case.

Not that we get that close to any of the (too) many characters; I didn’t really know who they were, what they’re doing, or why they’re doing it. They could have been “on the other side”. But who was the other side?. Was i on the side of “them” or was i siding with “us”? I didn’t know. Didn’t know who i was meant to be caring about. Any kind of soft empathy  in me – as a voyeuristic spectator – got diasbled. I couldn’t care less about any of them. Felt no compassion.

I suppose in this kind of world compassion is a redundant emotion to have, kind of irrelevant in the every day dog eat dog scheme of things.

The direction  deliberately lacked cohesion or coherence; we’re tracking about behind the camera, following behind characters we don’t know the relevance of, or what they might be “meaning” to the story of the film. The point probably is; there is no point, there’s no grandioise “meaning” to be extracted or film-like purposeful storyline to be entertained by in any of these disconnected lifes being lived.

It doesn’t glamourize gangster life at all; quite the opposite in fact; it’s stripping bare the romantic pretension from gangster life as depicting in Hollywood style mafia movies. Life is as it is: nasty, brutal, short and tragically disposable. There is no redemption for these people,

An uneasy flim to watch. Not comfortably entertaining. Just relentlessly, heartlessly, grim.

Glad i don’t live there.

Dir: Matteo Garrone, Italy

5.5/10

This might be Mike Leighs best film. It’s certainly one of the best i’ve seen.

Probably cus David Thewlis as disaffected Manc loser-loner “Johnny” is so spot on.

He carries you right into the heart of the hurt of his woundedness.

With such a caustic sense of futile frightening no-hope. It’s uncomfortable to watch. And yet compelling.

The dark bitter brilliant sarcasm cuts close to the edge of the bone

“There was this little dot right, and the dot went bang! and the bang expanded, energy formed into matter, matter cooled, matter lived…into the amoeba the fish, the fish the fowl, the fowl the froggy, the froggy the mammal, the mammal the monkey, the monkey the man….and quid pro quo, momento mori, add infinitum, sprinkle on a little bit of grated cheese – and leave under the grill till Doomsday“

Johnny keeps the clever pitter of patter coming, he’s read loads of books, he’s got (so he says) an A level in Psychology… a degree in Bullshit (“She’s got this irritating proclivity for negation; she thinks its progressive”)…and a Ph’d in Utterly Futile Bollocks…. he’s an incendiary device of detonated damage…..

“Do you think you might have already had the happiest moment in your whole fuckin life, and all you’ve got to look forward to is sickness and purgatory?” he’s asking his ex Louise.

Yes, a right cheery soul is Johnny.

He’s read his Book of Revelation. The Apocalypse is upon us, the End is nigh

““God doesn’t love you, God despises ya – there’s no hope. Good exists in order to be fucked up by Evil. The very existence of Good enables Evil to flourish. Therefore God is a nasty bastard”

The Pathos of the human condition is reduced to Noel Gallagher like soundbite Bathos

“You can’t make a omelette without crackin a few eggs, and humanity is just a cracked egg, and the omelette – stinks”

“We’re not fuckin important. We’re a crap idea” (chips in Liam Gallagher. Or maybe its Paul Scholes)

He wanders around the Streets of London trashing all the lonely people (where do they all come from?) All as lonely and lost as he is. He can’t even give a boozed up middle-aged woman the fuck she wants (actually, she probably wanted affection, warm human contact) “I can’t love, you look like me mutha! The look of pitiful despair on her face is matched by his look of pitying dismay (or maybe it’s disgust)

“You don’t wanna fuck me – you’ll catch something cruel” he says to her. And he’s right, he is cruel. Like God, he’s a right nasty bastard. And yet. You can’t help but feel compassion for how humanly flawed with fucked upness he is. (Whereas Greg Crudwell’s  – as Jeremy G Smart – nasty bastardness is lizard-like cold and sadistic)

Katrin Cartlidge as pothead Goth Sophie and Lesley Sharp as dumpy Louise come across as mysgonised victims. “What is a proper relationship? Living with someone who talks to you after they’ve bonked ya” says Louise in her weary-woe flat Lancastrian monotone. There’s some nasty violence towards Sophie (she gets brutally sodomised/raped by psychopath Jeremy G Smart) Johnny also gets a good kicking. Twice.

Towards the end he goes through a writhing mental breakdown on the hall landing, regressing to the poor sad little unloved boy he underneath always is (maybe thats why i feel so much sympathy for him)

He does a runner. Hobbles off down the street to God knows where. To Anywhere. To Nowhere.

He’s probably never gonna find anywhere that feels like home, that feels like love.

Dir: Mike Leigh, England

8.5/10

Katrin Cartlidge died in 2002. She was only 41.

Art Garfunkel smoking yet another fag. He’s a Shrink. Falls into an obssessive possessive erotic relationship with Theresa Russell. As if we hadn’t got enough Americans in Vienna, along comes Harvey Keitel as a long haired Viennese cop (but just doing a Harvey Keitel impersonation) to investigate what the hells been going on.

Turns out not alot has been going on really. But Nicolas Roeg’s direction invests the going on with all sorts of conundrumy complexy subplots, side-plots, no-plots.

The story is jigsawed up into disparate bits; our job (and believe me it does feel like “work”) is to puzzle the pieces of narrative back into some kind of meaningful sense.

Garfunkel and Russell are hopeless in the lead roles; he’s meant to be a deeply thinking Doctor of Analysis; she’s meant to be alluringly attractively troubled. But their “fatal attraction” to and for one another is fatuous. Perhaps its because Art Garfunkel can’t act; he does baby-faced opaqueness and thats about it. Russell comes across as a brazen hussied blank.The intensely torrid relationship they’re supposed to be having is convolutedly annodyne, interior-lite.

Theres some skinny shagging between them. Russell has a couple of tantrums. Art carries on his baby-faced smoking. (what a high forehead he had; he must have gone bald soon after this)

The film technique is all too conspicuously present; lots of cutaways and zoom-ins (on random objects in the frame. why?) The non-linear narrative splits and splices the chronology in every direction; cutting and pasting and juxtaposing to make the story seem obliquely complex.

I just got irritated by it. The film is phony as fuck.

And its dull.

In fact i was already binning the film, having seen – and been unimpressed by – a bit of it i’d seen previously . Then i remembered Keith Jarretts Koln Concert had been used in it. I suppose to add in intensity.

But the film has no internal intensity, no real resonance.

There’s no way i’ll be associating the Koln Concert with this pile of pretentious poo.

Dir: Nicolas Roeg, England/USA

4/10