Showing at the Showroom: Blue Valentine

It’s perhaps unjust to damn a film for not exceeding expectations, for just being quite good and not a lot else, but Blue Valentine hits a strange middle ground. It comes at the height of the awards season, and standing alongside other expectant contenders it’s been pinned down as the ‘actors film’. A hard hitting relationship drama, with Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling doing some real emotional heavy-lifting, being brave and going where few other actors dare. And they do, and brilliantly so. But that’s about it.

The crux of the story is a splintered and disjointed tale, following the slow coming together of the unexpectant young parents Dean and Cindy. At the start they’re the very model of a dysfunction, a bouncing young five year old daughter delighting the man-child Dean, the burden of being a grown-up wearing thin on Cindy. The live in a big house, surrounded by beautiful long grass which the morning sun catches nicely. The camera likes staying tight on their faces, the many splinters between the couple writ-large on their every darting glance.

Having left the little Frankie with the gruff grandfather, Dean corrals Cindy into taking up a boozy weekend at a saucy novelty motel, to ‘rediscover that spark’ and find the woman he first fell in love with. A nasty passive-aggressive car drive later and the film takes off on an unclear flight towards rediscovering that love from it’s first instance. Unfulfilled prior relationships come and go, and unlikely re/encounters lead towards a beautifully smoldering kindling of love.

From the grating petulance of his older self earlier in the film Gosling goes into an unremitting charm offensive to win over the coy and reluctant Williams, and effortlessly woos the audience along with her. Having a front seat to an almost bottomless falling in love is a warm and fine thing indeed, and in spite of skirting dangerously close to a mobile phone advert [warm colours, du jour indie soundtrack, a stubbly stud wooing a round cheeked girl with A BLOODY UKELELE] of course you get carried along with it.

All the better having then reached the carefree heights of a love unbounded to the pull the chord towards a spiraling tail-spin of bleakness when the realities and hardships of life get, well, very REAL. Which is when the award-winning performances come to the fore, with the daring and brave sex scenes, the raw-like-onions emotional tussling and rending of hearts and wills. The performances are tremendous, make no mistake, and in their strongest (often drunken) moments the film brings to mind the fraught feelings and jangling genuine anger/love of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Yet despite its’ best efforts, Blue Valentine just hasn’t quite got the same painful edge.

To say it almost feels engineered to bait American critics is to paint the film as cynical. Which it isn’t, but by dint of it’s approach it manages to tick a slew of awards worthy boxes. Which isn’t to say it’s pedestrian either. It’s gripping, involving and tremendous in it’s way, but having long left the cinema the film just hasn’t stuck with me beyond the moment itself.

In isolation the constituent parts of the film: the acting, the cinematography, the soundtrack, are all superb and more than worthy of all the prizes and plaudits you care to heap on it. It’s just by some unholy logic that the sum of said parts don’t quite match that same standard.

Three out of Five

Blue Valentine is showing at the Showroom cinema in Sheffield from the 14th of January 2011.

Rich’s Pickings and the wry double bill

First things first, if you haven’t seen Rich Hall’s ‘Dirty South’ then stop reading now, and go watch it. You have until 3:14am on Sunday 25th July 2010 to catch it on iPlayer, you’d be a mug to miss it.

Why? Because it’s a brilliant personal  treatise on cinema, a very particular strand of cinema close to stand-up comedian Rich Hall’s heart. As a proud Son of the South he’s more than a little fed up with the generalisations the region has suffered under the lens of Hollywood, and is tired of having to rebut himself against a stereotype which isn’t half as clean cut as would first appear. Did you know it actually rains in the South?

And it’s true, the notion of the South is almost wholly coloured by the films he cites, and the literature behind it. That and the ‘I SAY, I SAY’ of Tex Avery’s Foghorn Leghorn, but maybe that’s just me. Anyone who has any kind of spiritual connection to a city or a region will be all too familiar of having to kick against the clichés entrenched by popular media through the ages. And I say this as a blue-eyed, blonde-haired Swede sitting in a grey and miserable Sheffield in July. Things are a bit more complicated than how they first appear, are we clear on that?

There really is some unbound pleasure in just seeing someone knowledgeable and witty just riffing on some really great films, and the pillars of literature they are drawn from. Informative AND funny is a big ask, but Rich Hall brings a degree of irreverence and sincerity to carry it all off.

Heartfelt personal paeans to cinema are nothing new, and I’ve sat through a fair few looking for guidance on what should be sought out, and what should be avoided. The rather explicitly titled, A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies, is a fine example but for all the anecdotes and personal outpouring it’s still a little stilted, and perhaps too grand in its scope. Scorsese whips through the hundreds of films he touches on, but to criticise, it does exactly what the rambling title promises. Personal to the point of autobiography, and anathema for film fans not falling over Ol’ Marty in the first place.

To indulge on the heady fumes of nostalgia, what I really long for is the good old days of Alex Cox and his short, sharp and to the point Videodrome introductions. A curated series of films, introduced at nigh-god-forsaken hours, with a pinch of cool reservation and a pinch of insight. It’s as true then as it still is now, for the channels are awash with more films that you could shake a PVR at, and there’s great value in just having someone go ‘Oi, watch this, it’s good. Why? Because I said so.’

Rich Hall ultimately has come to serve this function, as two films mentioned in the documentary found a slot later on BBC4 on the same evening, namely God’s Little Acre and In the Heat of the Night. A repeat of another Hall documentary this week, How the West Was Lost, was also accompanied by a screening of John Ford’s Fort Apache. Unfortunately neither the doc nor the film is on iplayer, but the marriage of insight and relevant film should really be encouraged.

Much hoopla was made when the BBC announced that Claudia Winkleman was to take over the vaunted Film 20XX reviewers chair, the sceptics howls being hushed by the corporation’s desire to get away from the ‘old man in a chair’ approach to film reviewing. Some further hoopla was made by David Puttnam, when he criticised television producers for not capitalising on the growing hunger and interest for film that is being demonstrated at UK box offices.

It’s hardly rocket science to see a simple equation where you take the likes of enthusiastic profiles (Rich Hall, Mark Kermode, Alex Cox, a woman perhaps? Channel 4 news’ Samira Ahmed tweets and writes enthusiastically about her love of westerns. Someone give her a call) to either spend five minutes hyping an overlooked gem they love, or even perhaps going on a further exploration of some the bigger tropes in cinema. Charlie Brooker’s gotten good mileage tapping Stewart Lee and the like to reminisce about old televisual treasures for Screenwipe, would it be so hard to extend this into the realm of film?

Finding Four Lions in Sheffield

Discussing Sheffield as an overtly ‘cinematic’ city could easily be mocked as daft, but this town really does feel like it’s brought to you in VistaVision. Close to the total population of Sheffield lives on a hill of some kind, and almost everyone can look out of their window, if not down their street, and see at least part of the city unfolding before them. Having the urban heart on your doorstep and the countryside beyond the end of your garden was a quality Victorian art critic John Ruskin rated in Sheffield, and while the post-war period poured a lot of concrete into the city, you’re still never too far from at least a small patch of green.

Despite this the city hasn’t been overly exploited on film, with only a few notable exceptions. A new British comedy, Four Lions is the latest to make the most of the city, and the politically charged satire has its own twist of being set in the shadow of both Western consumerism and two fallen towers. That those two towers happen to be the Tinsley towers is an irony perhaps not lost on the local audience, but more on that in due course.

The place of the city in film starts with its own filmmakers, The Sheffield Photo Company, who got in early on the action with their rather brilliant Daring Daylight Burglary of 1903. Shot in Banner Cross, and up/down/round/about the Whiteley Woods area, one view of smoggy Sheffield down Carter Knowle Road is an eerie backdrop to the lingering death of a policeman. Early silent films aren’t all just knock-about slapstick, straight actuality, or trick films, and regional filmmakers knew both the impact and the draw of shooting in recognisable locations.

A repeated panorama of smoggy Sheffield is at the heart of the propaganda film New Towns for Old from 1942, which  can be found on the rather brilliant Yorkshire Film Archive Online.  Scripted by Dylan Thomas, Sheffield assumes the role of the fictional Northern city ‘Smokedale’ in a bold treatise on the importance of separating housing from industry, and envisioning a city in the sky, away from the ‘muck and the grime’. The jewel in this massive restructuring would of course be the much feted Park Hill flats, and the allusion towards it in New Towns for Old is proof if any where needed of the optimism of the Sheffield Corporation going into the project.

The fate of the Park Hill estate is as tortured and convoluted as could possibly be conceived, and has busy bodies bickering on all sides of the divide. It has yet to feature prominently in any films to my knowledge, but is none the less regularly exploited by TV and documentary teams looking for a handy visual shorthand for anything broadly Grim, Northern, Deprived, or all of the above. The BBC documentary English Heritage – Romancing the Stone did a fine job charting the highs and lows facing the current redevelopment, and the absurd ins and outs of the politics of the funding surrounding the project. The team behind the documentary also had a whale of a time shooting the estate from every conceivable angle, often catching it in rather a stunning light. A case for the site’s listing if you ask me, but lord knows the jury’s still out on that one.

A trope which films of the city consistently return to is using an allotment or suburban park as a setting, always unfolding to the backdrop of either the distant city, if not the cities rural fringes. Post-apocalyptic classic Threads had more than a few scenes set in allotments, where anxieties about the escalating diplomatic tensions were punctuated by the roar of passing Harrier jets. Half of The Full Monty seems to be Robert Carlyle sitting on a park bench looking out over the city, brooding with son/colleague/self over the particularly vexing question of whether to strip or not to strip. Last year even served up an admirable short film called Boy, by local lad Joe Morris, where a tortured soul brushes with the mere notion paedophilia after a chance meeting in a Sheffield allotment.

The new comedy Four Lions continues with this same trope, with the tale of four would-be jihadists bumbling together a plot to bring justice to the Western world. The apartment headquarters for this tiny insurgent cell is set in a very real terrace flat in the Sheffield suburb Tinsley, a stones throw from the hulking Meadowhall shopping centre, a fine symbol for excessive Western consumerism were ever one needed. Again the warren of allotments, and the meeting of urban and rural found there acts as a strange, almost liminal space where the group’s inept technician Fessal can field-test the explosives he’s distilled. The key scene for these tests are shot on the fields not far from Bole Hill in Crookes, and these views out into what becomes the Peak District are the very same that Ruskin epitomised in his reflections on living in Sheffield.

There are no major plot spoilers in saying that the film is partly set in London as well, but the irony for the Sheffield audience is spotting that nigh all the filming was still done in Sheffield. The empty side streets of The Moor stand in for London’s back streets, and one particularly heated confrontation takes place in Kebabish on the Wicker in central Sheffield.

Being a massive geek, and proud to live in Sheffield, I’ve cooked up a Google map to illustrate all the locations I could spot. BE WARNED, there are SOME SPOILERS. Just glancing at it won’t give up the game, but there are some plot details written into the pinpoints. Unspoilt viewers who wish to remain so are advised NOT TO CLICK ON THE PINS.

View Larger Map

To conclude, one final irony: When John Harris dragged a camera crew to Sheffield to film the blinkered and condescending documentary Time Shift: The North-South Divide for BBC4, the team needed shots to illustrate just how dilapidated Sheffield was relative to the bounteous South. Poor John couldn’t be bothered to actually explore Sheffield, so he took a cameraman and went for a  drive in his Mini Cooper. A glimpse of Park Hill ticked the usual box, and the one way system seemed to get him back to the Wicker. Flickering, shuttered shops blaze by, John squeezes in a snide remark about the Malcolm X Islamic bookshop on Spital Hill, and then rolls back down to the Wicker. A very short tour of course, but John still manages to chime in with the remark that this is all ‘very Sheffield now’. So Sheffield that it’s the first place filmmakers turn to when they want to film Sheffield to stand in for London.

Thanks for the insight Mr Harris.

Lars von Trier and the North Korean Documentary

Documentaries about North Korea are almost without exception brilliant. The troubled one party state lends itself perfectly to whatever approach of documentary you want to throw at it, if only by virtue of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s closed door policy to 99% of the world’s media. Some docs approach the place with the solemnity of tone expected of a country so adept at suppressing, if not just killing its’ own population. Others fall straight into the stop-point-laugh category of filmmaking, in which the sheer scale of DPRK’s sur-reality turns into a grand joke.

The BBC recently screened the amazing documentary Kim Jong Il’s Comedy Club (originally: The Red Chapel) and it stupendously manages to nail both the gravity and the inane hilarity of the matter. It’s amazing, and I’ll explain why in due course. [it’s on iPlayer until 4/4/2010 and you really should give it a look]

My entry into the rabbit-warren of NK docs started with A State of Mind, about two girls training for, and then performing in, the spectacular mass games held in honour of Kim Il Sung’s birthday. To be more accurate my first encounter with the film was on the Music TeleVision, as the music video to Faithless’ I Want More cannibalizes the film’s climatic performance to spectacular effect.

The closing game is strikingly shot, and Sheffield based documentary maker Daniel Gordon has pulled off the feat of capturing the individual cogs in this massive machine of perfectly synchronized children. A documentary of observation more than anything else.

Stepping aside from filmed documentaries, Guy Delisle’s graphic novel Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea captures what it’s like actually living and working in the DPRK. Sent on commission to work for two months in a major ‘tweening’ studio in the capital, Quebecois Delisle recounts the culture clashes and the unfailing frustration of talking to citizens seemingly plucked from another planet.

His relationship with his translators (the always-at-your-side state approved guides) are wonderfully telling, and his struggles deciphering opinion from indoctrined propaganda form an interesting crux. Does his guide really believe there are NO disabled citizens? “North Koreans are born strong, intelligent and healthy.” From the way he says it Delisle worries that his guide actually believes the rhetoric.

The book mixes the day to day interactions of the work place with the usual pre set tours that so often form the backbone of documentaries about North Korea. While a filmed documentary would obsess with capturing the scenes as they are passing by, Delisle has the luxury of hindsight when illustrating his own experiences.

Not managing the balance of in-the-moment footage with after-the-event reflection is The Vice Guide to North Korea. Coming from the broadcasting arm of hipster bible éternel, their infiltration of the DPRK is as irreverent as you might expect. While the Gonzo-lite approach works surprisingly well in the documentary Heavy Metal in Baghdad, with North Korea the film strictly follows the increasingly familiar state sanctioned tour route, stopping to point and stare, and then adding a reflective interviews to underscore quite how head-spinning the experience really was.

It’s never really clear if the crew are allowed to film, and while the illicit game of trying to record what you really, really, shouldn’t be is quite a giggle. This naughty schoolboy approach is less effective when speculating on the fact that there my be containment camps just behind that forest, or reflecting that the Nampho dam was probably responsible for the devastating famines of the early 90′s. Oh but they shouldn’t be filming the dam, eek, what larks!

Which is why Kim Jong Il’s Comedy Club is all the more amazing, for taking an even MORE irreverent approach to the matter. Danish journalist Mads Brugger takes two Danish Korean comedians (Simon and Jacob) to NK to put on a comedy show. The regime leaps over itself to invite two South Korean orphans back to the North, and one of them has cerebral palsy! A chance for the nation to prove how tolerant they are towards the lesser abled! You couldn’t script a better piece of propaganda.

Both filmmaker Mads and the regime try to play the two comedians as pawns in their elaborate game, which doesn’t really work as both defiantly kick against the pricks on all sides. Not having any Danish translators within the regime, the visitors can pretty much get away saying what the hell they like, and simmering arguments breakout as the tension rises, hectoring Danish flying back and forth as the visitors do their best to not let on that they are furious with each other.

Rehearsals are broken up with the ever familiar tour of North Korea’s proudest sights, but the trio’s running Danish commentary is brilliant, not just for pouring scorn on what they see, but also for laying bare come how crushingly uncomfortable the two comedians are at being shepherded around. Which is not to say they don’t have some fun along the way, constantly pushing the limits of what they can get away with. Before the show they have to pay due respects to the minister for culture, and having been decked out in the tailored work suits of the people, the trio sing the praises of the glorious leader and spit at the foul underhand dealings of the imperialist American dogs. A gift of a pizza shovel is made to the minister, to pass onto the beloved leader ‘as he loves pizza so much’. Short of asking what pizza is, you can tell no one has a clue what they are talking about.

It was almost without surprise that I found out at the end of the film that it was bankrolled by Lars von Trier’s Zentropa production company.The irreverence of the concept has all the hallmarks of the man who takes such pleasure in splitting audiences, and good as the Beeb are for screening the film you can’t imagine any commissioner in their right mind backing this project. A crying shame at that.

Having gone down the same path of laughing in horror at the regime, Kim Jong Il’s Comedy Club pushes through the wall hit by the Vice Guide to, and comes through in sheer brilliance of observational satire. The joke is on the DPRK, the tragedy is that they can’t quite grasp irony the in the first place.

Some Blue Eyed Revisionism

Men Who Hate Women (or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo as the publishers will insist on calling it) is just a week away from it’s UK wide release, and the TV/newspaper wide coverage is starting to reach fever pitch. The booming voice has slipped into a TV spot even more breathless than the knuckleheaded advert discussed in the last post, and from a few adverts in the papers it seems like every publication and its’ dog is giving MWHW (aka TGWTDT) a solid four, if not five out of five.

Which is no bad thing, as I can’t think of a single Swedish title which has ever had comparable pre-release hype. Take your pick of any worthy or big Swedish classic, and I can assure you it’s never found 30 seconds of airtime during the advert break of Death Wish on ITV. The Swedish film industry has desperately been striving for an international breakthrough hit that will warrant the attention of the non-arthouse masses, and up until now repeated been failing at the task miserably. Case in point: the collossal flop that was Arn: The Knight Templar, a multilingual mess of a crusading action film. Built on a successful trilogy of books by a multimillion selling indigenous author, I doubt Svensk Filmindustri have ever thrown so much money in the direction of a single film. When said film then flops to the point of not even breaking the British or American DVD market, then you’re talking about a film of a sub-Seagal standards, without the comfort of the unintentional laughs.

Along comes another multimillion selling trilogy of Swedish books that are, shock horror, actually pretty good in the first place. But talk of not knowing a good thing when you see it, Stieg Larsson’s smash trilogy is optioned, and then commissioned for Swedish television. Recording starts, and it seems that halfways through the recording of the first book someone had the bright idea that maybe this could be sold much better internationally as a feature film. The rest as they say, is history.

It seems to be a trend that top-drawer television is growing to struggle with more and more, and the issue has been echoed in the UK with the Red RidingTrilogy . Another trio of feature length TV specials with a strong literary source, shot with big indigenous names in front of the camera, and genuine visionaries behind it the end product is programme which literarlly pops off the screen. The trilogy has been touring across the States garnering wholly justified ecstatic write-ups from every corner smart enough to look in it’s direction. To have the New York Review of books declare the trilogy ‘better than The Godfather’ carries no small weight. Even Swedish critics have been looking across at the trilogy with hungry eyes, calling for a similar mini-tour to put the ‘film’ back where it belongs: the cinema.

[for fine words on Red Riding and it's striking/stifling use of location and landscape, you could do a lot worse than check out David Forrest's take on 'The North as Abstract' over at Words on What I've Seen.]

While Red Riding has found it’s feet abroad as a markedly British art feature, the selling of the first part in what the distributors are calling ‘The Girl’ trilogy is being played on completely different terms. Audiences familiar with the Anglicized version of Wallander will be more than prepared for ‘The Girl’, as it comes from exactly the same production company (Yellow Bird Films), utilising a lot of the same crew in the production of the film. Both have a very similar feel, bleached colours palettes, following broken souls looking for answers in a series of brutal acts, which in part are endemic of Sweden’s national failings.

The audience unfortunate enough to be stuck in front of Death Wish last weekend will now be approaching ‘The Girl’ with anything BUT the above criteria in mind. The marketing engine can’t seem to decide if ‘The Girl’ being Swedish is a good thing or a bad thing. As previously discussed, the trailer remains mute, but for reasons known only to the advertising team, the promotional material would have you believe that Lisbeth Salander is blue eyed. The exact detail isn’t made clear in the books, and in a straw poll of two the verdict leant towards the literary Lisbeth having green eyes. What is certain is that actress Noomi Rapace has brown eyes, so there’s no doubt that some sort of photoshop skull-duggery is at hand. Which begs the question, why bother?

To present a a sharper vision of Swedishness? Sexy blue-eyed liberal foreignness, a scando marketing tag anyone can get on board with? Maybe if you consider the country in terms ‘racial purity’ and ‘ayrianism’, which last time I checked was one of the very cornerstones of what Stieg Larsson spent his life fighting against. A mountain out of a mole hill maybe, but bloody daft whichever way you cut it.

European Silent Cinema Trailers

Or more precisely the case of the mute trailer.

The sad fact is that Brits, as a whole, can’t stand listening to foreign tongues. Much can be made of the abysmal standards of modern languages teaching in the British school system. Marry that with the ‘everyone speaks English, why bother’ attitude and you’ve got cause for the unashamed dislike of many things culturally ‘foreign’.

In film circles this manifests itself in the bizarre notion of someone being ‘not too keen on subtitles’. By extension of the same logic you should have audiences biased against films with a lot of red in them, as ‘it’s quite demanding of your attention’ and ‘you can’t really relax when watching a [red] film’. In reverse the liking of predominantly [red] films is seen as a pretentious affectation, and some of those who actively seek out [red] films wear it as some sort of badge of honour. ‘If you didn’t see the original [red] version then you may as not have seen the film. The Hollywood remake is far too bland and unimaginative, and it overlooks a side of the film which is inherently [red] y’know?’

But laboured analogies aside, and Cannes and Oscars gongs aside, Brits can very rarely be sold on foreign language films. [Try convincing a class of undergraduate students that an American film is actually foreign and you open a whole new tin of worms.]

How then do you sell a foreign language feature to this stubborn audience? Quite simple: you make it mute. Which is not to say that you hark back to the good old days of silent cinema, but that you keep all the characters in any trailer from actually saying a word. It’s absurd to think of it, but once you notice it you’ll quickly realise that no one ever says a word in foreign language trailers.

The story which first flagged the idea was when audiences apparently walked out of The Lives of Others precisely because it was full of foreign speak. The trailer had led them to believe that it was in English, and would the box office very kindly refund them as this was obviously cut and dry deception of the highest order. That anyone would assume that a film about the Gestapo could ever be in English makes you wonder how apocryphal the story actually is, but the point remains. The scary fact is that The Lives of Others presents a very clear example of the muting process in action.

US Trailer :

The film’s initial release in the US was two months before it came out in the UK. Looking at the US trailer we can see it is 1min49secs long. Look at the UK trailer and you can note is only 1min27secs long. The only difference is that the UK trailer as had every iota of dialogue snipped out of it.

UK trailer :

Dumbed down trailers are nothing new, but to think that the only way cinema advertisers can engage with British audiences is by actively deceiving them is a return to a very sorry standard. The boom of foreign language films in the UK and US through the fifties and sixties was of course fuelled by the now totemic work of Bergman, Fellini, Kurosawa and de Sica. The dark underside to this was that these films were often actively marketed as seedy and salacious imported films for ADULTS ONLY. While the sexual/emotional frankness matched with the chance of seeing some boob kept the seedy cinemas of Soho filled with Bergman, one particularly noteworthy advert in the New York Post sold de Sica’s Bicycle Thief as a sexual film of transgressions. Social realism doesn’t sell. Sex does. Go figure.

Arguably the selling of The Lives of Others taps into that as well, with the American DVD cover showing the Gestapo’s auditory voyeur sensationally listening in on the saucy bohemian playwright making passionate love to his creative muse. That’s not really what the film’s about, but it gets the Dirty Mac Brigade in all of us to at least pick up the DVD and have a closer look at it.

The two strategies of obscuring a film’s nationality with overplaying its sexy-sexy foreignness is coming to a nadir with the English language release of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The Swedish trailer released last year plays up to the film’s strong narrative pull, the slow uncovering of a grander conspiracy through hard-nosed investigation and archive sifting. The two main characters Lisbeth and Mikael get reasonably equal billing, and the trailer culminates in quick cut action. It’s pretty representative of the film as a whole.

Looking at the dubbed German trailer a lot is made of the original novel which was incredibly popular in Germany. Again the detective novel aspects of investigation, archive cracking and the unlocking of secret codes is foregrounded, culminating in some breathless but unexplained action.

Get to the UK trailer and the frying-pan-around-the-head bluntness starts with the bass-y voiceover of reckoning from the spirit of Don LaFontaine. ‘HER JOURNEY HAS BECOME AN INTERNATIONAL SENSATION. HER SECRETS HAVE CAPITAVTED MILLIONS. THIS YEAR…’

The whole film is about Lisbeth and her secret, and lots and LOTS of action. The British distributors have even acquired the domain www.thegirl.co.uk for the film, just so we all know who the focus of the film is supposed to be. Poor acne scarred Mikael doesn’t get a look in, and heaven forefend if we should catch a glimpse of paper, or perhaps a file of archive materials.

And of course no one besides Hollywood -Voice-Over-Man gets a word in edgeways. You’d be forgiven for mistaking this for the Hollywood remake that’s already being negotiated. Shame that they can’t highlight the film’s inherent [red]ness, and how like pretty much all modern films from [red]land, that it’s largely about the failing of the [red] social model. After all the original [red] title was Men Who Hate Women, but I guess that wouldn’t trip off Hollywood-Voice-Over-Man’s tongue so well. But what do I know, I’m just half [red] anyways.

Kill Switch and the DTV Star System

Being of a certain age I can unfortunately not claim to have seen one of the Big Man’s films on the Big Screen. Yet by the peculiar quirk of advertising I have still seen the Big Man himself on the Big Screen, so with begrudging gratitude to Orange telecoms I direct you to this:

It is, almost without question, one of, if not THE best thing he has done on screen in the last ten years. Needless vehicle-based chases, inexplicable explosions, a flourish of spoken Japanese, a sense of humour, and most astonishingly some genuine ass-kicking (albeit without any nut-cracking) from Seagal himself! No stunt-double!

Those dear marketing execs really outdid themselves in boiling down the essence of what we, the baying hordes, demand from a Seagal film. The irony is that this is literally what he is trying to escape with the Rom-com script he is touting to the fictional Orange execs. The double irony is that this mirrors Seagal own attempts to break out of the action mould, evident in traces through films like Kill Switch and other recent DTV films. Granted, the advert takes it to an extreme level of absurdity, but there is a bizarre poignancy in seeing Steve play out the bizarre Catch 22 he will forever be stuck in. It’s the self-reflexive postmodern genius of JCVD all over again, only condensed into a single minute. Call ‘over-analysis’ all you like, the dogs-dinner script and editing of Kill Switch is proof if any where needed that what Steven wants and what Steven gets are two very separate things.

For all the collected mistakes and shoddy breaks in almost all of Seagal’s recent DTV output, Kill Switch bears the marks of a film with grand intentions that just came crashing down in the edit. As executive producer, writer and lead actor in the film, you cannot help but wonder how much beyond mere finances Seagal had invested in this film. The Making-of that accompanies the film paints the picture of a team genuinely set on pushing some boundaries in terms of your average Seagal action DTV

Steven, the director, all the main actors, everyone lines up to discuss the nuance and the complexities of the story. Jacob King, the controversial detective at the heart of the film is discussed and Steven goes into some detail about the challenges of getting to grips with a man who is just as obsessed an perverted as the serial killers he pursues. The director also goes to some pains to describe a couple of scenes in the film and how he chose to shoot them, even going so far as to show a storyboard for the flying-out-of-a-window-seventeen-times sequence. He doesn’t corroborate my own rather bold reading of the sequence as a revisionist take on Hollywood editing, but there is proof at least that this wasn’t a wholly unplanned hodge-podge.

Perhaps most telling is that the interview with the director is shot in the editing room, in front of the editing suite with a cut of the film running in the background. Said cut of the film features a edit of the window-seventeen scene that differs significantly from the cut in the finished product. Fewer cuts, a shorter sequence, and another argument against my revisionist reading. It is impossible to guess at what stage in post production the interview was conducted, but on some level it does illustrate the different stages of where the Making-of was made, compared to the final edit of the film.

Indeed I feel it is safe to say that the film that the cast discuss in the Making-of is separate from the film as it ended up on the DVD. It is possibly the most incoherent mess you could ever conceive of outside of experimental filmmaking. Characters appear and disappear, the story progresses without any sense of purpose, with more plot holes than a rural backlane. Almost worst of all, Steven’s character unexpectedly lashes out in brutal acts of ultra-violence. Think American History X curb stomping, but without the emotional impact.

Seagal’s character is wholly and totally morally irreprehensible. A chauvinist, a sadist, and a down right Arsehole.

He could very well pull off the nuance and complexities of such a character, and his fellow cast and director seemed to believe so too. The producers evidently, much like the Orange execs, did not and saw fit to chop and change the film to make it best fit the picture we all have of Seagal as an action hero. The simple fact is that DTV producers play the market much as the exploitation producers of the 1970′s did. Catch the eye with a bold poster (or DVD cover), and to hell with whether it actually lives up to the promise, as long as the punters just come flocking.

Seagal is a name everyone recognises. It is a hallmark of certain kind of rather conventional action film. Hire the name and you have a certain amount of box office guaranteed. Simple.

Exploitation producers didn’t care much whether a film actually lived up to it’s title, provided the title was good in the first place. Seagal’s name is on the poster, so why are these DTV producers so desperate to recut the film? A crying shame, as it would have been refreshing to see Seagal at least try to flesh out a multidimensional character.

Oh yes, and did I mention that Isaac Hayes is in this film? There’s another name for the poster. As a pathologist no less.

The First Coming of Antichrist

This is it. The eye of the media shit storm; after the cultural digestion from the liberal arts programmes and columns but still before the reviews start raining in the ‘official’ verdict. Lars von Triers‘ Antichrist has been a fair while coming, but the great Dane has got the media machine humming to his tune, a maestro of stoking controversy, a grand master of publicity. To borrow the sacrosanct yet divine language befitting of the film I can say I’ve been blessed to see the film, and there is a lot to digest.

Firstly we need to establish some parameters to von Trier’s game, for those are the rules we have to play by.

Don’t ever take anything he says at face value. The hook he has given himself in the promotion of Antichrist is that he is ‘The Best Film Director in the World’ and countless hacks have taken the bait. Even if they all contextualise the statement and the humour in which it was said, the headline remains the same. Bryan Appleyard in the Sunday Times tries to put down von Trier by inventing his own word and denigrating that it as ‘pure undergraduatese.’ The fact that Appleyard continues to play this game on von Triers terms is proof if any that Trier’s declarations are anything but naïve.

A few critics have done a good job at calling von Trier out on this sport, and hats go off to the Guardian’s in-house film-hater-extraordinaire Peter Bradshaw for presciently speculating on the publicity value of von Trier announcing his depression over two years ago. That was the first word I heard of Antichrist, and it is wholly unquestionable that this is a film defined by a nigh chronic depression. It is bleak, unrelenting, and it spirals towards a hysterical ending. It remains firmly in the subjective of the female lead, struggling and failing to break out of a cycle of grief. As she is locked in depression so too is the viewer rooted, shackled to their seats throughout.

In its’ premise Antichrist is easily summarised, and its critics are quick to quip about its blunt symbolism. A husband and wife fall into deep mourning after the tragic death of their child. The ‘She’ is briefly hospitalised, physically debilitated by her loss, while the psychoanalyst ‘He’ carries his loss in a ‘typical’ manner. To tackle her ‘atypical’ mourning, the couple retreat to their isolated cabin, Eden, set deep in an overbearing almost monstrous forest. The husband is blindly convinced that he alone can give active and adequate therapeutic guidance to break his wife out of her depression. Despite promising signs early on, it all goes terribly wrong.

In its weakest guise this is a film about psychotherapy, and films shot from the therapists couch rarely grasp you by the eyeballs. Onscreen discussions on the value of medicated ignorance or the importance of exposure therapy clunk about in a heavy handed way, railroaded through the film by an increasingly insistent husband/therapist. Yet these doubts fade as the folly of this dominant approach slowly unravels, turning instead to a confrontation of cold rationalism against emotional hysteria. Put bluntly it turns into a straight up clash of the sexes.

This is hardly new territory to von Trier and his critics are all too quick to cite his major post-dogme films and the trail of ‘destroyed’ women he has left in his path. Dragging Nicole Kidman through misery on Dogville, driving Björk to eating her own jumper on Dancer in the Dark. While this rather glib trope of ‘dragging women through hell’ might be obvious in these later films, Antichrist draws its conflict from further back in von Trier’s past, harking back to his widely overlooked TV film adaptation of Euripides’ Medea.

A true archetype for the conflict and contrast of the hysterical wife against the coldly rational and distant husband, Medea casts the imbalance of the sexes at the heart of its conflict, and the tensions between the responsibilities of the mother (Medea) against the liberties of the father (Jason). It ends with Medea rejecting the shackles of her maternal role, killing her sons by Jason, and fantastically disappearing on a golden chariot driven by dragons. While von Trier’s Medea doesn’t end quite so fantastically, it keeps the bloody ending and the inner conflict of a woman uncomfortably vulnerable to a cheating husband she still loves remains as the films definitive dynamic.

This very anxiety carries over into Antichrist, driving a personal tragedy deeper into the realms of metaphysical and symbolic horror. Before the film has even been released across Europe discussions are already raging on the pages of the respectable press whether this film is misogynist or not. To boil it down as such is about as complex as speculating if the coin has landed heads or tails. Is the switch on, or off? Does von Trier hate women, or not? Such headbangingly simplistic debate is about the greatest injustice you can do the film, as it does away with the nuance of the personal and the broader issues that von Trier targets in Antichrist.

Equally the excessive violence at the end of the film does not definitively flick this switch on or off. For the media to be endlessly scratching their heads over it is surely to miss the forest for all the trees? In terms of British exhibition this film is unequivocally a milestone in what can be shown on legitimate screens, and some media debate over the role of the BBFC, and what they think about Antichrist, is natural. Yet when it boils down to the usual claptrap of ‘but is it Art?’ and ‘What DOES it take for a film to get banned these days?’ you can’t but worry for the state of educated discussion of such matters. Yes it is shocking, wince worthy, enough to make any human genuinely uncomfortable. But this is just about underlining the horrors that the characters go through. When Oedipus claws his eyes out it isn’t to anti-titillate the audience, it is (arguably) to drum home the horrors he has just realised, to make physical the dramatic revelation of irony that has been building up throughout. This is the school of tragedy von Trier is dealing with. Physical mutilation: par for the course. Deal with it.

Or is it?

The devilish imp von Trier really cannot be trusted, and for all the interviews with director and cast consistently pointing to the sincerity of this production you can’t but wonder what ire he was hoping to stoke up with all of this. He has widely discussed the two edits he had made, the uncut Protestant version and the cut Catholic version, and with his canny producers’ hat on von Trier must have seen this coming. Undoubtedly, but for all of its most extreme moments Antichrist is none the less a tremendously challenging watch, and all the better for it.