Latest from David Cox

Suffused in a blue-grey wintry light and flecked with brown, beige and burgundy, Joel and Ethan Coen’s Inside Llewyn Davis plays out in a low-key melancholy mood broken only when simmering frustration boils over into anger, or sardonic asides swirl up into sudden savage comedy. The reception in the 1000-seat Debussy cinema, full of critics and journalists who had just queued for up to 90-minutes in the pouring rain, was genuinely warm rather than rowdily celebratory. It was as if the film’s calm control – its firm-handed, light-touch mastery – had placed everyone under a spell.

Oscar Isaac is folk singer Llewyn Davis, something of a star in the East Village but struggling to sell records in Cincinnati. Nothing quite goes right for Llewyn as he struggles with his principles over the course of the film, watching lesser acts such as his friends Jim and Jean (Justin Timberlake, Carey Mulligan) gain acceptance while he gets beaten up in a dark alley and visits his manager to discover he’s received no returns, no post, nothing. What’s more, he has a serious cat problem.

An artist’s struggle in an unforgiving environment is something the Coens have dealt with before in Barton Fink, a previous Cannes success that won them the Palme d’Or in 1991 (and which also featured John Goodman in malevolent form). Inside Llewyn David is a very different film however – apart from a surreal and ultimately defining roadtrip to Chicago and a sinister figure who bookends the film, this is a naturalistic comedy-drama that runs on beautifully observed period detail, a range of typically colourful characters and a some sharp, angry humour – most of it driven by Llewyn’s deep frustration and disappointment. What really raises it, and serves as a mark of the Coens’ supreme confidence, are the numerous songs – mostly played in full – that punctuate proceedings. Each serves a different dramatic function (without telling stories through lyrics) and each stops the film and makes you look closely at, and think hard about, Llewyn as he performs (one of the songs is more of a comic number with Timberlake and Adam Driver, but even that has a bearing on the direction Llewyn’s life will take).

For such a modest film, Inside Llewyn Davis is as rich as anything the Coens have done before. We’ll get a clearer idea of how the film has been received tomorrow, when the reviews come out and the red-carpet audience experience it at its world premiere in the evening. On first viewing though, with the jury still out, Inside Llewyn Davis is leading the pack at this year’s festival.

The relentless rain means that it’s increasingly hard to distinguish the ocean from the Croisette here at Cannes, but on the screen at least everything is buoyant. Three Film4 productions – Clio Barnard’s The Selfish Giant, Mark Cousins’ A Story of Children and Film and Paul Wright’s For Those in Peril – have filled us with home-team pride, the trio of filmmakers all festival first-timers whose distinctive films guarantee that their presence here will be strongly felt. Looking further afield, relative Cannes veterans Hirokazu Kore-eda and Jia Zhangke fearlessly tackled domestic and social politics to provided a pair of very strong Competition entries – respectively, the delicate emotional balancing act Like Father, Like Son and the violent, searing indictment of contemporary China, A Touch Of Sin. Set against that pairing Asghar Farhadi’s The Past, his follow-up to the almost-perfect A Separation, felt like an exercise in emotional mathematics, a puzzle to be solved rather than a story to be lived.

However, if you want your spirits lifted, soul nourished and cynicism blasted then look no further than the wonderful wizard of Chile, Alejandro Jodorowsky. The silver-haired ringmaster returns to the cinematic circus at 84 years old, with his first film since The Rainbow Thief in 1990. An autobiographical phantasmagoria that begins by looking back to his childhood in Tocopilla, before branching out to follow his father’s own spiritual and political awakening, La Danza de la Realidad (showing here in Director’s Fortnight) could be seen as Jodorowsky’s Amarcord – although calling it ‘Fellini-esque’ would do a disservice to the director’s unique style. Even without the periodic appearances of Jodorowsky himself, tenderly offering advice and support to his younger self, you’d still know exactly whose world you’re inhabiting – a gang of multiple amputees chant protest songs, perfectly uniformed firemen parade through the village streets at night, a beautiful white horse performs balletic tricks, young Alejandro’s mother – who sings all her dialogue – covers her son in black bootpolish in a bid to banish his fear of the dark… Every frame is so full of poetry, every sequence so suffused with romance and adventure, that I barely noticed the heavy grey rain upon exiting the cinema.

Before we left, Jodorowsky himself appeared on-stage looking trim, youthful and full of mischief. He called his film ‘a psychological bomb for the whole of his family [many of whom appear in the film]… a way to reconcile with my father’. He also talked movingly, but never judgmentally or self-servingly, about how cinema is ‘an industry’ and asked ‘what’s left for the director… who is a poet’. Not exceptional or radical statements but touching coming from a director/poet coming close to the end of his creative life and who clearly needs cinema now more than ever. With La Danza de la Realidad, Jodorowsky has created both a memory-piece and his masterpiece at the same time, and its final line sums up both him and his new film perfectly: ‘Sail away from the past… but keep the child’.

There’s still more to come from Jodorowsky at this year’s festival, with a documentary tracing the director’s frustrated attempts to bring his version of Frank Herbert’s epic science-fiction novel Dune to screen (a feat later accomplished by David Lynch). That screens for the first time this evening but, as it clashes with the first press show of the Coen brothers new film Inside Llewyn Davies, I’ll catch up with it later in the week and report on it then. (Of course, the good news is that I’ll have word on the Coens in the meantime.)

For now, it’s back out into the rain, to see if there’s anything left of Cannes itself…

 

For an event that generates so much excitement and carries with it such potential for surprise, it’s remarkable how – year after year – the experience of being at the Cannes Film Festival always feels exactly the same. Even though this is my 20th consecutive visit to the festival, I still can’t quite fully recall the impact it has when one actually arrives – the dramatic change in the routine and structure of the day, the surges of enthusiasm and the suck of enervation as films either deliver or don’t, and an absolute shift in priority as to what’s hugely important at any given moment.

However, give it twenty-four hours or so (which is how long I’ve been at the 2013 festival) and I’m already sleepwalking into bewildering queuing systems, calculating precise times between coffee shop, press room and cinema without even thinking and basically shunting all the usual day-to-day stuff out of my brain to make room for nothing but the festival – the schedule that sprawls across five official sections and market screenings, the complicated foreign titles of films I didn’t know even existed five minutes previously, and opinions that I know will be radically revised “once I’ve had more time to really think about it”. With the logistics and physical layout always largely unchanged from the year before (apart from the new Irish pub), brain and body fall quickly into line and it’s the films themselves that become the only points of difference.

Mind you, after the first two days of this year’s festival that last point is definitely arguable. From what I’ve seen, things are looking as familiar on-screen as they are off. Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge opened Cannes in 2001 and now he’s back fulfilling the same function with The Great Gatsby, an entirely airless and lumbering spectacle that’s equally as ghastly as its festival predecessor. The first film to be screened in Competition – Amat Escalante’s Heli, from Mexico – is as bone-dry and violence-prone as Los Bastardos, the director’s Un Certain Regard entry in 2008. François Ozon returns to tease audiences with more of his arthouse softcore in Young & Beautiful, while Sofia Coppola continues to occupy her very comfortable comfort zone with The Bling Ring, a flip and feather-light true story of celebrity and fashion-obsessed teenage thieves set in Beverly Hills.

That’s not to suggest that all the above films are bad, although I certainly can’t conjure any positive feelings about Luhrmann or Ozon at this juncture. However, Heli is a blunt and terrifying thriller about innocents caught up in the drug trade that’s shaded with moments of emotional grace,while The Bling Ring is a gem – its swiftness and ease might make it feel superficial, but it’s actually a sharp character-comedy built on genuine empathy. In both this and her previous film Somewhere, Coppola’s clear-eyed view of an environment she seems to know well yields moments of great visual beauty. Still, the strengths of both films can’t quite hide the fact that this year’s festival hasn’t broken any new ground yet.

Surprises and revelations are still to come, I’m sure, but in the meantime it’s worth finishing with a word on Fruitvale Station, the big winner at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Ryan Coogler’s debut feature tells the true story of Oscar, a young man shot by police at an Bay Area subway stop on New Years Eve, 2008. Anchored by a sensitive lead performance from Michael B. Jordan (and strong support from Melonie Diaz as his partner Sophia and Octavia Spencer as his mother), Coogler tracks Oscar through his final day alive.

It all seems fairly uneventful until you realize what Coogler is really doing, telescoping the shape, weight and texture of an entire life – challenges, decisions, aspirations, personal connections – into one single day (the film’s ending is set in motion by an effectively neat narrative contrivance that manages to compress the events of the day itself, really sharpening the point). The film feels slightly burdened by the event that it’s building up to – you can’t really do much but feel for Oscar throughout when you know what’s coming – but ultimately it’s the universality that gives the film its force. How would your life look abstracted and played out over the course of a ‘regular’ day? This dignified drama, plain and worthy on the surface, looks set to sneak up on people who may not feel it’s for them.

All this talk of ‘regular days’ brings us back to the start and the experience on Cannes itself, where every day is different and every day is the same.  The routines may continue tomorrow, but who knows what surprises may be up on the screen…

Channel Editor of Film4 David Cox has been in Berlin, watching as many films as humanly possible at the 63rd International Berlinale. Here, he reports on the prize winners in the festival’s official selection and gives a run down of his personal Berlin highlights.

Having started so strongly on February 7th, the Berlin Film Festival came to a close last Sunday having remained impressively consistent across its entire 10-day span. As rewarding as the Berlinale always is, it’s not regularly a festival that delivers many of any given year’s best films. The 2013 edition – the 63rd in the festival’s history – promises to change that.

The actual awards were, as is the case at most major festivals, something of a mixed bag. The resonant if not particularly galvanising Romanian drama Child’s Pose (directed by Calin Peter Netzer) won the top award of the Golden Bear for Best Film, while the runner-up film award - the Jury Grand Prix - went to Denis Tanovic’s An Episode In The Life Of An Iron Picker, a film which seemed to be treated with respect rather than greeted with much enthusiasm. David Gordon Green – who’s proven himself capable of maturing even when seemingly regressing – was an inspired choice to win the Silver Bear for Best Director (for the film Prince Avalanche) and Jafar Panahi was the recipient of the Best Screenplay prize for his inventive Closed Curtains (a film I wish I’d liked more at the time, and look forward to re-visiting in the future away from festival overload).  As expected, Paulina Garcia won the Best Actress award her performance in Sebastien Lelio’s emotionally satisfying Gloria, probably the best received film at the festival, with Nazif Mujic’s Best Actor triumph making it two major awards for Tanovic’s Iron Picker. Particularly well-deserved was the Best Cinematography win for Aziz Zhambakiyev, whose work helped to make young Kazakh director Emir Baigazin’s assured Harmony Lessons one of the competition highlights.

The prizes above only represent what was happening in the official Competition section of what is a sprawling festival that really starts to pay off the deeper you dig into it. Even having spent seven days there seeing more than 35 films I missed a lot of acclaimed titles, amongst them the aforementioned Iron Picker; the double-winner in Panorama Broken Circle Breakdown; the Teddy Award winner In The Name Of (the Teddy being the festival’s prize for best gay-themed film); Best First Feature The Rocket (a favourite in the youth-oriented Generation Kplus sidebar which won three prizes overall) and new films from Gus Van Sant, Steven Soderbergh and Ulrich Seidl. And that’s just the film that made ‘headlines’.

Still, omissions aside, I came away feeling as if I’d managed to take a reasonably broad sample of what the 63rd Berlinale had to offer. It’s always a good place to go in order to get the new year in film underway – along with Sundance and Rotterdam in January, Berlin is where you really get to see the first batch of major 2013 films and if these ten days are anything to go by we have a bright year ahead. Here, for no reason other than a desire to wrap things up in a relatively labour-unintensive fashion, is a list of best films and personal highlights from my time at the Berlin Film Festival:

OVERALL BEST FILM:

Upstream Color (Shane Carruth, USA, in Panorama): Symphonic science-fiction, with a myriad ideas and emotions nesting amidst its abstractions.

THE REST (alphabetical):

Before Midnight (Richard Linklater, USA, Official Selection/Out-of-Competition): Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke’s walking-and-talking romance gets surprisingly serious in Greece.

Camille Claudel 1915 (Bruno Dumont, France, in Competition): A formidable performance by Juliette Binoche graces this austere but impassioned tale of an artist’s confinement.

Coming Forth By Day (Hala Lotfy, Egypt, in Forum section): A young woman tends to her dying father in Cairo, her every action followed by a patient and empathetic mobile camera. Slow, subtle, with shades of Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien.

Everyday Objects (Nicolas Wackerbarth, France, in Forum section): Confined to a holiday home in the south of France for the summer, a German writer makes some very poor choices as she attempts to make the most of her minimal opportunity for personal expression

Forgetting To Know You (Quan Ling, China, in Forum section): People and place are both beautifully observed in this study of suspected adultery in a small Chinese town, produced by Jia Zhang-Ke.

Harmony Lessons (Emir Baigazin, Kazakhstan, in Competition): A young boy is bullied at a rural school in Kazakhstan, with non-whimsical flights of fancy taking the film into unexpected territory.

I Used To Be Darker (Matt Porterfield, USA, in Forum section): A delicately constructed and realised tale of emotional confusion; a pale Irish teenager goes to stay with her uncle and aunt in Baltimore, a pair of musicians who are splitting up. Patterns emerge from the resulting upheavals but not necessarily any order. More accessible than Porterfield’s previous films Hamilton and Putty Hill but just as beguiling.

In Bloom (Nana Ekvtimishvili, Georgia, in Forum section): A tough and heartbreaking coming-of-age story set in Tblisi, following two teenage girlfriends forced to assume adult roles.  Features one of the festival’s standout setpieces, a perfectly-placed solo wedding dance – performed in a single take with fierce conviction and remarkable concentration – that provides the film with its emotional centre.

Lifelong (Asli Ozge, Turkey, in Panorama section): A contemporary artist is stuck in a marital and creative rut in this cool and clear-eyed appraisal of domestic disharmony.

Prince Avalanche (David Gordon Green, USA, in Competition): Two men – Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch - in the middle of nowhere, trying to make sense of their lives but lacking the necessary skills to do so. Broad comedy and intimate drama, set against a devastated but beautiful rural American backdrop.

 

That’s it from Berlin – hopefully quite a few of the films above, plus others that featured at the festival, will be arriving in the UK before the end of the year. In the meantime, roll on Cannes – the festival in May for once has something to live up to.

Channel Editor of Film4 David Cox is in Berlin, watching as many films as humanly possible at the 63rd International Berlinale. Here, he checks out the third part of Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise, Before Sunset trilogy: Before Midnight, plus David Gordon Green’s Prince Avalanche, Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color and more

One of the major temptations of the Berlinale is the opportunity to quickly catch up with a number of the titles from the just-finished Sundance Film Festival in January. A number of films from Sundance are scattered throughout the official selection and a few others turn up in the market, so it’s easy to find yourself simply playing catch-up with these rather than embracing the new-new work being presented at this festival.

This year a few Sundance films proved either irresistible or impossible to avoid given their presence in one or other of the main categories. Chief amongst them is Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight, which appeared in the Official Selection but out-of-competition. It’s a worthy third (but not necessarily concluding) chapter in the collaboration between director Linklater and his stars Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke, catching up with their characters Celine and Jesse nine years after the Paris-set Before Sunset tantalized viewers with its ambiguous open ending. The pair are very much together now, married with children and spending a summer vacation in the Southern Peloponnese with a loose group of acquaintances. Set once again within a 24-hour timeframe, Linklater, Delpy and Hawke take the relationship into choppy waters as the pair reveal mutual dissatisfactions over the course of a supposedly idyllic night in a luxury hotel. Full of humour but not afraid of a harsh honesty (Linklater’s debt to Eric Rohmer is more apparent than ever here), Before Midnight finds this extended romantic story growing richer the further Celine and Jesse travel together.

 

Prince Avalanche

Also from Sundance, and appearing in the Official Competition, is David Gordon Green’s Prince Avalanche, a leisurely road-movie of sorts starring Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch as line-painters and pole-pounders on a long stretch of road running through a Texas forest largely to laid to waste by a forest fire. A remake of the Icelandic film Either Way, the film neatly brings together the two strands currently running through Green’s filmography – an earthy American poetry and a broad, almost juvenile humour (the director seemingly never tires of stripping his male leads down to their ‘tighty-whiteys’ in film after film). Rudd is very touching as the uptight know-it-all who has retreated into nature to make himself a better person, while Hirsch is amusingly childlike as the brother of Rudd’s girlfriend, along for the ride but more concerned with getting laid at the weekends. Very beautiful and very relaxed filmmaking, getting everything it needs from its two main characters and the landscape itself but with a few sensitively-handled asides along the way. Whether he returns to the poetic mode of his debut George Washington, busts out another conventional comedy like last year’s The Sitter or even takes on the long-promised (threatened?) remake of Suspiria, I’d gladly follow David Gordon Green wherever he wants to go.

 

Upstream Color

In the Panorama section, and one of the most anticipated films both here and at Sundance, is director Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color, a follow-up to his remarkable 2004 time-travel film Primer (which is coming to Film4 channel soon). Primer was a real puzzler, a low-budget sci-fi film of head-scratching complexity, and his new film continues in this narrative vein while adding a new-found film-making confidence and expansiveness. A story of human connection and transference (I think), redemption through nature (maybe), substance abuse (less sure about this) and different ways of navigating through a complicated world (getting increasingly general at this point!), the film is a full and flowing thing that proceeds from a dark and terrifying science-fiction conceit (a extreme experiment with an organic drug that when shared amongst people creates a single mindstate) through to an almost operatic finish that pays tribute (almost accidentally, according to Carruth) to Thoreaus’s paean to nature Walden. Upstream Color requires more time for reflection than a festival really allows, but it’s a wonderful and exciting piece of work, one that’s sure to be watched, argued about and picked apart for many years to come.

 

Horror in the market and more…

The market was the place to find two of the most memorable films screened around the festival this year. S-VHS (soon to be retitled V/H/S/2) is the sequel to the lo-fi horror anthology that I saw here in the market last year. With directors Adam Wingard (the forthcoming You’re Next), Eduardo Sanchez (The Blair Witch Project), Jason Eisener (Hobo With A Shotgun) and Gareth Evans (The Raid) delivering the stories, the new film is a supercharged version of the first. The emphasis is more on providing a relentless gruelling experience than giving you the creeps, but it still re-invigorates horror’s found-footage subgenre.

A horror film of a very refined kind, Escape From Tomorrow is already notorious for having been shot without permission at Disneyland. What I’d expected to be little more than a provocative stunt turns out to be one of the most unsettling films for a long time as it follows an average family around the amusement park on the last day of their vacation. The park itself takes on a sinister aspect as the father slowly loses touch with reality, his obsession with two teenage French girls constantly flitting through his eyeline just the first stage in a mental breakdown that goes to some very strange places indeed. Even if the future of the film remains in dispute given its appropriation of Disney trademarks (at the very least), it would be unfair to give away too much more about this genuinely freaky fantasia. Safe to say, grab any chance you get to see Escape From Tomorrow in case it disappears for good.

Also still fresh from Sundance are Andrew Bujalski’s deadpan and ultimately quite eerie Computer Chess (in Forum), the intriguing drama of sexual awakening Concussion(in Panorama), the by-the-numbers biopic Lovelace (also in Panorama) and, in the market, the eccentric comedy Toy’s House, which has shades of Wes Anderson, Terrence Malick and Jared Hess and boasts a very memorable comic creation in the form of a character called Biagio.

Hopefully that’s all from the USA from this festival. I’ll do a wrap of the remaining Berlinale highlights over the weekend.

 

Click here to browse the rest of David’s Berlin coverage