Festivals

Film4.com editor Catherine Bray experiments with James Franco’s ambitious split screen adaptation of William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize winning impressionistic stream of consciousness novel, As I Lay Dying…

I’m generally a fan of people trying to do something a bit different, even when they don’t totally succeed. James Franco’s adaptation of As I Lay Dying is better than some critics seemed to want it to be. It certainly ticks many of the boxes that tend to ensure a film attracts a certain level of gimlet-eyed scrutiny from pundits (1. it stars the director, 2. it’s formally ambitious, 3. it has something to do with James Franco). Not that scrutiny is a bad thing, but it does need to be applied equally to all comers.

As I Lay Dying is by no means an easy watch, but it’s certainly easier to watch than the book is to read, with Faulkner’s at times Joycean, occasionally manic, style of interior monologue and shifting perspectives shared by 15 characters over 59 chapters hardly constituting a holiday page-turner. You probably won’t hear anyone complaining that the book is willfully difficult to comprehend. I do wonder whether the film is fully intelligible independently of the novel. It’s not necessarily a problem if it isn’t – it’s not a commercially-minded film, but one made as a serious artistic response to a piece of Nobel prize winning literature.

The film locates the death of Addie Bundren (Beth Grant), mother of impoverished Southerners the Bundren clan, at around the 20 minute mark. They’re then on the road 25 minutes in, transporting Addie in the coffin made by big lunk Cash Bundren (Jim Parrack) to Jefferson, where it is her dying wish to be buried. The sense of bad luck and ill-omen attending their quest is almost as tangible as the smell of Addie rotting in her coffin as the Bundrens fail to make good time, due to a combination of misfortunes. The original narrative is pared back slightly, with various digressions and minor characters making way for multi-perspective coverage of the main Bundrens: rotten-toothed Anse, sensitive Darl (Franco), illegitimate Jewel (Logan Marshall-Green), secretly pregnant Dewey Dell (Ahna O’Reilly), self-sacrificing Cash and young Vardaman (Brady Permenter). Characters like the minister Whitfield who is Jewel’s real father are barely glimpsed, but it would take a four or five hour film to get everything in.

I was dreading the split screen technique in advance, having heard about it and presumed it would be a gimmick. Actually, I think it works rather well. At its best, it’s used to illuminate different perspectives within the same scene, which feels very true to the multiple first person narration of the book, though this doesn’t happen as often as it could, and the technique sometimes lapses into a simple way of combining long shot and close-up which offers less than some of the more rigorous composition employed elsewhere.

The most questionable note for me was James Franco’s casting as Darl, not because it’s a bad performance, and not because he’s too good looking for the part or anything like that, but because of his persona and our awareness of his status as the director. I couldn’t watch a lingering close up of his face without being conscious that I was looking at James Franco, the actor, presented in close up by James Franco, the director. And then I would think about James Franco, the Oscar host. If it were possible to watch this film with no knowledge that the director was the chap playing Darl, I suspect it would be easier to relax and engage with the performance on a more straightforward level.

Anyway, hats off to Franco for a handling a bold choice of source material in an innovative fashion.

Film4.com editor Catherine Bray catches an early morning screening of the new film from prolific Japanese director Takashi Miike…

Last year at Cannes, I experienced the extreme pleasure and madness and finally incoherence of Takashi Miike’s genre-busting For Love’s Sake, which screened out-of-competition. An action-musical-romance set mostly in a high school, it was a wacky treat, but not the type of film that would ever play in Competition. This year, he’s back with Shield Of Straw, his second Competition bow after 2011′s Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai.

Battle Royale’s Tatsuya Fujiwara stars as child-killer Kiyomaru, who gruesomely despatches the granddaughter of a billionaire. Bad idea – the billionaire grandad retaliates by publicly putting an enormous bounty on Kiyomaru’s head. He promptly become the most wanted man in Japan, and realising the bind he’s in, turns himself over to the law, who are required to bring him to state-sanctioned justice in Tokyo. Unfortunately, that’s over 750 miles away, and every mile of the journey is fraught with would-be assassins aiming to bag the cash, with police deaths regarded as simply unfortunately collateral damage in the race to the prize.

It’s an exciting set-up – not large on plausibility, sure, but something you feel ought to guarantee some fine set pieces and pulse-racing action. And yet there’s something oddly prosaic about most of the stand-offs, and they’re punctuated too frequently with a lot of emphatic pontificating about the honour of Japan (which will apparently be compromised if Kiyomaru dies). It’s difficult to fully understand why this film was chosen for Competition out of the dozens of films that would also have been contenders – it’s fine for a Saturday night at the local Odeon but sits strangely in this showcase of the best that world cinema had to offer this year. It is of course always refreshing to see that the Competition is open to genre films -  but did it have to be this genre film?

In fairness, I found it hard to engage with in part because the dialogue as represented in the English subtitles was so poor, which may not be the case in the Japanese original. It’s hard to take the morality debates seriously when they’re rendered so clunkily. If Shield Of Straw is remade in the US, the main lesson to learn is that there is nothing about this story that requires it to be 2 hours 5 minutes long.

Film4.com editor Catherine Bray catches a film in Competition and a film in Un Certain Regard linked by their character’s systematic refusal to play by the rules…

Borgman and Grand Central are very different films, and you wouldn’t ordinarily link them, but I happened to see them consecutively at Cannes, and this happenstance started me thinking about the different ways in which they both transgress. So let’s look at them both through that particular filter.

Grand Central, which played in Un Certain Regard, is the third feature film from Rebecca Zlotowski, and the second, after Belle Épine, to star Léa Seydoux, who may be more familiar to UK audiences as a foxy bad girl in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, but is a rather better actress than perhaps that film allowed her to demonstrate. Grand Central also stars so-hot-right-now Tahar Rahim (A Prophet), who also takes a lead role in Asghar Farhadi’s Competition entry The Past, reviewed here on Friday.

French director Rebecca Zlotowski is clearly a talent to watch: in Grand Central she has made a stylish and confident film about a love triangle which makes the most of its nuclear power plant setting. Say whaaat? Yes, rather than an boring old office setting (take that, The Apartment), here we have two star-crossed lovers, beautiful Karole (Seydoux) and handsome Gary (Rahim) who both work in a nuclear power plant, as does Karole’s chunky middle-aged partner, who is, unfortunately, also Gary’s boss.

The setting really adds something interesting to what could have been a pretty prosaic tale deliberating between the relative merits of infidelity and passion versus stability and familiarity. As Gary crosses the social line which says you don’t bite the hand that feeds you, much less shag the hand’s lady, he also deliberately breaks employment law, absorbing far more then the recommended levels of radiation, leading to plenty of Silkwood-style decontamination scenes. While he allows his soul to decay by getting in deeper trouble with Karole, so he allows his body to fall prey to radioactive decay at the plant. This parallel is not hammered home and so is rather more effective than I’ve probably managed to make it sound here, while a fantastic experimental score helps the sense of screeching unease no end.

But let’s keep some moral perspective: at least poor old Gary doesn’t murder anyone, which is only one of a number of oddnesses enacted upon a wealthy family by apparently homeless drifter/guru/psychopath Camiel Borgman (Jan Bijvoet), in Alex van Warmerdam’s Borgman. I say oddnesses rather than crimes, because not all of his transgressions are strictly speaking illegal, and, like a vampire, he only appears to cross thresholds once invited. Borgman is really a very accomplished film, though certainly won’t be for everyone – it welds themes from Beckett and Pinter with a sense of humour that feels right out of Giorgos Lanthimos’s brilliant Dogtooth, a sense of menace that recalls Ben Wheatley’s Kill List, and an initial innocence coupled with sort-of home invasions that oddly reminded me of 3-Iron by Kim Ki-duk. Throw in a bit of Michael Haneke (in particular The White Ribbon, I felt, though Funny Games will be the more tempting comparison for many), and you’re in danger of over-egging the reference pudding, particularly when this is a film quite capable of standing up for itself without this scaffolding.

When Camiel initially approaches wealthy Richard (Jeroen Perceval) and Marina (Hadewych Minis), following a superb prologue involving an underground lair, he seems a strange but essentially childlike man, who attempts to lie his way into their house with a ridiculously transparent, instantly shot-down gambit. Thereafter, his insinuation becomes more subtle as he inveigles his way into Marina’s guilty affections, skilfully playing a constant verbal and physical game of brinkmanship.

Told to stay in the summer house, he is discovered inside the main house talking with one of the three children – he had heard her crying, he says, and who would ignore a crying child? It is through these thin-end-of-the-wedge tactics that he effects his takeover, transgressing an inch at a time, until a situation has arisen that would never have come about had he attempted to move quickly. It’s a powerful parable about the erosion of resistance, and the way that human morality, which can often stand strong against a sense of large transgression, makes a poor job of coping with a series of steadily increasing wrongs.

This was one of my favourite Competition films, though doesn’t seem a likely Palme d’or choice. Still, I’m hoping we see more from Alex van Warmerdam at Cannes in years to come.

Film4.com editor Catherine Bray takes a look at an acclaimed new talent who has emerged from Critics’ Week at Cannes 2013: debut feature director Paul Wright, whose Film4-backed drama of survivor guilt and surrealist imagery For Those In Peril was warmly received yesterday

31 year old director Paul Wright’s career is shaping up pretty seamlessly thus far. His first short film Hikikomori, made while studying Film at Glasgow’s RSAMD, won the Scottish Bafta for Best New Work, Best Drama at the RTS Awards in 2007, and received a Bafta nomination in 2007 for Best Short. Then, while studying for a Fiction Directing MA at the NFTS in 2008, he made another short, Believe, which won Locarno’s Golden Leopard for Best International Short, plus awards at Winterthur and Leeds International Film Festival. In 2010, his short Photos Of God was selected for Berlin, and his graduation film, Until The River Runs Red won the Bafta for Best Short in 2011. Now, his debut feature has premiered at Cannes, in Critics’ Week, the strand that aims to highlight the work of talented newcomers. It’s the stuff of dreams and envy for aspirant filmmakers.

“Critics’ Week is the perfect platform,” Paul says when we speak, the day after the premiere. “We couldn’t ask for more, or hope for more of a way for it to stand out and hopefully connect with an audience in an increasingly crowded market place. It won’t be for everyone, but we hope that for the people who like it, it really has an impact.”

A cinephile from a young age, Paul’s earliest memory of a film that really made an impact on him is Nic Roeg’s superlative study of grief, Don’t Look Now – “I saw it when I was probably younger than I should have been, and the ending really got to me”. While he says that Roeg’s cult classic was not a direct influence on For Those In Peril, it’s fair to say that with their common themes of grief, guilt and the supernatural feel those emotions can have when heightened (plus an arresting shock image in the final moments), they would make a great double bill.

Another film with which some reviews have compared For Those In Peril is last year’s hot ticket at Cannes, Beasts Of The Southern Wild. Like Beasts, For Those In Peril features a lead performance that is being hailed as the arrival of a potential new star. George MacKay, who I spoke with yesterday, is, as producer Mary Burke puts it, “so different from the character that he’s playing. He’s from Barnes, and he’s kind of meek and posh and sweet.” George worked with Paul to create Aaron, the increasingly unbalanced sole survivor of the wreck of a fishing boat that claimed the lives of four local lads including Aaron’s brother Billy. Aaron is the character around which the film is built, and needed a strong lead. Mary remembers, “we did all these casting calls, searching for a needle in a haystack for a young actor to play and hold the lead role throughout the whole film, like with Submarine and This Is England. And I had never seen George in anything, so I had no idea who he was. He came into the office with a guitar on his back ‘cause he was going back and forth from Wales for How I Live Now and just came in for, like, 20 minutes, and yet I was almost crying in his audition. That’s how good it was. And I don’t cry, because I’m from New York.”

Paul was also thrilled with their leading man. “We knew pretty soon we were onto a winner. We knew we had our guy. On the shoot he gave 100% – we couldn’t have done it without him. He was in practically every scene.” And for his part, George says: “I’ve never had such a close relationship with a director before.” This attention to detail (Paul spent two days going through the script one-on-one with George before shooting) paid off, with positive reviews including Robbie Collins’ assessment in the Telegraph of the performance as “terrifyingly good: George MacKay, who four years ago was already showing promise in The Boys are Back, is simply heartbreaking in a performance that leaves you feeling like your own soul has been peeled.”

But Paul isn’t a director who came into the profession because he likes bossing actors about – he admits his initial passion lay with technique, but says of directing actors, “I’m getting better, but I’ve got this slight obsession with visuals and audio. It’s a testament to the actors that they came on board a project where such a lot of the script has no dialogue.” One of the most notable bits of dialogue is a recurring tale about a monster in the deeps, with which Aaron becomes fixated. I asked Paul whether it is based on a folk tale local to where he grew up, or completely made up for the film. “I guess growing up near the ocean, there were a lot of stories,” he says, “but it’s a combination of stories and myth, rather than any single one that already existed. I wanted to leave space for the audience to interpret the film for themselves.”

Paul has been mulling over the kernel of the idea for this film for several years, and began working on an actual script about two years ago. Yet this is the first time For Those In Peril has encountered an audience and begun to exist outside of Paul’s control. “Today was the first Q&A with what you might call average punters, from pensioners to teenagers – some of the responses were overwhelming. There were a few tears.”

Paul himself is ready to move on to the next project, which is at the ideas stage. I suggest that I can’t really imagine him jumping to sign on to direct an Iron Man 4 or a Transformers 5, but were the offer to be made, would he go to Hollywood? “Well, I think about it in terms of whether an idea is something you can care about for years of your life. I need to have an emotional investment, but there are plenty of different types of cinema that can provoke a reaction.” With his cited list of “gamechanger” filmmakers including the likes of Andrei Tarkovsky, Werner Herzog, Terrence Malick, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Lars von Trier and Gaspar Noe, and an ambition to follow in their foot steps in creating wide-ranging, authored works of cinema, I can’t wait to see what Paul does next.

For Those In Peril will be released in the UK in 2013

Catherine Bray switches off her inner monologue and finds the Coen brothers Competition entry, Inside Llewyn Davis, to be one of the most absorbing films of the festival…

At Cannes, and indeed any festival or highly anticipated screening, it’s quite easy to be all-too conscious of your own mind appreciating or not appreciating a film. You end up with a kind of running interior monologue, going: “That’s well done. Interesting shot. Urgh, overuse of the score here. That’s a clever joke. Poor continuity there. Is that a bit racially insensitive? That seems unrealistic. Ooh, gorgeous. What have I seen him in? No, not the bloody violins again! Hmm, people don’t talk like that. But wait, how did she know that? Plot hole. Bad edit. Good costume. Wobbly accent.”

Critics generally jot down the bits of that inner monologue that seem most relevant, then come out of the screening, mull it over, add research around the film, facts, dates, context, references, names, maybe a joke or two, hazard a guess at commercial prospects or awards hopes, and – voila! – a review is born, and it goes off into the world to be reviewed in its turn by people on the internet. It’s kind of a funny way to earn money.

Sometimes a film is able to puncture all that, and is so fully-formed and engaging you simply immerse yourself in it: the inner monologue shuts up. I had that experience with Inside Llewyn Davis, the new film from the Coen brothers that screened in Cannes in Competition yesterday. As sometimes happens with buzz titles, there were more people who wanted to see the film than there were seats available, and I wasn’t close enough to the front, so I saw it this morning instead. When that happens, there’s a tiny, petty, all-too human part of you that wants the film you were excluded from to turn out to not be as transcendent as the people who saw the early screening said it was. You have to try to shut that part of yourself up, and in the case of Inside Llewyn Davis that couldn’t be an easier task, because the film is so clearly great.

The man of the title, aspirant folk musician Llewyn Davis, is played by Oscar Isaac, who until this breakout has mostly had small roles in films that we can now judge unworthy of his talents (Sucker Punch and W.E. spring to mind). He tells John Goodman’s brusque jazz man, who at first hears his name as Lew N. Davis, that the name is Welsh, but his mother was Italian. We never meet her, but his father, rotting in a rest home, functions as an advertisement for everything Llewyn fears becoming – a folk music career is his ticket out of hell, and the idea of giving up to get a more conventional job and simply “exist”, as he puts it to his sister, would be a genuine abdication of hope.

Heavy stuff, right? Well yes, in a way, but these are the deep themes running under the deft down-beat comedy that plays on the surface. A very likeable cat provides plenty of comic moments, and hats off to the Coens for writing that into their script, cats being notoriously unwilling to do anything other than precisely what they feel like doing, shooting schedule or no. I’m going to wrap up there, because otherwise I’ll be at risk of simply repeating Film4 channel editor David Cox’s spot on write-up of the film from the first press screening – so if you haven’t caught that already, click here to read why Llewyn Davis is leading the pack at Cannes 2013.