Posts Tagged ‘London Film Festival’

It’s stupid o’clock in the morning and I’m clutching my notepad and pen, trying my best to look sufficiently hipster in a crowd of spotty teenagers in a greyish Leicester square. This tubby boy in a Dawn of the Dead t-shirt is earnestly declaring his love for Danny Boyle in a loud and insistent voice, to a pretty but bored girl who looks a bit lost. For a second I’m transported back to my misspent youth; staying up to watch my battered video copy of Trainspotting until it wore out, sneaking in to see 28 Days Later at the cinema, and comprehensively failing to use my encyclopaedic knowledge of zombie films to seduce girls.

My guide for the morning, this very earnest Amnesty representative with a kind face who looks a bit uncomfortable in his suit ushers me into the upstairs foyer of the Odeon and suddenly I’m surrounded by movie bigwigs in sharp suits, PR flunkies and Amnesty officials. I’m hastily introduced to Kate Allen who passionately explains the project that is being launched, an initiative to show films to thousands of school children, to raise their awareness of international issues and make them want to ‘…make the world a better place’. When I ask her about Amnesty’s take on the arguably exploitative production process of Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, the project’s flagship film for today, she recommends I take it up with Danny and promptly moves away.

I’m led over to the Empire and in the foyer I glimpse Boyle, a fixed grin on his face as a parade of schoolchildren file past. The wide-eyed cinephile in me kicks in and my heart flutters a little. A harassed looking girl dashes around looking for aesthetically pleasing kids to pose with him and my guide nudges me over to stand with Boyle for a photo. As per usual I come out looking like a criminal. I try to concentrate on matters at hand, not swoon or shout ‘Danny Boyle just touched me!’ at the children as I walk down to the main screen where Kate Allen and Boyle animatedly introduce the screening of Slumdog. Just as Allen declares ‘You will see absolute inequality in this film’ a kid sitting in the row behind me wretches violently and is led out to the corridor to be sick. Boyle tells an interesting anecdote about his dealings with the Indian censorship board, which had no problem with the torture scene at the start of the film, since police brutality is commonplace in India. I’m perplexed.

The Amnesty and Boyle pack moves out, and we leave the children to enjoy Dev Patel pursue his mind-numbingly capitalistic dream. Back in the Odeon I get a couple of minutes with Boyle before he dashes off to introduce another screening and I ask him about the project. He tells me he’s been a member of Amnesty for years, and that, though his film is not political, it is ‘humane’. I don’t take him up on this rather puzzling statement. Instead I try and ask him a convoluted film studies-ish question about surrogate families in his movies and he smiles rather mischievously and tells me that questions like that are really up to the critics. He checks his amusingly broken-looking Iphone and is promptly led off by another harassed suit. I like to think we had a moment though.

Before I leave, I hang around for a while and just sort of mingle. I overhear one film PR girl tell another that she ‘…was never really into films’ but took her job because it was ‘…what I could wear jeans to’. I see Boyle standing on the Odeon balcony with that same grin proudly holding aloft a ‘Protect the Human’ sign as hundreds of cameras click away. I flick through the press pack, see some shocking images and read some horrible statistics. I check my cynicism against Boyle’s, maybe compare the rather dodgy means to the positive ends of this project and I feel a bit guilty. Then I leave.

If, like Joseph Brodsky contended, bad literature is a form of treason, the Soviet Union should have exalted the Nobel laureate poet and essayist as a national hero. Instead, he was jailed, sentenced to hard labor, and finally exiled to the US, never again to see his native St. Petersburg – at least, not until Andrey Khrzhanovsky’s A Room and a Half, which takes up the unrealized plan Brodsky had fashioned for an incognito visit (via sea journey to Finland), and dresses it with animated sequences, archival poetic excerpts, and stellar performances to emerge, finally, with a fantastic and intensely nostalgic account of a man and a society now irrevocably lost to the past.

Khrzhanovsky is primarily an animator – A Room and a Half is his first live-action feature – and it shows. As an aged Brodsky (Grigoriy Dityatkovskiy) heads home after the deaths of his parents, a breakfast coffee initiates the episodic recounting of his childhood – the first sign of A Room’s Proustian pedigree. In a house with an impressive pedigree of its own, as evidenced by a sequence of elegant silhouettes of pre-Revolutionary intelligentsia – but split up, as goes the rule in Communist Leningrad, into apartments housing several families at once, little Joseph (Artem Smola) and his parents lead as idyllic an existence as possible for a family reunited in post-war Russia. Indoors, father (a lovingly sympathetic Sergei Yursky) and mother (an excellent, infinitely understanding Alisa Freindlich) dance cheek-to-cheek in soft sepia, surrounded by piles of antiques on which the camera lovingly lingers – antimacassars and dinner sets, books and clippings, Japanese masks and teapots. In the communal kitchen, Joseph watches, wide-eyed, women’s mystical domestic ritual – with Fellini, this is at worst self-indulgent but here, totally endearing. In a parallel, animated landscape, Joseph’s alter ego, a cartoon cat, scribbles and flirts outrageously, as outside, in black and white, a bevy of musical instruments float into the skies: art banished from the snow-blanketed city. Stalin dies, and before poetry, before dissent, before bohemian parties and vodka in the park, teenage Joseph – having barricaded his section of the room accordingly – discovers girls.

If Tarkovsky’s “Nostalghia” is an aching paean to a mythical, idealized and highly personal Russia, “A Room and Half” is a much less lofty tune, (heavily classical and folk-y soundtrack notwithstanding). Khrzhanovsky constructs a strangely innocent world shot in period hues, where youthful idealism ranges only as far as denim and a vague democracy. Even Brodsky’s years in internal exile are considered only a sort of poetic finishing school, so the best, most genuine bits among the whole are those about St. Petersburg as was. After all Khrzhanovsky, unlike Brodsky, didn’t emigrate, and he has less to say about exile – barring a few priceless shots of Brodsky in New York, monkeying around in an honorary cap and gown – than about the city in which a young man found poetry, and to which he always wanted to return.

The London Film Festival kicks off on 14^th October, during which a multitude of brand new films will be showing at cinemas across the capital. Screen takes a look at potential highlights…

An Education

Adapted from The Guardian journalist Lynn Barber’s memoir by Nick Hornby, this feature stars hotly-tipped newcomer Carey Mulligan as Jenny, a bright girl from a lower middle class family who is seduced by Peter Sarsgaard’s older man, David. Enticed by the fine things in life that David can provide for her, only school teachers (Emma Thompson and Olivia Williams) sense the danger Jenny may be entering.

The Road

Cormac McCarthy’s second scintillating novel to be made into a film, The Road stars Viggo Mortensen as a nameless survivor of a nameless apocalypse who is travelling across a scorched America with his young son. If director John Hillcoat has managed to convey even a fraction of the book’s grim vision, we could be on to a winner. Last showing is this afternoon though so hurry!

A Serious Man

The latest film from the Coen Brothers sees the nice and normal world of Larry Gopnik fall apart around him as he tries to maintain his virtuous existence. Some feel that Burn After Reading was a misfire after the much lauded No Country For Old Men; let’s hope A Serious Man can restore their faith in the ever surprising Coen’s catalogue.

Balibo

Balibo is based on the true story of five Australian journos who were killed whilst covering the 1975 genocide in East Timor (for more about that search YouTube for Noam Chomsky’s excellent documentary, Manufacturing Consent). The film has been described as tense, thrilling and affecting and should highlight a relatively little know 20^th century tragedy.

Bunny and the Bull

The producers of this have described it as ‘Withnail & I for the mentally ill’. It boasts Paul King, director of the Mighty Boosh at its helm as well as stars Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt. It will probably be rather funny then. It concerns the tale of two friends who’ve had a trip around Europe so tumultuous; it’s left one of them house-bound for two months. Fielding and Barratt play an ex-matador and a tramp that the couple encounter on their trip. Expect surrealism.

American: The Bill Hicks Story

An inventive documentary from two UK filmmakers, American: The Bill Hicks Story combines stand-up footage, testimonies from close family members and animation techniques to tell the tale of one of the greatest comedians ever to grace a stage. Hick’s performances were audacious displays of articulate rage, unrelenting compassion and machete-sharp wit. Hopefully, the film will capture some of this and serve as a fitting memorial to the sadly missed stand-up.

The Scouting Book for Boys

Thomas Turgoose, the breakout star of Shane Meadow’s tour de force, This Is England, takes the lead as David in this compelling drama about two childhood friends who are separated when one goes missing. Apparently mixing the anxieties of teen-hood with the idylls of childhood in the summertime, this could be the film that turns Turgoose into a household name.

Metropia

“Downbeat animated sci-fi noir” describes this Scandinavian curiosity. Roger lives in a dystopian vision of the future in which all of Europe is connected by subterranean transport links and constantly monitored by CCTV and big corporations. Also, he’s hearing voices in his head. Is someone trying to control him? Who? And why? Or is he just mental? Sounds intriguing!

Women Without Men

Iranian director/artist Shirin Neshat adapts Shahrunsh Parsipar’s banned (in Iran) novel, in which we follow the stories of four women during the time of the 1953 coup (backed by us western buggers) in which Iran’s democratically elected PM was deposed by the shah. A heady mix of political, social, sexual and religious issues are discussed in this beautifully shot film.

Also showing at the festival are showcases of several short films, grouped by theme. ‘The Gothic and The Grotesque’, for example collects numerous macabre and creepy shorts including Little Red Hoodie, an update of a familiar Grimm tale and Touch of Red, a depiction of Edgar Allen Poe as he writes The Fall of the House of Usher. The ‘Landscape as Character’ set also contains many potential gems, such as A Whore and a Chick which features a cycling chicken man and John Wayne Hated Horses, about a father and son’s views on machismo.

There’s also the secret screening, in which the audience doesn’t know what they’re going to watch until the lights go out. In the past, punters have been treated to No Country For Old Men and The Wrestler. My money’s on Terry Gilliam and the late Heath Ledger’s The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus.

For more information, screening times and locations and tickets, visit www.bfi.org.uk/lff.