Disappointing... yet brilliant

LFF#7: Something Wild 

SPOlLER ALERT There is a dramatic development in the first few minutes of this film that has to mentioned to discuss it in any sensible way. 



Each year I try to see at least one archive film at the LFF. This time it was this little-seen film from 1961. It stars, and was partially financed by Carroll Baker and directed by her then husband, Jack Garfein. Baker is most famous for playing the nymphet in Baby Doll, the Tennessee Williams/Elia Kazan film. Garfein worked with Lee Strasberg, the legendary method-acting guru, and set up the LA branch of The Actors Studio. Something Wild was meant to show that Baker was an actress to be reckoned with, and the couple hired the best possible talent to work on their labour of love, including title sequence genius Saul Bass, composer Aaron Copland and the legendary cinematographer Eugen Schufftan, who picked up an Oscar for one of the other films he shot that year, The Hustler. And yet all of this failed to make Something Wild into the critical success its makers were aiming for. 


Baker plays a student who gets raped on her way home in a socially declining Bronx neighbourhood. She says nothing about her experience to her snobbish, uptight mother. Unable to resume life as normal, she runs away into the city. One of the great things about Something Wild is that it was shot on location in New York, in the days when that was still rare. And Baker roams for miles, from the blazing lights of Broadway to the forlorn Lower East Side.


She’s excellent. The Actors Studio had a big effect on the movies, and not always a good one. A film where the Method is unchained, and one which a chunk of it takes place in one room with two characters, offers up all sorts of self-indulgent possibilities. But Baker avoids most of the traps, and produces a fine performance as a woman who can’t communicate what has happened to her. It’s a shame this film didn’t work for Baker – making it was a brave move, and it deserves a better reputation.

LFF#6: The Body

Alex thinks he has committed the perfect murder, until his wife’s body goes missing and he ends spending the night in the morgue, where things are going bump in the night. Meanwhile, we get flashbacks to piece together the build-up to the killing of the wealthy wife with a peculiar sense of humour… but does someone know more than they are letting on, or has the ‘corpse’ staged one final big gag? Catalan director Oriol Paulo is a big fan of Hitchcock and Agatha Christie, and there is plenty of the former and at least a dab of the other in this cheerfully twisted tale. Crucially, it has a lightness of touch that puts it ahead of many superficially similar American movies, at the same as not being being too jokey. And José Coronado, the detective, has one of those ridiculously deep Spanish voices*, which always work well in a decent cinema sound system. Thoroughly enjoyable.

(*Quality of voices – under-discussed in film criticism?)

LFF#5: Peddlers

At the start, this feels like a critical look at the new India, kicking off with some rich kids who take their socially clueless dealer to the beach with them as a bit of a plaything, and a hip young cop who fits too easily into his cover of lounge lizard. It’s all Facebook and iPhones and characters renting Dexter on DVD, and it’s shot like a moody American indie. It’s obvious that the kid and the cop will cross paths, but what gets them there involves less crime and police procedural than you might expect, although we do get a foot chase through the slums, which is probably an inevitability. One of the storylines is a slow-burning tragedy that, for all the contemporary trappings, could have come from a 19th-century novel. The other, meanwhile, feels like a homage to slick Hollywood sleazemeister Joe Eszterhaz. That’s a jarring contrast, rather than an inspired fusion, and ultimately makes for a silly film that takes itself far too seriously. That’s a shame, because Peddlers goes to places (geographical, including India’s new mega-suburbs, and sociological) we haven’t seen enough on screen. 

LFF#4: Nameless Gangster: Rules Of The Time

Meet Mr Choi. He’s flabby, schlubby, corrupt, easily bullied, a bit of a joke. He’s a minor customs official entering middle age, enjoying the odd bribe but going nowhere. Until chance gives him an opening in the world of organised crime, and Mr Choi starts his unlikely rise. His secret: in positions of power on both sides of the law are other Chois, his distant clan relations, all duty-bound to give him a hand. It’s a heart-warming story of a loser who wins, liberally strewn with bone-shattering beatdowns. The film seems (to this foreigner at least) to be saying several things about South Korea, not least of which is that under the patina of modernity lies an fundamentally feudal set-up.

Much less stylised than the other (admittedly not many) Korean crime movies I have seen, Nameless Gangster is set in the 1980s and feels if it could have been made then (things harder to do today than then: smash someone bloody with a phone). The violence is frequent but not drawn out or fetishised. All the main characters seem to get an equal chance to beat each other up.

I’m sure in Korea it has a lot more satirical bite, and the jokes get more laughs, but it’s still a lot of fun.

LFF#3: The We And The I

Michel Gondry is the director of some hugely entertaining and inventive movies, including Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind and Be Kind Rewind. But although his new film has an intriguing set-up – taking place on a single bus ride home through the Bronx on the last day of school – it should it in no way be mistaken for a piece of entertainment. It is, in fact, the product of workshops with the young cast, presumably focussing on bullying and peer pressure (hence the awkward title). The cast all share their names with their characters. It’s possible that something vital and surprising could have emerged from the process, full of fresh yo-mama jokes and newly coined slang, but it hasn’t. There was only one moment at the screening I saw where anybody laughed. The film basically falls into two halves: the early babble of the crowded bus when it is hard to make out what anyone says, and tough to keep track of the two dozen characters; and the second half when there are only a few kids left on the bus and it is unfortunately all too easy to hear them as they lurch into ‘this is me telling the truth for the first time’ mode, weirdly reminiscent of the repellent 1970s backstage musical A Chorus Line. It reaches levels of tedium I’ve not felt in a long time in the cinema – a lot of the time it really is like being on a bus where the people in the seat in front of you are having such a detailed, aggressively dull conversation about their lives that you get off two stops early. A few bits of trademark Gondry home-crafted fantasy sequences and a soundtrack full of Young MC and Slick Rick offer moments of respite, if fleeting. I hope making it was a cathartic experience for all concerned, but this is like being made to watch a heavy-handed school play starring kids you aren’t even related to.

LFF#2 Eat Sleep Die

So apparently even Sweden has its rust belt, dying towns being emptied out of people doing dying jobs. The irony in this case being that many of the residents seem to have only just arrived in the country. Eat Sleep Die is the story of Raša, who - Montenegran-born but raised in Sweden - is neither quite a foreigner nor a native. She’s a 21-year-old who is an endearing mix of truculence, fluctuating self-esteem and resilience, good at a low-end job that might be about to disappear from under her, and looking after a father who is unfit for work but unable to qualify for disability benefit. It all feels pretty real – there’s a chilling accurate scene of redundancies being announced. What keeps it from slipping into wallowing in someone’s else’s misery is Nermina Lukač’s vibrant performance as Raša, who’s a great character to hang around with.

LFF#1: End Of Watch

Cop movies have suffered from the current golden age of TV. There’s something about police work, its daily grind, its different-but-similar incidents, and the chat when nothing is happening, that fits 13 or 24 hours better than two. End Of Watch goes down the kind of LA streets and alleys between one-story clapboard houses and chain-link yards as (the impossibly great) The Shield and more recently (excellent) Southland. It’s actually very close in feel to the latter, being about uniforms rather than detectives, incidents not extended cases. Mostly. But that’s not to dismiss it: this is a terrific buddy movie about two good, if slightly cocky, cops. Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña do a great job in capturing that way men communicate with their friends, without crossing the line into formuliac banter. There are some good jokes at the expense of white people. This is a funny movie. It’s also somewhat anxiety-inducing. Some of the plot developments are a bit obvious, the bad guys a bit over the top and having the characters filming themselves a bit tired. But I liked it a lot, and loved the ending.

Which of Sight & Sound’s Greatest Films Ever Made are worth skipping an episode of Revenge to see?

1. Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958, USA)

In short: Pensioned-off San Francisco cop becomes obsessed with glamorous but damaged young woman. Then something happens that pushes him into behaviour that is frankly screwy…

The S&S voters love it because: It suggests that at the heart of every solid American citizen there is a pervert waiting to spring out. And that’s a theme many critics will never get tired of. According to S&S, the clunkiness of some of the plotting only makes it even stranger, and therefore better. It’s also one of the most referenced and ripped-off movies ever made, leaving its traces on the work of directors as different as Chris Marker and Paul Verhoeven. 

Is its reputation earned?: Hitchcock’s thriller about obsession, phobias, blondness, the (very common) desire to transform the person you’re with into the person you want, all makes for a more punter-friendly top film than former No1 Citizen Kane. For critics, there’s always been plenty to ponder on the lines of whatever psychological theory is current at the time, plus there is the pleasure of watching James Stewart, who in the 1930s was the embodiment of American sincerity and good heartedness, getting properly weird. What should be the big twist is dropped in far earlier than any modern director would dare. It’s a quite beautiful film, too. 

At all likely to make anyone consider ditching Revenge and watching this instead?: Even now, Hitchcock doesn’t need the support of an institution like the BFI to connect with the audience – no director ever had a better grasp of what made audiences work.

Which of Sight & Sound’s Greatest Films Ever Made are worth skipping an episode of Revenge to see?

2. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941, USA)

In short: Why did Charles Foster Kane, wildly rich, charismatic, idealistic, never short of a dazzling idea, died a defeated man? The answer is compellingly pieced together through flashbacks.

The S&S voters love it because: The endless behind the scenes gossip, technical flash and the legend of Orson Welles, the boy genius crushed by Hollywood and his own vanity.

Is its reputation earned?: According to the voters, Kane is no longer the greatest film ever made… which would seem to make some kind of sense because it is possibly the third best movie Orson Welles directed, after Touch Of Evil and the lost version of The Magnificent Ambersons. Over-praised for its technical breakthroughs, Citizen Kane has probably suffered from the idea that is something that people should watch, rather than want to watch. When you actually see it, you realise it is cracking tale of power, inspiration, betrayal and disappointment. It is a lot of fun. The only serious flaw is Orson Welles’ bizarre faith in the ability of his prosthetics and make-up people. Both Welles, only 26 when he made this, and co-star Joseph Cotton struggle in their horribly unconvincing old man get-ups.

At all likely to make anyone consider ditching Revenge and watching this instead?: Conspiracies, publicity stunts, the madness of the very rich, the same actors playing their younger and older selves – Kane and Revenge have a surprising amount in common.

Which of Sight & Sound’s Greatest Films Ever Made are worth skipping an episode of Revenge to see?

3. Tokyo Story (Ozu Yashiro, 1953, Japan)

In short: An elderly couple decide to visit their (ungrateful) grown-up children in the Japanese capital. A lot of what might now be termed passive-aggressive behaviour ensues.

The S&S voters love it because: The restraint, and the humanity, plus the formal precision of the shots.

Is its reputation earned?: If ‘great’ makes you expect grand, epic, visually overwhelming, then Tokyo Story might come as a bit of a surprise. It’s a quiet film about family in which for a lot of the time nothing big is happening on the surface. Even calling it a drama suggests you’ll get letting-it-all-out Tennessee Williams-style moments. There are none. It might make you cry, but not in a bullying Steven Spielberg manner - seeing an old man drink his tea becomes heartbreaking. It’s a wonderful, wonderful film, although I think that the same director’s Late Spring – 15 on the Sight & Sound list – is even better.

 At all likely to make anyone consider ditching Revenge and watching this instead?: In a rather better world than we have, alas.