The First Date

“What happened?”

She laughs. She is forbidden to mention this to any prospective groom, or to anybody for that matter. She faces him. He’s not her prospect anymore.

“I don’t remember the exact details. I was told by the nurse at the mental hospital that I attacked a man with a kitchen knife in the middle of the street. There was a police case.”

“You are joking, right? That’s insane.”

“Insane. That’s a right word. Now, you can go tell your mother that I’m insane and the wedding is off. Just don’t tell Dastidar Kaku about it, if possible. He doesn’t know. Nobody knows.”

“I’m sorry. I did not mean that. I’m finding it hard to believe your story. You look perfectly normal to me, unless you are carrying a kitchen knife in your bag right now.” He gives her a smile, a open-mouthed smile of solidarity. “Who was the victim anyway? Was he dead?”

“Thankfully, no. This is the best part. He was the reason I went to Boston. He was my senior and we were in love. We were planning to get married once I finish my doctorate.”

“Then his mother found him a bride.”

“No. He decided to marry a local girl, because he had impregnated her. He came to me that day, this much I remember. He told me that he loved me, but he must marry that girl because she was carrying his child. He must protect his seed, those were his exact words.”

A silence hangs between them. Sometimes silence is the best way to extend solidarity.

[Excerpt from a story I am working on, tentatively titled 'At Victoria' or 'The First Date']

A Prayer for Memory

I too dream, not like lovers, giddy, exhaustive daydreams, no
Not like ambitious fathers, not like an alley cats dreaming of
Fried fish, not like highway truck drivers dreaming of beds, no
Not eunuchs’ desire for stardust, farmers desire for water
No, I dream like rivers do. I dream of things lost, irretrievable, I
Dream of the past, what was not done, a history of time incalculable, no
These days, I mostly dream of dead turtles and crocodiles.

The future is foretold, no worries there, future is safe, the end will
Arrive whenever it does; it’s the past that’s difficult to reconcile with,
Past that glitters like thousand stars on a summer night, past that did not
Die. My past and yours, and everyone else’s, his with matted hair, his
With peacock feathers, his with the shaven head, his with the sacred
Thread, and his sons and grandsons... The past of kings and killers
And of Bhagirath’s, he without a future, and with an unclean past...

Like a rag that cleans the floor, the rag which was once my glittering attire
Woven in water, the past is lost and I am what is forgotten, like the
Beggar woman who once had a home, which could contain me, homes, I
Cannot remember and cannot forget, my abode beyond the stars, his hairy
Embrace among the glaciers, the places of silver and mud, and I am set free
To roam the earth, to collect shards of broken memories, of things which
Could have been, and to count specks of ashes of flesh and bone.

I dream like mothers do, of her offspring’s future, I forget my dream
And dream yours, I weep at your demise as I have for generations
Before you and as I will for generations after you, like a patient mother
I make you forget and I remember, I am the despair that gives you
Hope. I will remain even after you have abandoned me, for I am the
Mother of dead things, of filth and yours too, I too dream
Of dread things and of thing no one else remembers.

I am the mother of this very existence, these lines, dry ink, I am the
Mother of dead things, yours and your mother’s, I am the mother
Of drawn babies, suicidal virgins, fallen soldiers, lustful widows, I am
The mother of decrepit bodies, mango barks, sandalwood and ashes, of
Dirt and bone, of fire and the rising sun, I am the mother of everything
That decays, of the sun and the rain, I am the mother of the child who will
Be dead one day, I am the mother of the sapling which will die one day.

[Ganga, the most scared of rivers, is imagined as a goddess seated on a turtle or a crocodile. She is said to have descended on Mrityulok, the Land of the Dead, to free the ancestors of Prince Bhagirath. In the process, she was trapped in the hair-bun of Lord Shiva. She had to abandon her love for Mahadev to fulfill her destiny, the same way she had to drawn her children and leave her mortal husband King Shantanu. Yet, she is destined to remain earth-bound till the end of time, till everything is over and world ceases to spin.]

Once Upon a Time in the West

Once Upon a Time in the West (Italian: C'era una volta il West) is a 1968 Italian epic Spaghetti Western film directed by Sergio Leone for Paramount Pictures. It stars Henry Fonda cast against type as the villain, Charles Bronson as his nemesis, Jason Robards as a bandit, and Claudia Cardinale as a newly widowed homesteader with a past as a prostitute. The screenplay was written by Leone and Sergio Donati, from a story devised by Leone, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Dario Argento. The widescreen cinematography was by Tonino Delli Colli, and Ennio Morricone provided the film score.

After directing The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Leone decided to retire from Westerns and desired to produce his film based on The Hoods, which eventually became Once Upon a Time in America. However, Leone accepted an offer from Paramount to provide access to Henry Fonda and to use a budget to produce another Western film. He recruited Bertolucci and Argento to devise the plot of the film in 1966, researching other Western films in the process. After Clint Eastwood turned down an offer to play the villain's nemesis, Bronson was offered the role. During production, Leone recruited Donati to rewrite the script due to concerns over time limitations.

The original version by the director was 166 minutes (2 hours and 46 minutes) when it was first released on December 21, 1968. This was the version that was to be shown in European cinemas and was a box office success. However, for the US release on May 28, 1969, Once Upon a Time in the West was edited down to 145 minutes (2 hours and 25 minutes) by Paramount and it was greeted with a mostly negative critical response and was a financial flop. The film is now generally acknowledged as a masterpiece and one of the greatest films ever made.

In 2009, it was named to the United States's National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being “culturally, historically or aesthetically” significant and will be preserved indefinitely.
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Bandits

Bandits is a 2001 American crime-comedy romantic drama film directed by Barry Levinson. It stars Bruce Willis, Billy Bob Thornton, and Cate Blanchett. Filming began in October 2000 and ended in February 2001. It helped Thornton earn a National Board of Review Best Actor Award for 2001. Thornton and Blanchett's performances earned praise, as each was nominated for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress Golden Globe Awards for their performances in this film, while Blanchett was nominated for Best Supporting Actress at the Screen Actors Guild Awards.
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Today is the birthday of an important person in my life. I did not wish him. I do remember him fondly, longingly perhaps, with love and respect, but I did not wish him.

It’s surreal how New Delhi, the messy capital of modern India, wraps within itself its myriad pasts, to be revealed at will, and if you are at the right spot at the right time, you can almost do an impromptu time-travel. The other day, while returning from Sarai Kale Khan after dropping a friend at the Nizammuddin railway station, an autorickshaw driver hails at you and asks: “Bhayya, Yamuna-paar jaana hai?” (Brother, looking to cross the Yamuna River?) In an instant you are in the days of the Mahabharata, when Yamuna was the fearsome, life-giving force (not a glorified nullah), and you are a wayward traveller and he, your brother, is the lone boatman on the river’s deserted shore. For a while, you forget the heat.

The Impossible

Drowning as visual apparatus. Naomi Watts in Juan Antonio Bayona’s The Impossible (2012)

In the House

In the House (French: Dans la maison) is a French film directed by François Ozon. It is based on the play The Boy in the Last Row by Juan Mayorga. The film was awarded the main prize at the 2012 San Sebastián International Film Festival, the Golden Shell, as well as the Jury Prize for Best Screenplay.
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Holy Motors

Holy Motors is a 2012 Franco-German fantasy drama film written and directed by Leos Carax, starring Denis Lavant and Édith Scob. Lavant plays a man who travels between multiple parallel lives. It is Carax's first feature film since 1999. The film competed for the Palme d'Or at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival.
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Zorba the Greek

Zorba the Greek (Βίος και Πολιτεία του Αλέξη Ζορμπά, Life and Adventures of Alexis Zorbas) is a novel written by the Greek author Nikos Kazantzakis, first published in 1946. It is the tale of a young Greek intellectual who ventures to escape his bookish life with the aid of the boisterous and mysterious Alexis Zorba. The novel was adapted into a successful 1964 film of the same name as well as a 1968 musical, Zorba.
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Zorba the Greek is a 1964 film based on the novel Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis. The film was directed by Cypriot Michael Cacoyannis and the title character was played by Anthony Quinn. The supporting cast includes Alan Bates, Lila Kedrova, Irene Papas, and Sotiris Moustakas.
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The Skinny

Writes Armond White: The title of The Skinny refers to gossip–the low-down between friends–but read another way (in the credit sequence’s colorful graphics) it also refers to sexual opportunities in New York City. Writer-director Patrik-Ian Polk is interested in the erotic possibilities found by five young black gays, recent Brown University graduates, who reunite during New York’s Pride Week celebrations. Gorgeous, young, educated black gays like these don’t appear in movies by Gus Van Sant, Todd Haynes nor in mainstream Hollywood films. They hail from a society that only Polk puts on screen–a world recognizably his own vision like Wes Anderson’s and equally as affecting.

By placing them in New York, Polk gives his characters a cultural coming-out (in the debutante sense) which also means advancing upon the bourgeois mainstream already so well represented by media-empowered white gays that these characters seem new–in fact, almost alien to the New York Times whose dismissive review linked Polk‘s characters to “an invisible demographic.” Nothing could be more clueless–or so tragically revealing of mainstream media’s self-important blindness.

Fact is, as Polk casts and photographs his characters, they are visualized quite handsomely. Joey‘s joking lament “Who knew an Ivy League degree in semiotics would be so useful!” turns out to perfectly define the film’s success. These good-looking black folk are living signs–of black, gay social progress and arrival–although the mainstream media might label them “minorities”.

Magnus (Jussie Smollett, a Prince-look-alike but with dimples) breaks up with his thug-hot boyfriend Ryan (Dustin Ross), while virginal Sebastian (Blake Young-Fountain) hankers after his studly best friend Kyle (Anthony Burrell). Beautiful British dyke Langston (Shanika Warren-Markland) and the elegantly masculine Southern queen Joey (Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman) watch from the sides, nervous about making their own hook-ups. This group resembles the ensemble of Polk’s trailblazing LOGO-TV series Noah’s Arc, but he’s refined the stereotypes into more subtly-performed archetypes. These actors represent the range of urban black males less realistically than were the women in Pariah but more idealistically, like the co-eds in Whit Stillman’s Damsels in Distress. Their rom-com search for love is also a quest for self-acceptance (infatuated Magnus opens the film kissing and grinning with emotional satisfaction) despite New York pressures of class, disease and insecurity that keep them from being carefree.
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The film was written and directed by Patrik-Ian Polk, who endeared himself to this largely invisible demographic with the Logo television series “Noah’s Arc,” a relationships-in-the-city show centered on four gay, black characters. In “The Skinny,” though, he uses the trappings of soft-core pornography to dress up awkward messages about sexual responsibility and abiding friendship, with uneven results.

The friends — four men and one woman — are Brown University alumni who a year after graduating are reuniting in New York during Gay Pride Week. Their version of catching up consists disproportionately of talking about and looking for sex, so the characters end up being defined largely by their promiscuity level, perhaps not the best stereotype to reinforce. The gamut is represented, from the wanton Kyle (Anthony Burrell) to the innocent Sebastian (Blake Young-Fountain).
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The profusion of characters and subplots proves overwhelming at times, with writer/director (and virtually everything else on the film) Polk apparently not terribly interested in keeping up the pace. He does, however, seem intent on providing a primer on virtually every aspect of being gay, including detailed discussions about such issues as sexual violence, sexually transmitted diseases, and picking the right condom size. There’s also no shortage of torrid encounters featuring the hunky, frequently unclothed actors.
On the plus side, the irreverently graphic dialogue is frequently amusing (during a pilgrimage to author Langston Hughes’ townhouse, one character remarks, “Can you imagine all the dick he must have gotten up here in Harlem?”), the large ensemble deliver mainly endearing performances and the tech elements are solid despite the obvious budget.
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The Skinny is a great film that does, upon occasion, creeps into TMI territory. But remember, Patrik did make this film to celebrate and educate about the experience of being a Black gay men. For the rest of us, Polk crafts a beautifully shot film, which is both hilarious and poignant, with a centerpiece message being the power of love, acceptance and enduring friendships. Look for cameo appearances from Polk project alums Wilson Cruz and Darryl Stephens.
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The film begins with all actors arriving in New York City to stay with Smollett's character, Magnus. In the beginning we understand that since graduation, these friends have come to live in very different places around the world. Polk paints the characters as truly dynamic individuals who are very different from characters we have seen in previous works, and through this he helps cultivate a cinematic environment that is ripe for hard topics and tough decisions that are relevant in all black, gay, and black/gay communities. As the movie progresses, we are given intimate looks into the dynamics of this long friendship between five people, and how their Pride weekend unravels in the backdrop of New York City -- of course giving us some steamy scenes that I am sure will keep this film rated R, at least.

To avoid giving anything away, I will only slightly discuss a pinnacle moment in the film that deals with an HIV scare and a sexual assault after a character takes Ecstasy for the first time. This HIV scare happens through circumstances that will make your stomach turn and could very well be triggering to many, but it is something that happens, and many are afraid to talk about it. I truly applaud Polk for writing this topic into his script. This instance deals with sexual violence, HIV, and friendship in a way that is real and understanding of the complexities around these issues, acknowledging that sexual assault is not always black-and-white but sits in a gray area that makes one uncomfortable. This pinnacle point will make many people uncomfortable, and will spark many debates in communities around consent and drug use, but it is important because it will connect with many gay men, black or of any other race. Drug use, HIV, and consent during sex are real issues that are kept under the rug in our community, and Polk is pulling up that rug, giving us a space to take notice and begin to do work.

In the end, The Skinny will leave the viewer with that satisfaction that we all desire at the end of films. However, don't get me wrong: there were moments in the film where I turned in my seat and had to shake my head, but that may be revealing too much, so the best advice is to see the film. Polk is part of a very small minority of black gay filmmakers in the world who are really pushing the envelope and creating projects that are not only progressive but gaining lots of attention. The Skinny is a film that is not skinny in substance or importance: it pushes at our waistlines and fills our minds with more questions to ask and lives to consider. It is a film about who is around you and how they care about you. Because that is what friendship is about: caring for one another.
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Man Of Steel

On the new Superman blockbuster: Man of Steel:

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Man of Steel combines the origin story from Richard Donner’s iconic 1978 film version with the Zod storyline in that film’s sequel, but it sacrifices many of those films’ most important elements in the process. Superman doesn’t moonlight as a journalist at the Daily Planet, and Lois Lane uncovers his otherworldly origins early on, so there’s no intrigue concerning his secret identity, which added to the duality of his character. Also, since there’s not much flirtation between Lois and Clark before she finds him out, their relationship is nonexistent; you have no idea why these two are drawn to each other. In the original films, Clark was a bumbling journalist who overcompensated for his inherent lack of human DNA by acting like a klutz, while Lois was a cagey journo who viewed him as a lovable goof, and the opposites attracted. Here, Superman isn’t human at all. Not only is the relationship with Lois MIA, but he also has precious few friendly interactions—or dialogue, period—with the people he’s sacrificing himself for. The comic-book Superman—and Christopher Reeve’s famous portrayal—saw him saving folks with a wink and a smile. A part of Superman always got off on being the hero, the protector, the “god” to these people. In Man of Steel, there’s no clue as to why this brooding, relatively humorless alien wants to save these people, aside from the fact that his daddy told him to.

It’s also become readily apparent that Snyder, known for the CGI fantasies 300, Watchmen, and Sucker Punch, has become a bit blinded by the wonders of CGI. Man of Steel’s final third is almost exclusively high-octane action sequences of buildings being destroyed—usually by having someone hurled through them (I can’t stress this enough, it’s constant). We’ve seen this footage countless times before, in the Transformers films and, most recently, The Avengers.
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To say that Man Of Steel wastes no time setting things up would be no exaggeration. We're straight into a really high-tech Krypton, with a surprisingly low-tech delivery room, as the latest take on the son of Jor-El is born into the world. Jor-El this time is Russell Crowe, a more agile man than Marlon Brando was, and thus Snyder has him swimming, jumping and looking stern in double quick time.

In fact, it feels as if Snyder's foot is rammed against the accelerator for the first chunk of the film. It's basically the same story that Richard Donner filmed that we're being told for the most part, albeit louder and with more crayons available to its director. Furthermore, in the early stages, Snyder's Man Of Steel quickly suggests a much darker, more sombre tone than we've seen from big screen Superman before, and that proves indicative of what's to follow. Those Dark Knight influences are not hard to spot.

Make no mistake: this is a serious take on the character, with the lightness and humour of previous movies long gone. You almost end up overcompensating with a guffaw when the few hints of humour are allowed to shine through. Even characters previously toyed with a little for fun, such as Daily Planet editor Perry White (now in the guise of Laurence Fishburne), are now part of the darker world that's put across here. If it all feels a bit un-Superman in that regard (certainly in the big screen sense, although comics are a different story), then that's clearly very much the intention.

Much of the darkness comes from the villanous acts of General Zod, and here's where Snyder and writer David S Goyer firmly plot their own path. They invest a lot in Zod, keen to put across the reason why he's the nasty, unflinching man we meet at the start of the film. As with lots of Man Of Steel, the character development comes in dribs and drabs, and not in chronological order (Kevin Costner's underused Jonathan Kent is the biggest casualty of this decision), but it's firmly there. And in the shape of Michael Shannon, Man Of Steel has a villain who you genuinely believe has real conviction. You'll struggle to name a single one of his cohorts by the time the credits roll, but Shannon's Zod is very clearly a force to be reckoned with.
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Here’s a superhero who almost dares not speak his name: the “S” inscribed on his chest doesn’t stand for Superman after all, it’s the Krypton symbol for “hope”. That is the messianic burden by which this overlong but not disagreeable reboot defines itself.

The man of steel will save the earth, but first he must bide his time. Just as Christopher Nolan (who produces here) did with Batman, Zack Snyder (300) presides over a creation myth: Superman is sent into space by his father, played by Russell Crowe as if he were God Himself, and thus escapes the environmental cataclysm that destroys his home planet Krypton.

He also narrowly avoids the clutches of the rebel general Zod (Michael Shannon), who will return with a vengeance for the story’s finale. It’s in the flashbacks of the long middle section that the film makes its mark.

Clark Kent, played with square-jawed introspection by Brit Henry Cavill, drifts from job to job, trying to keep a lid on his awesome powers out of respect for his adoptive father (Kevin Costner), who believes they will make him a target for evil.

When Clark’s hand is forced and he does save earthlings - drowning schoolkids, oil-riggers trapped by fire - the combination of shock and wonder is impressively handled.

His anonymity is finally blown by Daily Planet reporter Lois Lane, played by Amy Adams with a pert sexiness and no little self-esteem (“I’m a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter”, she reminds her editor, non-endearingly).

The film loses itself in the last 45 minutes, with fist-fights between Superman and his foes that destroy half the skyscrapers in Manhattan, and half the hearing in my ears. Snyder flouts a simple rule: one explosion can be exciting; one hundred will be quite boring.
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Fast forward 35 years and Superman is a very different beast: a lone voice for truth, justice and the American way with an expensive, uninspired attempt at a reboot – 2006's Superman Returns – behind it, and a cinematic universe currently overrun by Marvel's pop art team movies.

Well, hopes are high for Man of Steel. Directed by Watchmen's Zack Snyder, and produced and conceived by The Dark Knight Rises' Christopher Nolan, Man of Steel treads a familiar route at first: Superman – as he is almost never called in this film – is born as his home planet Krypton is disintegrating into civil war and environmental catastrophe, and is sent into space by his father Jor-El just ahead of Krypton's destruction.

Russell Crowe, with a plummy English accent as thick as a cupboard, plays the self-sacrificing father; he does rather well in the complicated opening scenes, which simultaneously introduce the rebellious General Zod (Michael Shannon), Krypton's rather zany liquid-metal communication-devices, and a visual style that smothers everything in a kind of irradiated backlit CGI.

It's when we get to Earth that Man of Steel starts to take on its distinctive shape. Clark Kent – played by Henry Cavill with a permanent little worry-frown in the middle of his forehead – is revealed as a rootless drifter, blundering from one low-paid job to another in a frustrating battle to keep his taunters unbattered, his rescuees oblivious, and his inner demons placated.

A series of sharp flashbacks show the roots of his emotional malaise: an adoptive father (Kevin Costner) who is pre-emptively convinced his boy will be hated and feared for his gifts.

This, it would seem, is Nolan's principal innovation for this Superman: reminiscent, perhaps, of Batman Begins, this is superheroism as a burden, and a burden transformed into neurosis.

The scenes where little Clark begins to discover his special powers are rather impressive to behold – he's baffled, and traumatised by the unwelcome intrusion of x-ray vision or laser-like heat beams from his eyes.

It's this early part of the film that is most successful; Nolan and Snyder, along with scriptwriter David S Goyer, have created a plausible context for the introspection and self-doubt that dogs the adult version of their costumed warrior.
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Aadukalam

This is unprecedented.

These Hindi movies copy plot-points, at times even frame-to-frame sequences from foreign films and even fail to acknowledge the source. When someone points out the similarities, they’d simply say, they not copies; they were inspired by the original.

In this context, here is a film and here is a filmmaker, who puts boldly his inspirations on the front of the end credit of his film. Not that his film was inspired by the films mentioned, or by the two books he mentions in the end credit, but it is heartening to see a filmmaker acknowledging the works of other filmmakers, and if Michel Haneke is in the list, you know, it’s something special.

The filmmaker in question is Vetrimaran and the film is the Tamil film ‘Aadukalam’ for which Dhanush won the national award for Best Actor.

As the film ends (which is a riveting watch by the way), we see a list of seven films under the title ‘Filmography’ and two books under the heading ‘Bibliography’. It beats me why these lists are here. But the content of the list is impressive. It contains Haneke’s ‘Cache’, also known as ‘Hidden’ in the English-speaking world. It is considered to be the Austrian director’s most inscrutable work, and considering it’s Haneke, it’s saying a lot.

The list also contains three films by Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu — ‘Amores perros’ (2000) and ‘Babel’ (2006) and the short film ‘Powder Keg’ (2001) (part of the "The Hire" series for BMW) . Someone told me a long time back that Indian filmmakers have a special love for Iñárritu’s fractured narratives and almost-pessimistic worldview. I did not know there was this much love.

There’s also three Tamil films — ‘Devar Magan’, ‘Virumaandi’, and ‘Paruthi Veeran’. Now, ‘Paruthi Veeran’ is a film I really, really love. It’s a film that makes it’s hero a villain and keeps him a villain for the length of the film and yet let us root for him. And, it’s so much fun!

I did not see any apparent ‘inspiration’ of these films with Aadukalam, which tells the story of illegal rooster fights and its fighters in Madurai, and what happens to the unsuspecting protagonist who is one of the fighters.

Like Paruthi Veeran, Aadukalam is also set in Madurai.

Like in Iñárritu movies, Aadukalam begins with various scrambled scenes in the future till it finds the track for a linear narrative in the present.

Other than that, I found Aadukalam to be an extraordinary work of art.

Among the books mentioned, I agree with Alex Haley’s ‘Roots’, it’s a great work. The same I cannot say about the other book mentioned, Gregory David Robert’s ‘Shantaram’.

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Aadukalam (English: Arena) is a 2011 Indian Tamil drama film written and directed by Vetrimaran. The film stars Dhanush, Taapsee Pannu, V. I. S. Jayabalan, and Kishore. The film was released on 14 January 2011 to highly positive reviews. The film won six awards at the 58th National Film Awards, including the awards for Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Actor. It was also felicitated with 5 awards in 59th Filmfare Awards South which includes Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Music Director and Best Cinematography.
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Elephant Bathing

My review of Anand Thakore’s collection of poems ‘Elephant Bathing’ (Poetrywala, Mumbai, 2012, Pp 80, Rs 150), in Indian Literature: Sahitya Akademi’s Bi-Monthly Journal, March-April 2013



An excerpt:

Coming back to Indian poetry in English, the favourite poet of my undergraduate English teacher was Dom Moraes. It was a curious choice, as Moraes is the most "un-Indian" of all Indian English poets. Moraes' poems are poems; there's nothing inherently Indian about it, unlike other celebrated poets, say, Nissim Ezekiel, whose poetry is seeped into his real-life experiences; we cannot understand Ezekiel without an understanding of the place he belonged to, Bombay. For Moraes, however, a poem itself is a means to an end.

In this context, Thakore is perhaps a worthy descendant of Moraes' poetic vision. For Thakore too, the main concern is the poems themselves, not their meanings. Thakore is more concerned about how the poetry is achieved than what the poems convey. More than a literary tradition, perhaps this comes from his background in music, where it is the tune that's supreme, not the verse. Similarly, Thakore tries to create poems as artifacts, complete unto themselves, the metaphorical "well wrought urn" so to speak, to borrow the expression from Cleanth Brooks.

This becomes more than obvious in the third section of the collection, titled, 'Make me a Symbol if you Must', where he not only communicates with a number of objects like punching bag, dream catcher, wind chime, a fondue pot, and ostrich egg, but also finds his structure of things though the objects. He writes: "Or call me a mere object if you prefer,/ A mindless tool, the unwitting/ Instrument of a self-wrought deliverance,/ A tragic knot, a magic knot,/ A veritable miracle of a knot,/ Or the one certain, undeniable knot/That can untie the thousand you cannot see:/The great knot of memory interwoven with desire…" ('Hangman's Knot', p 60)

The Dress

The dress itself is parrot-blue and covered in abstract leaves of red, gold and orange; it’s eye-catching enough for a summer frock, but it’s not going to be the star of any woman’s wardrobe. The design is conceived in a moment of desperation and despair, inspired by a street argument; the prototype is created by a pervert. The women who buy it hope that it might brighten their lives for a brief moment, but it only leads them to sorrow instead. The plot wanders off Phantom of Liberty style to each new owner of the dress, but perhaps one of the weirdest things about the movie is that it feels neither unified nor fragmented. From segment to segment, the tone of downbeat drama alternating with bittersweet comedy remains the same, and characters even recur, but there isn’t a strong thread holding the tales together—other than, perhaps, the way they all illustrate the futility of the pursuit of erotic happiness. Writer/director van Warmerdam gives himself the best role, as a train conductor who becomes obsessed with the wearer of the dress.
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Jack the Giant Killer

The tale is set during the reign of King Arthur and tells of a young Cornish farmer's son named Jack who is not only strong but so clever he easily confounds the learned with his penetrating wit. Jack encounters a cattle-devouring giant called Cormoran (Cornish: 'The Giant of the Sea') and lures him to his death in a pit trap. Jack is dubbed 'Jack the Giant-Killer' for this feat and receives not only the giant's wealth but a sword and belt to commemorate the event. Another giant, Blunderbore, vows vengeance for Cormoran's death and carries Jack off to an enchanted castle. Jack manages to slay Blunderbore and his brother Rebecks by hanging and stabbing them. He frees three ladies held captive in the giant's castle.

On a trip into Wales, Jack tricks a two-headed Welsh giant into slashing his own belly open. King Arthur's son now enters the story and Jack becomes his servant. They spend the night with a three-headed giant and rob him in the morning. In gratitude for having spared his castle, the giant gives Jack a magic sword, a cap of knowledge, a cloak of invisibility, and shoes of swiftness. On the road, Jack and the Prince meet an enchanted Lady serving Lucifer. Jack breaks the spell with his magic accessories, beheads Lucifer, and the Lady marries the Prince. Jack is rewarded with membership in the Round Table.

Jack ventures forth alone with his magic shoes, sword, cloak, and cap to rid the realm of troublesome giants. He encounters a giant terrorizing a knight and his lady. He cuts off the giant's legs then puts him to death. He discovers the giant's companion in a cave. Invisible in his cloak, Jack cuts off the giant's nose then slays him by plunging his sword into the monster's butt-hole. He frees the giant's captives and returns to the house of the knight and lady he earlier had rescued. A banquet is prepared, but interrupted by the two-headed giant Thunderdel chanting "Fee, fau, fum". Jack defeats and beheads the giant with a trick involving the house's moat and drawbridge.

Growing weary of the festivities, Jack sallies forth for more adventures and meets an elderly man who directs him to an enchanted castle belonging to the giant Galigantus (Galligantua, in the Joseph Jacobs version). The giant holds captive many knights and ladies and a Duke's daughter who has been transformed into a white doe through the power of a sorceror. Jack beheads the giant, the sorceror flees, the Duke's daughter is restored to her true shape, and the captives are freed. At the court of King Arthur, Jack marries the Duke's daughter and the two are given an estate where they live happily ever after.

[After seeing 'Jack the Giant Slayer', a film directed by Bryan Singer and starring Nicholas Hoult as Jack was released on March 1, 2013. More here.]

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Of Freaks and Men

Alexei Balabanov's film about 19th-century Russian porn may not be to everyone's taste, but Peter Bradshaw is unsettled and impressed, in The Guardian

Shot in a glittering, wintry monochrome, which attains a heavy sepia tint, Of Freaks and Men is set in turn-of-the-century St Petersburg. It imagines the bourgeois origins of Russia's fledgling porn industry: specifically that catering for images of flagellation and sado-masochism - catching this industry on the cusp of its movement from still photography to rudimentary moving pictures. The film's periodic silent-movie captions and its daguerreotype-hue are in homage to both media.

For this flourishing new porn culture, Balabanov invents a milieu of secrecy, exoticism and aberrant strangeness. The result is a disturbing, erotically creepy, funny and touching film whose images will live in your memory.

It concerns a doctor and his beautiful, blind wife who have adopted a pair of Siamese twins joined at the hip - Tolya and Kolya. The twins' singing ability in adolescence is exploited by their adoptive parents on the stage and they inspire an obsessive following with musical audiences, becoming the toast of polite society.

Nearby, a widowed engineer lives with his daughter Lisa in slightly less genteel circumstances, and the two households become connected by a below-stairs taste in pornography. Elaborate studies of naked women being spanked and thrashed with birch twigs are being turned out with fanatical artistic care by the glacial, deadpan Johann (Sergei Makovetsky) and his sinister, grinning sidekick Victor Ivanovich (Victor Sukhorukhov), as a sideline to their respectable portraiture business.

Johann and Victor insinuate themselves into both houses: and their influence coincides with the descent of one of the twins into alcoholism, and the other's erotic obsession with Lisa. Victor, too, conceives an interest in Ekaterina, the doctor's wife, and the scene in which he tweaks up her skirts to examine her genitalia - while she appears to stare glassily, ambiguously ahead - is an extraordinary moment.

There is something very gamey and very kinky in the way Balabanov represents the consumers of Johann's wares as being women, and this conceit has its own element of pornographic whimsy. Balabanov's juxtaposition of pornography with the trim, prim world of stage performance and bourgeois musical taste - in the form of Tolya and Kolya's sensational career on the stage - endows this secret theatre of sexuality with a vulnerability and a terrible pathos.
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A Touch Of Sin

This ultraviolent attack on Chinese consumerism is a stunning slap in the face from previously-sedate director Jia Zhang-ke, writes Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian:

Cannes is a place for shocks, jolts and surprises. This change of artistic direction from Chinese film-maker Jia Zhang-ke offers plenty. He has been known until this moment for an intensely considered, quiet documentary realism — particularly in the 2006 movie Still Life, about communities preparing to be drowned in the service of China's Three Gorges hydro-electric Dam. So this brash, daring and often ultraviolent movie is atypical to say the least, avowedly inspired by the wuxia martial arts films of King Hu, but it has clear debts to Tarantino's riffs on this same genre, and to Sergio Leone. The idea of Jia Zhang-ke making his own Pulp Fiction or A Fistful of Dollars (or rather yen) might before now have seemed fanciful. But that is what he has done — or almost.

In fact, A Touch of Sin eventually moves back to the calmer, realist cinematic language more associated with this director in its final act. And the film is in any case not simply a racy adventure in exploitation, but an angry, painful, satirical lunge into what the director clearly sees as the dark heart of modern China, and a real attempt to represent this to audiences elsewhere in the world. He sees China as a globalised economic power player suffering a new and violent Cultural Revolution of money-worship in which a cronyist elite has become super-rich in the liquidation of state assets, creating poisonous envy in the dispossessed who hear all about others' wealth from the internet, and are supposed to gossip aspirationally about it on their mobile phones. A key scene in the film shows someone brooding over Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter.

It is a fractured and divided story, like shards of a shattered mirror. Different strands and characters and stories emerge, tangentially concerned with each other. Jia has taken his plotlines from newspapers, violent stories of criminal despair, and by meshing them together, these tales, often involving guns, build up a picture of China as a desolate Wild West of lawless violence and cynicism. A worker erupts with anger at how the mine-chief has somehow been able to afford a sports car and to lease a private plane. Three brothers coming back to their hometown for their mother's birthday reveal themselves to be deeply unhappy in various ways, and the unhappiness somehow always manifests itself in violence. Two have handguns: one casually slays three guys who have attempted to rob him on the road. Another, who has been telling his wife he has been travelling the country looking for work, reveals himself to be an ice-cool armed robber who doesn't scruple to murder women in cold blood for their expensive designer bags. Another is having an affair with a sauna receptionist (played by Jia's longtime leading actor Zhao Tao) and this too ends in a bloody confrontation.
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China returns to the Cannes competition with Jia Zhang-ke's sobering view of festering discontent as the gap between the country's rich and poor expands, says The Hollywood Reporter

The widening chasm of social inequality separating the moneyed powerbrokers from the struggling masses – not to mention the despair and violence bred by that disparity – is a subject of saddening universality. Exploring those thematic lines in A Touch of Sin (Tian Zhu Ding), Chinese auteur Jia Zhang-ke only occasionally strikes chords that resonate, despite having distinguished himself as one of the most perceptive chroniclers of his country’s transition into 21st century nationhood in films like Platform and The World.

The English-language title of his seventh narrative feature is a play on King Hu’s 1971 martial arts epic, A Touch of Zen. And while that seems more a homage than a significant structural inspiration, there are certainly bloody genre elements here that are new to Jia’s work. But tonal inconsistency, lethargic pacing and a shortage of fresh insight dilute the storytelling efficacy of this quartet of loosely interconnected episodes involving ordinary people pushed over the edge.

As always, the visual compensations are considerable thanks to regular cinematographer Yu Lik-wai, whose eye for arresting detail is equally sharp whether trained on natural landscapes, assembly-line industrial communities, bleak mining towns or the crumbling remnants of China’s past.
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The latest film from Chinese director Jia Zhangke would appear to be a departure from his previous acclaimed work. But on closer inspection, his particular cinematic DNA has been perfectly preserved. It’s just that, this time, there’s a lot more bloodshed than we’ve come to expect from him.

A Touch of Sin is Jia’s stab at more commercial filmmaking, although one should not confuse this ensemble drama with a conventional action movie or anything so easily accessible. (Jia made this film with the backing of Shanghai Film Group, a government-sponsored production company, which was a first for him.) The independent auteur of quiet character pieces like The World and Still Life has constructed a story about four loosely connected individuals whose lives are touched by violence or death. At its center are the same concerns that have always interested Jia—namely, how ordinary Chinese citizens are adapting to the rapid economic development of their nation. As usual, the characters struggle mightily with that proposition. But in A A Touch of Sin, their anguish is expressed in gunfire and knife fights. This is less an action movie than it is an acting-out movie.

Rather than adopting the Crash/Babel style of multi-character drama in which the protagonists’ stories overlap and also intersect, Jia has essentially made four short films, with a character from one story moving into the next sequence, the pattern repeating until the end. But what unites them all is their misery. In one segment, a disgruntled miner (Jiang Wu) decides that he’s finally had enough of his callous, corrupt bosses and the mine’s rich owner, taking up arms against them. In another, a receptionist (Zhao Tao) engages in a fruitless affair that barely takes her mind off her menial job and boorish clientele.
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Behind the Candelabra

It’s 26 years since the flamboyant American pianist and entertainer Liberace died from an Aids-related condition. Most people in Britain under 40 would have little more than a hazy idea of who he was, or the extent of his fame. From the vantage point of today, it’s hard to explain the sheer magnitude of his celebrity or to account for his astonishing success.

Yet in his four-decade heyday he was a household name (pronounced, as everyone knew back then, ‘Libber-AH-chef’) - and from the 1950s to the 1970s he was the world’s highest paid entertainer, outstripping Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland, all of whom now live on in much more vividly in our collective memory.

This is hardly surprising. His fame – outside America, at least – was almost totally dependent on his live shows. He recorded albums of piano music, but they are rarely heard today on radio. He never had a Top 20 single in Britain. In the 1950s he tried film acting, but thought better of it after starring in the flop Sincerely Yours, playing a pianist stricken by deafness. These days there is not much to remember Liberace by.

All that is about to change. Behind the Candelabra, a film about Liberace, has just had its world premiere in Cannes, where it was received with wild enthusiasm by festival-goers and critics alike. Directed by Steven Soderbergh, it stars Michael Douglas as Liberace in the final years of his life, and Matt Damon as Scott Thorson, a young man who became his lover and moved in with him for five years. It’s a candid, touching, funny portrait of a gay relationship. Ironically, Liberace’s identity as a gay man was something he tenaciously fought to keep secret.
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Behind the Candelabra is smartly scripted and directed – though, as Liberace and Thorson's relationship sags, the film's pace does slightly, too. It picks up again for a poignant coda in 1987 when Liberace (who by then has Aids) summons Thorson to his deathbed. "With his gaunt face and wasted body, he looked like a scarecrow," Thorson remembered. Throughout the movie, Michael Douglas does a fabulous job of underpinning Liberace's artifice with vulnerability. In his last scene, he looks as heartbreakingly frail and faded as ET in the medical tent. What a shame that this film didn't get a theatrical release in the US. If it had, Douglas could be clearing his mantelpiece right now in anticipation of next year's best actor Oscar. Interestingly, according to Thorson, only two celebrities came to Liberace's funeral in Palm Springs: Dallas actor Charlene Tilton, and Michael Douglas's real-life dad, Kirk Douglas.
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The flamboyant pianist is seen through the wide, adoring eyes of his long-term lover Scott Thorson (Damon) whose memoir the film is based on. Before meeting Liberace (Douglas) in 1977, he is fresh-faced and fairly innocent, to the point that he is reluctant to embrace his homosexuality. He calls himself bisexual, though as Liberace later comments, he's never been seen with any women. Evidently, it wasn't love at first sight with Liberace either. When brought backstage at a show in Vegas, Scott shifts nervously under the old man's gaze (there's a 40-year age gap) and he flinches at the prospect of being touched when Liberace contrives to have him share his bed. Soderbergh plays this situation brilliantly for comic effect and, crucially, without demonising his star.

Douglas is truly arresting as Liberace; complex yet childishly simple. He flounces around in fur and rhinestones, but behind all that - and the candelabra on his piano - he is clearly lonely and, in a way, a stranger to himself. He attempts to buy love when he offers Scott a job (and has him quit his veterinary career), but later on, he also tries to buy his silence. Liberace never came out publicly. The ups and downs of their relationship are both extreme and everyday. Control issues come to the fore, but they're made more pronounced by Liberace's spending power and the drama queen antics - though it's mostly Scott storming out of rooms in shiny knickers. If he got into this for the money, it's not the reason he stays. He grew up in foster care and, absurdly, Liberace offers to adopt him.
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After Side Effects, supposedly his final work for the cinema, Steven Soderbergh has now apparently performed his post-swansong. Behind the Candelabra was commissioned for HBO television but is shown here in the Cannes festival competition as a standalone feature-length drama: a bizarre anti-Pinocchio parable in which the power of loneliness and toxic love transform a handsome young man into a deeply unhappy, plump-nosed, cleft-chinned latex doll. It's the true-life story of the flamboyant pianist Liberace and his young companion and chauffeur Scott Thorson, taking us from the couple's ecstatic first meeting backstage in Las Vegas in 1976 to Liberace's death from an Aids-related illness in 1987.

The film is mesmeric, riskily incorrect, outrageously watchable and simply outrageous. Unlike ITV's Vicious, which stars two famously gay actors, Behind the Candelabra does not offer any extra-textual liberal assurances in its casting. Michael Douglas is very funny as the great man himself, a primped and toupéed peacock of the ivories whose undoubted technical genius at the keyboard means he does not need to rehearse, and whose excess energy and artistry is channelled into chasing after young men. Matt Damon is Scott, the pert animal trainer and would-be veterinarian who wins Liberace's heart by artlessly offering to treat his blind poodle, Babyboy. Dan Aykroyd plays Liberace's glowering manager, Heller, and the recipient of his antisemitic wisecracks. ("No you can't come for dinner, we're having pork!") And Debbie Reynolds plays the only woman in Liberace's life, his elderly mother, Frances.
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Passion. Possession. Infatuation. Betrayal. These are the hallmarks of any unhealthy and dramatic relationship. And despite the glitz and glam of Steven Soderbergh‘s Behind the Candelabra, none of these emotions feels fresh or surprising despite the talent of the lead actors and the colorful figure of Liberace. The strange relationship between Liberace (Michael Douglas) and Scott Thorson (Matt Damon) is rendered inert by a dramatic trajectory that’s been laid out within the first ten minutes. The love affair isn’t doomed; it’s predictable. At best, Behind the Candelabra makes out love to be as shiny, entrancing, and as fake as Liberace’s public persona.

The story runs from 1977 to 1986. Liberace has been famous for decades, and “Mr. Showmanship” is one of the stars of Vegas as his skills as an entertainer, with his rhinestone-encrusted costumes and piano, dazzles audiences. Scott attends one of Liberace’s shows, is absolutely entranced by the performer, and is brought backstage by one of Liberace’s friends, Bob Black (Scott Bakula). Liberace quickly takes a shine to Scott, who has worked with animals on movies, and is able to restore sight to Liberace’s poodle. We then follow the intimacy and destruction of the couple’s relationship as Scott becomes jealous and turns to drug abuse while Liberace grows distant and begins looking for a younger model.

The relationship would hold some dramatic weight if its path wasn’t neatly laid out by Liberace’s relationship with Billy Leatherwood (Cheyenne Jackson), a handsome backup pianist who angrily sits in a corner when Scott meets Liberace. As he angrily chomps in the foreground, we know Billy has had the kind of relationship with Mr. Showmanship that Scott is about to have. And if it wasn’t clear enough, Liberace’s houseboy Carlucci (Bruce Ramsay) tells Scott point blank that he isn’t the first and won’t be the last. Scott is simply the latest plaything, and Soderbergh hopes that we’ll find something fascinating in Thorson’s relationship with Liberace.

To be sure, Liberace is an odd duck. Aside from the usual trappings of fame that can make one paranoid, insecure, and create a feeling of victimization, Liberace wants to be Scott’s entire world. The young animal trainer easily gives himself over to the Vegas entertainer because Scott is too naïve to realize that he’s become Liberace’s human pet. The relationship is made abundantly clear as he gives Scott the same nickname as the poodle, “Baby Boy.” This isn’t love. It’s ownership, and makes Scott a possession that’s destined to be discarded because he isn’t a “dumb animal.”
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For his final film (for now, at least), Steven Soderbergh turns fairy godfather, granting liberace’s wish “to be a movie star”.

Laying bare the homosexuality he hid from public view, it’s hardly the red-carpet treatment the fiercely litigious pianist dreamt of. Nor is it the fantastically kitsch biopic that some anticipated. Rather, it’s a witty, classy study of relationships, sex and stardom.

It’s based on the memoir of Scott Thorson (Matt Damon), a teenage animal handler who’s taken backstage (ahem), at a Liberace concert. Wowed by the superstar (Michael Douglas), Scott soon becomes his live-in lover, and will do anything for love (but he won’t do that).

Following the wax and wane of the couple’s affair, the story doesn’t take too many unexpected twists. But when the man at the centre delivers it with such élan, it hardly matters.

It’s a deceptively complex role – Douglas is playing a gay man pretending to be a straight man performing a camp revue twice nightly in Vegas – and he modulates accordingly. His stage patter is brilliantly stilted, his offstage seductions significantly smoother.

The lack of vanity required to play such a vain man is remarkable; the 60-something liberace is secretly bald and paunchy, and so, here, is Douglas.

By contrast, despite an expertly sculpted torso, Damon’s part isn’t quite as meaty. Fortunately, Damon is a master at doing a lot with a little, often at his most watchable when being watchful. It’s a quality that serves him well here, and means he isn’t wholly upstaged by Douglas.

Both leads get an excellent assist from top-spec CGI, making the 42-year-old Damon’s cheeks peachy and rejuvenating/aging Douglas to startling effect.

Old-school tricks have their place too: a floppy wig hides Rob lowe’s Marlene Dietrich facelift, his taped-up features giving his plastic surgeon a gleefully sleazy squint.

US studios passed on the project, fearing a hard sell in the red states, but they needn’t have worried too much; Damon and Douglas don’t hold back, but the camera adopts a relatively coy stance (odd, given that full-frontal friendly HBO green-lit it).
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If Steven Soderbergh is truly done with feature films we should be thankful he left us with three great films, one after another, before his departure. With Magic Mike, Side Effects and now Behind the Candelabra that's three films in a row that most directors could not achieve the likes of over the course of a career, let alone the rest of Soderbergh's oeuvre from Sex, Lies, and Videotape to Traffic.

Behind the Candelabra says as much about us as a society as it does about its two protagonists in a story that's surprisingly dark at times, just as it is emotionally rewarding, entertaining and even humorous.

Tracing events from 1977-1986, the story follows the life of Scott Thorson (Matt Damon) as he goes from being a Hollywood animal handler to the dazzling lifestyle and palatial estate of famed Las Vegas entertainer Liberace (Michael Douglas).

Growing up an orphan, moving from house to house, Scott is looking for someone he can depend on and he wants desperately to feel loved. When Liberace offers him the opportunity to live with him as his personal assistant he doesn't hesitate, knowing full well it's less a job than it is a ruse for the relationship that would eventually blossom and span five years, which is believed to be the longest, loving relationship Liberace ever had with anyone.

Conversely, Scott also fulfills Liberace's needs as a loving partner in a relationship he can successfully keep private under the guise of Scott being an employee and, at one point, even being confused for Liberace's son. Equally perverse and telling, the moment that summed up their relationship for me came as Liberace tells Scott he wants to be his "father, brother, lover and best friend." The idea of such a relationship is absurd, but the way the film treats it seriously and without false or mocking behavior makes it easier for the audience to relate, and enter the world rather than look at it as a curiosity.

Douglas and Damon are extraordinary. Douglas is charming, captivating, perverse and sad as a character whose image is everything and the desire to never grow old has him constantly searching for the Fountain of Youth, be it those around him or a plastic surgeon's knife. Damon, as Thorson, must first play the wide-eyed school boy and slowly transform into the paranoid lover, a role both men play to some great effect.

Soderbergh has surrounded his two leads with a strong supporting cast, the best of which include Dan Aykroyd as Liberace's manager Seymour Heller and the most entertaining being Rob Lowe as his plastic surgeon Dr. Jack Startz. Lowe's performance and character is a great example of how Soderbergh and screenwriter Richard LaGravenese, adapting the story from the book written by Thorson and Alex Thorleifson, manage to tell both a touching and emotionally rewarding story, but also one that entertains.
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Borgman

Dutch writer-director Alex van Warmerdam unleashes a cultish group of evil intruders on an upper middle class family in this Cannes competition entry.

The first Dutch feature in the main Cannes competition in 38 years, Borgman is laced with Alex van Warmerdam’s characteristically droll humor but sees the writer-director venturing into darker, more unsettling waters. A quirky study of the unrelenting grip of evil, the film is beautifully made, though stronger in its intriguing setup than its muddy resolution. Still, this is an engrossing and original work that should find an international niche.

Since making a mark in the Netherlands with his 1986 feature debut Abel and then cracking the festival circuit in 1992 with The Northerners, van Warmerdam has assembled a richly idiosyncratic body of work, most of which he also appears in with his wife Annet Malherbe. In films like The Dress, Little Tony and Grimm, he brings a deadpan observational style to seemingly ordinary lowlanders, subjecting them to absurd situations, sticky psychological challenges and simmering threats of violence.

“And they descended upon the earth to strengthen their ranks,” reads a quote at the start of Borgman. To the extent that its enigmas are explained, the film could be described as a cult recruitment thriller, with possible supernatural undercurrents. The presence of watchful hounds sauntering through the house where insidious intruders have established their domain vaguely recalls such demon-spawn classics as The Omen. But van Warmerdam mostly eschews standard genre trappings.
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Last year Cannes brought us snuggly Haneke, as the great man thawed out for Amour. This year, we get ho-hum Haneke, courtesy of a Dutch Funny Games knockoff which tickles happily for the first 40 minutes, then gets niggly, then annoying, and finally just a bit tedious.

Things begin swell, with a man knocking back some pickled fish straight from the jar (welcome to the Netherlands!) before joining some pals, headed by a priest, who are hunting down our hero (Jan Bijvoet). He's a forest-dweller, squirreled away with colleagues in a complex underground den. Thanks to the quick wit of Borgman – thick beard, straggle hair, mad eyes, cavernous face – they all escape; he then pitches up in a posh suburb and starts knocking on doors asking if he can have a wash.

The occupants turn him down, including Richard (Jeroen Perceval), who kicks Borgman senseless at his impudence. Later that night, when Richard has left the luxy pad he shares with his wife, Marina (Hadewych Minis), their three blonde moppets and foxy au pair, Borgman asks Marina for shelter and food. Shamed by both her husband's behaviour and her own burgeoning attraction to Borgman, she becomes complicit.

Time passes, with Borgie squirrelled in the summer house and, then somehow, suddenly, Marina never wants him to leave. There is no relationship, but, just because he "wants to play", Borgman cooks up an elaborate plan to dispose of the gardener and install himself, shorn and scrubbed, in his place.
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If Michael Haneke had a slightly less ironic appreciation of the term “funny games,” he might have cooked up something a little like “Borgman,” a sly, insidious and intermittently hilarious domestic thriller that is likely to remain one of the most daring selections of this year’s Cannes competish. More disquieting than explicit, this eighth feature from Dutch writer-helmer Alex van Warmerdam, who also features memorably in the ensemble, strikes a familiar note in its allegorical punishment of the entitled upper classes, but the execution is sufficiently inventive to mark the pic as a challenge worth accepting for adventurous arthouse distribs.

For the sake of descriptive economy, it’s tempting to classify “Borgman” (named for its oddly passive-aggressive chief villain) as another entry in the increasingly popular subgenre of the home-invasion thriller, but that would misrepresent the film’s more complex premise. “Home inveigling” or even “home infection” would be closer to the mark: Many of the most horrific domestic violations in this story occur with the permission of the family under threat, lending a Pinter-esque slant to van Warmerdam’s slow-burning narrative.
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Caustic, surreal, creepy, and blackly funny, Dutch polymath Alex van Warmerdam’s “Borgman” is the trickster god in this year’s Cannes competition pantheon. Tonally similar to recent cultish favorites from Yorgos Lanthimos and Ben Wheatley (“Dogtooth” feels like a particularly close and favoured first cousin), there’s also a little Haneke in its chilly dissection of a perfect bourgeois life. But it’s really its own thing, due to the inspired choice to take recognisable archetypes of evil and mischief-making, and let them loose on a crisply contemporary, contained playground in the form of an aspirational, architect-designed modernist house, its gardens, and the lives of the family that lives there.

With pitch-perfect performances across the board, and boasting crisp photography and editing, the film never ceases to twist, turn and surprise, taking wicked joy in constantly switching us back on ourselves and our expectations of the characters. Appropriate, then, that it popped up at us like a jack-in-the-box this morning to prove one of the biggest unexpected pleasures the festival has thus far provided.

The prologue to the main story begins as a priest with a shotgun, a young man carrying a sharpened pole and a third man armed with an axe, go hunting in the woods. They’re tracking Camiel Borgman (Jan Bijvoet, in a brilliantly ambivalent, underplayed turn), who is hiding in a pit dug into the forest floor and hidden from view. Borgman, seemingly a wildman cross between Boudu from Renoir’s “Boudu Saved from Drowning” and Rasputin, evades his pursuers, and, alerting two cohorts also hiding in the forest, he flees for pastures new. Turning up later on Richard and Marina’s (Jeroen Perceval and Hadewych Minis) well-heeled doorstep, Borgman causes a scene by claiming to know Marina. Richard retaliates by beating him viciously, for which Marina feels guilty and eventually, behind Richard’s back, installs Borgman in the small summer house on the other side of the large garden.
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Grigris

Grigris is a 2013 French-Chadian drama film directed by Mahamat Saleh Haroun, starring Soulémane Démé, Mariam Monory, Cyril Guei and Marius Yelolo. It will tell the story of a 25-year-old man with a paralysed leg who dreams of becoming a dancer, and starts to work for a gang of petrol smugglers. The film was produced through the French Pili Films with co-production support from the Chadian Goï Goï Productions. It also received support from Canal+, Ciné+, TV5Monde, Canal Horizons and the CNC. Filming started 29 October 2012. The film was nominated for the Palme d'Or at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival and won the Vulcan Award.
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France-based Chadian director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun's last feature, the Cannes-winning "A Screaming Man," involved father-son tensions against the backdrop of civil war. By comparison, his followup "Grigris" is something of a letdown, though it works well enough on the scale of a basic character study. The movie has a lot less on its mind and makes no drastic attempts to overreach. A straightforward tale of overcoming personal and professional challenges with no fancy dressing, "Grigris" goes down easy but offers nothing remotely fresh.

The title refers to the nickname of its slick protagonist, a young man named Souleymane (Souleymane Deme) whose killer dance moves make him a popular club presence in the small town in which he resides. Grigris' flexible physicality is especially impressive because of a bad leg that gives him a distinctive gait. Yet the disability isn't exactly a hindrance for Grigris, a seemingly well-liked presence who works for his ailing father. When their hole-in-the-wall business dries up, however, Grigris turns to a local illegal petroleum dealer to support his family, inciting a series of incidents that eventually put him in the gangsters' crosshairs.

In the meantime, he strikes up a romance with local prostitute Mimi (Anais Monory), for whom Grigris falls before he figures out her profession. Acting first for the sake of his family, then for the sake of his lover, and finally running for his life, Grigris is eventually forced to confront the outcome of his seedy associations in a perilous climax.

That's the entire sketch of a plot that writer-director Haroun offers up, as he relies less on story than the charisma of his nimble-footed lead, whose lanky physique is frequently captured in lavish interludes where he practices his hobby. Cinematographer Antoine Herberle brings a lush palette to the proceedings that alternates between the bright colors of daytime Chad scenery and the ominous shadows that engulf Grigris' world when he takes part in the smuggling routines. But the imagery does little to distract from a thin, overly familiar story in which our well-intentioned hero falls for a hooker with a heart of gold and attempts to smooth out the imperfections in their world.
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Working-class hoofer Billy Elliot was living the high life compared to “Grigris,” the eponymous hero of Chadian writer-helmer Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s typically studied fifth feature. The story of a disabled, dance-crazy young buck whose involvement in an illegal gasoline-trafficking ring eventually has him running scared, this elegant, geographically vivid pic is considerably leaner than its melodramatic premise might suggest, though wan characterization makes it less immediately engaging than Haroun’s last film, 2010′s Cannes jury prizewinner “A Screaming Man.” Distributors may well feel the same way, though fest programmers routinely starved for accessible African fare will keep the film’s dance card full.

With the film set in the Chadian capital of N’Djamena, a large but still-disenfranchised city where radio carries a slow trickle of outside culture to the population, it’s perhaps appropriate that “Grigris” opens, quaintly, with an apparent reference to “Saturday Night Fever”: Dressed in a blindingly white dress shirt that mirrors the tiled dance floor, Souleymane (striking professional dancer Souleymane Deme, sharing a full name with his character) throws down some breathtaking moves at a local nightclub, delighting the regular crowd of admirers who have nicknamed him “Grigris.”

The name is perhaps derived from the term “gris-gris,” a talisman used in parts of West Africa as good luck charm. If so, it’s a cruel choice, given Souleymane’s consistent run of ill fortune — beginning with his paralyzed left leg, a disability that at least lends his dancing considerable distinction. By day, however, it makes the young man a social outcast, excluded from the city’s mostly menial job market and deemed unfit for purpose by its eligible women. Small wonder, then, that he finds love and a kindred spirit in another creature of the night, mixed-race prostitute Mimi (Anais Monory), whose light skin has further restricted her to the social margins.
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Mahamat-Saleh Haroun‘s fifth film to date tells the tale of Souleymane (Souleymane Deme) – known as Grigris to his friends – an immensely skilled dancer living in Chad’s capital, N’Djamena. Due to a debilitating leg injury, however, he struggles to hold down even manual labor, while seemingly the only joyous aspects of his life are his dancing and a nascent romance with a local prostitute, Mimi (Anais Monoroy). When his step-father wracks up hefty medical bills, Grigris decides to start skimming shipments of gasoline from the illegal racket he works for as a runner, yet when his boss finds out, he’s given just 48 hours to pay the funds back, on threat of death.

Haroun smartly throws us straight into the African milieu from the get-go with an entertaining scene of the titular character showing off his exceptional dancing skills, made only all the more characteristic by his disability. This is suddenly juxtaposed with Grigris’ more provincial home life, taking pictures for the locals and helping out around the village. There is a constant to-and-fro of aspiration and adversity being depicted, while the city’s economic and religious specifics – the latter including numerous references to Allah and the Qu’ran – are more subtly cossetted into proceedings.

Binding the picture together is a quietly composed performance from Deme as a likeable if placid sort, sweet and unassuming, yet undeniably a sublime physical specimen and great dancer, even despite – or perhaps in part because of – his physical disadvantage. Still, Grigris is a man of fine, almost disadvantageous temperament, gentle even when fending off a lecherous man trying to take Mimi home. Instead, he is more likely to turn his violence inward, notably as he repeatedly smacks his head against a wall to give the impression to a local gangster that he has had his gasoline shipment stolen.

Despite his theft of his boss’s goods, the picture painted of Grigris depicts a deeply moral man clinging desperately to the edge of means. We need no better indication of where his moral compass lies than when he positively refuses to take advantage of a drunk Mimi, who quite literally throws herself at him.

Haroun’s directorial approach is that of the laid back, observational slow burn. While it’s a story that’s admirably very simple and easily digested, Grigris is also at times rather earnest which, when combined with a languid pace, will make for a somewhat testing sit for less-sentimental audiences. The romantic aspects are, to the pic’s credit, nicely downplayed, not opting for the simplistic schmaltzy route for the most part, at least until the cheesy pop music makes an appearance later on. By film’s end, however, the energy of the piece has well and truly run out in all aspects, despite some intriguing elements throughout.
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Mohamat-Saleh Haroun’s Grigris is a film of communities in contrast. How people identify themselves within a given social space is paramount to the director’s overt thematic interests involving family and region. But Haroun’s straightforward approach is surprisingly simplistic when compared to his nuanced direction of 2010’s A Screaming Man. With Grigris, he relies heavily on the character’s cliché external conflicts to convey a thinly explored ideology that gratuitously favours country living over urban existence.

In the film’s vibrant opening sequence, Souleymane (Souleymane Deme), a young photographer whose leg is hobbled with paralysis, enters a colorful discothèque to the applause of a large crowd chanting his stage name, "Grigris! Grigris!" He proceeds to dance for the adorning onlookers, bending and contorting in ways a normal human body could not. Flexibility allows Souleymane to entertain, but doesn’t afford him any real economic security. His situation grows more desperate when his stepfather grows extremely ill.

Patriarchs obviously interest Haroun since A Screaming Man dealt with the crumbling relationship between a Hotel pool cleaner and his protégé son. In Grigris, the patriarch is eliminated from the situation and replaced by a gangster who employs Souleymane for various shady dealings involving petrol smuggling. Their relationship is nearly always plot-driven, a superficial and familiar construct that foretells an inevitable narrative trajectory. Survival fuels Souleymane’s reckless actions in the second half of the film, mostly involving his relationship with a prostitute named Mimi (Anais Monory), but Haroun fails to create any tangible danger in this situation.
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Heli

Heli is a 2013 independent Mexican crime drama film directed by Amat Escalante and produced by Jaime Romandía. Featuring newcomers Armando Espitia, Andrea Vergara, Linda González, and Juan Eduardo Palacios, the film premiered in competition for the Palme d'Or at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival. Amat Escalante won the award for Best Director. While being appreciative of the film's technical aspects, film critics were divided in their opinion of the film itself. Heli was filmed around the Mexican city of Guanajuato.

Heli tells the story of the titular protagonist (played by Armando Espitia), who is a seventeen-year-old boy living with his wife (played by Linda González) and his sister, Estela (played by Adrea Vergara). The film follows the arcs of these characters and Estela's boyfriend (played by Juan Eduardo Palacios) as they struggle with drugs, violence, and corruption.
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Amat Escalante's "Heli" opens with a shot of two bodies, bound and bloodied, pinned down with brute force in a truck bed until one is left alive atop an overpass while another is hung from it, for all to see. By the time the story reaches this point, we've come to learn the identities of each captive and -- in the broadest strokes -- how their fates have intertwined; the second half of "Heli" devotes just as much time to the long, quiet fallout of such a brutal, prolonged assault.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Heli (Armando Espitia) is a young man who works nights at the local auto assembly plant while his father works days, caring for his younger sister, Estela (Andrea Vergara), with the help of his girlfriend (Linda González). Unbeknownst to Heli is the fact that Estela, hardly a teenager herself, has been toying with the heart of 17-year-old police cadet Beto (Juan Eduardo Palacios), and this relationship will indirectly bring violence to their door.

Spain's Amat Escalante has proven divisive with earlier features "Sangre" and "Los Bastardos," as has co-producer Carlos Reygadas with his own work ("Post Tenebras Lux"), and that trend shows no signs of abating. The director/co-writer takes his time before unleashing bad things on good people, and once it finally does, said violence climaxes in explicitly upsetting ways. Just as Heli and his family seem like a convincingly average blue-collar Mexican family -- each of the main actors is a first-timer, a fact that doesn't show -- their encounters with more aggressive parties have an equally natural brutality about them.
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The first thing anyone is sure to notice in Amat Escalante's Heli is Lorenzo Hagerman's cinematography. The film opens with the sole of a boot pressed against a young man's face as he is bleeding, bound, gagged and lay flat on the bed of a moving truck. Next to him is another young man whose face we cannot see. All we hear is the creaking of the truck as it rolls down a dirt round in an unspecified Mexican town.

All in one shot, the camera slowly pans up and moves into the cab of the truck as the sun beams in over the horizon. It's a beautiful shot and I couldn't help but be reminded of how film limits our knowledge of what's going on based on what we see. Only minutes earlier we were looking at a grisly scene and now, through the front window, the scene appears as innocent as anything else. Innocence as it turns out, is at the heart of this film as the fate of the two boys, and many other young children in Mexico like them, are to become the story of Heli.

The film follows the life of its title character, Heli (Armando Espitia), a 17-year-old living with his wife (Linda Gonzalez), young son, father and 12-year-old sister Estela (Andrea Vergara).

Like his father, Heli works at the local automobile plant and dropped out of school to support his family. One night, after returning home from his night shift, Estela is still up at 1 AM doing her homework. After telling Heli what she's working on he says, "I don't remember any of that." To which she replies, "I probably won't either when I'm your age." The audience chuckles, but little do we know how clairvoyant young Estela is. The five years that separate the two may as well be 20.

As it turns out, Estela is already attempting to grow up too fast. Her boyfriend (Juan Eduardo Palacios) is a police cadet determined to marry her despite the five years that separate them and his plan to make sure they can do so brings violence directly to their doorstep.
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The world of Heli is a dark and desperate one. Set in an impoverished isolated Mexican community, director Amat Escalante’s spare, unflinching drama treats crime and violence as regrettably commonplace occurrences. From Heli’s perspective, it’s not surprising that lawlessness exists in that country’s remote regions—but it is somewhat miraculous that it has yet to visit the film’s main characters. Until now.

The movie, which got its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival on May 15, stars newcomer Armando Espitia as Heli, a young man in his 20s who lives in a small house with his wife (Linda Gonzalez), their infant, his 12-year-old sister, Estela (Andrea Vergara), and their father. Lanky and looking more like a kid than a grownup with a child, Heli is nonetheless responsible and protective—not just of his baby but also of his impressionable sister.

No wonder Estela is hiding her relationship with Beto (Juan Eduardo Palacios), an oafish police cadet who doesn’t have the constitution for the job and seems interested in marrying the underage girl mostly so he can sleep with her. Wanting to start a new life with Estela, Beto makes off with some confiscated illegal drugs, figuring that selling them will bankroll their future. Heli gets wind of Beto’s plan, however, dumping the narcotics to protect his sister. Unfortunately, that doesn’t help him when masked, crooked law enforcement officials break into Heli’s home, taking him, Estela and Beto captive until they recover their drugs.

Escalante’s third feature—his first two, Sangre and Los Bastardos, screened at Cannes but failed to secure U.S. theatrical distribution—boasts a nicely controlled tone that’s subdued but pitiless, calmly showing how Heli’s home is under assault both from within and from without. Coping with an unhappy wife who’s resentful that he moved her so far away from her family, Heli works a tiring, menial job at a local automobile plant, his economic prospects looking terribly dreary. And as the film’s brutal opening, which includes armed men hanging one of their victims from the edge of a bridge, suggests, there are plenty of life-or-death fears outside his door—after all, he’s living in an area where the gang members and the police might be one and the same.
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“Open your eyes so you don’t miss the show,” instructs one character midway through “Heli,” shortly before a kidnapped man is beaten with an oversized paddle and stripped to the ankles, his genitals doused in alcohol and set merrily ablaze. Indeed, it’s no coincidence that the title (and title character) invokes a certain place of eternal damnation in this nihilistic third feature by Carlos Reygadas acolyte Amat Escalante, who plunges us deep into Mexico’s vicious cycle of drug-fueled violence, with no end — or much of a discernable point — in sight. Destined to traumatize buyers and audiences in roughly equal measure, this accomplished but singularly unpleasant pic lends this year’s Cannes competition its first authentic whiff of scandal.

Surely the most explicit, realistically violent film to premiere on Cannes’ main stage since Brillante Mendoza’s controversial “Kinatay” (which ended up winning the fest’s directing prize in 2009), “Heli” opens on the telling image of a bound-and-gagged man having his face pressed into the bed of a pickup truck by an unseen assailant’s boot. When the truck pulls over, another body is unloaded, carried to the top of a freeway overpass and hung by the neck for all to see. Pic then loops back to explain who these men are and how they got here.

One of them is Heli (the very good Armando Espitia), an auto factory worker in an unnamed Mexican desert region modeled on Guanajuato, who lives a modest existence with his wife (Linda Gonzalez), infant son, father and 12-year-old sister, Estela (Andrea Vergara). Coursing with pubescent desire, Estela has begun seeing the older Beto (Juan Eduardo Palacios), an army cadet who impresses her with his macho brio (one indelible image has him curling Estela like a human barbell). But back at boot camp, Beto himself is subjected to such emasculating hazing rituals as being forced to writhe about in his own vomit — yet more indication that “Heli” intends to leave little to the imagination.
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Man cannot subsist on glamour alone, and Cannes knows it. So, after the sugar rush of opening nighter The Great Gatsby, the programmers scheduled in some veg. It was served New Wave Mexican style: raw, gritty, and force fed by bandits who snap puppies' necks with one hand while recruiting underage sex slaves with the other. It tasted as superficially indigestible, if ultimately nutritious, as the prickly pears our hero hacks off the desert cacti in a frenzy of impotent rage.

Heli (Armando Espitia) is about 20, and lives with his wife, baby, father and 12-year-old sister Estela (Andrea Vergara). This we learn when a census officer pops by his breeze-block house – a half-cute, half-clumsy device – just before he hops on his boneshaker for the night shift at the local auto factory. He forgets himself when he tots up the numbers; this is structurally, as well as thematically, a film about supporting others as you yourself are written out of the picture.

His sister is seeing a 17-year-old soldier, Beto (Juan Eduardo Palacio); scenes of front-seat fumblings seem initially queasy, then, with hindsight, the picture of innocence and joy. For Beto, whose training includes rolling about in his own vomit, has stolen some cocaine and stashed it in the water tank on the top of Heli's house. This triggers a fallout which eventually explains the opening shots (a kidnapped man being hung from a footbridge), by way of an extended torture set-piece involving cricket-bat beatings and a set of genitals doused in lighter fluid and flambéed, Christmas-pud style. A sofa-full of bored boys watch, taking turns with the bat as a break from the Wii. "What did this one do?" asks one. "Who knows," says another. In the kitchen next door, an unconcerned woman makes tea, cutlery clattering in the gaps between the screams.
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Heli may be the most optimistic film you will ever see in which one young man sets another’s genitals on fire. Amat Escalante’s third feature centres on an extended family who live in a smallish city in Mexico. By its end, that family unit has been battered, brutalised and reduced in number – but the unit itself still persists.
So yes, I did leave the film with a spring in my step, although that sense of hopefulness was perhaps compounded by the fact Escalante’s picture was the first to screen in competition at this year’s Cannes Festival. No one knows what horrors and provocations might lie around the corner, but once you have sat and watched another man’s penis being flambéed, you rather feel you can take on anything.
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