The Machine That Kills Bad People* is a bi-monthly film club programmed by Erika Balsom, Beatrice Gibson, Maria Palacois Cruz and Ben Rivers. This 35mm presentation of a rarely screened Claire Denis film is their latest screening. There will also be a 16mm screening of 'Big In Vietnam' (Diop, 2012). Full details here.
Variety review:
Set in Marseille, the film separately intros Nenette (Alice Houri) and Boni (Gregoire Colin), the first a quietly rebellious 15-year-old at a boarding school, the second a cocksure 19-year-old pizza chef who has wet dreams about a local baker’s sexy wife (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi). Only when Nenette skips school and turns up at Boni’s apartment one day is it made clear the pair are estranged brother and sister.In a change of tack from her previous pics, Denis adopts a patchwork of styles that gives the movie an irreal, highly metaphysical flavor. Frequently shooting in tight closeups that put the emphasis on the thesps’ faces, helmer moves from restless, almost documentary-like camerawork, through idealized dream sequences (for Boni’s sex dreams) to more conventionally shot sequences.This impressionistic approach may not be to the liking of those who favor regular character development and clear answers. Denis and co-scripter Jean-Pol Fargeau often supply information only after the event, and the pic studiously avoids any judgment of the characters’ actions. Binding everything together, however, is the superb musical score, which gives the pic a dreamy, often magical feel that precisely captures the floating emotions of her young protagonists and raises potentially grungy, downbeat material to an often intoxicating level.
Derek Elley
Set in Marseille, the film separately intros Nenette (Alice Houri) and Boni (Gregoire Colin), the first a quietly rebellious 15-year-old at a boarding school, the second a cocksure 19-year-old pizza chef who has wet dreams about a local baker’s sexy wife (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi). Only when Nenette skips school and turns up at Boni’s apartment one day is it made clear the pair are estranged brother and sister.In a change of tack from her previous pics, Denis adopts a patchwork of styles that gives the movie an irreal, highly metaphysical flavor. Frequently shooting in tight closeups that put the emphasis on the thesps’ faces, helmer moves from restless, almost documentary-like camerawork, through idealized dream sequences (for Boni’s sex dreams) to more conventionally shot sequences.This impressionistic approach may not be to the liking of those who favor regular character development and clear answers. Denis and co-scripter Jean-Pol Fargeau often supply information only after the event, and the pic studiously avoids any judgment of the characters’ actions. Binding everything together, however, is the superb musical score, which gives the pic a dreamy, often magical feel that precisely captures the floating emotions of her young protagonists and raises potentially grungy, downbeat material to an often intoxicating level.
Derek Elley
*The Machine That Kills Bad People is, of course, the cinema – a medium that is so often and so visibly in service of a crushing status quo but which, in the right hands, is a fatal instrument of beauty, contestation, wonder, politics, poetry, new visions, testimonies, histories, dreams... It is also a film club devoted to showing work – ‘mainstream’ and experimental, known and unknown, historical and contemporary – that takes up this task. The group borrowed their name from the Roberto Rossellini film of the same title, and find inspiration in the eclectic juxtapositions of Amos Vogel's groundbreaking New York film society Cinema 16.
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