This film, which also screens on July 20th, is part of the 'Station to Station: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Top Ten Train Films' season. Full details here.
BFI Southbank introduction: Her long-term relationship crumbling, a Finnish art student takes a train beyond the Arctic Circle to the north coast of Russia. She’s forced to share an austere compartment with a boorish young miner (Yura Borisov, as brilliant here as he was in Anora) who delights in making her feel uncomfortable. But as the landscape outside grows bleaker, these two lost souls begin tentatively to share empathy and friendship. Sublime and heart-warming, Kuosmanen’s Cannes Grand Prix winner has the gentle profundity of Chekhov’s best stories.
This film is also screened at the Prince Charles on August 27th. Details here.
Time Out review:Entirely studio shot, Hou Hsiao-Hsien most formally daring film to date is less an adaptation of a century old novel by Han Ziyun than a distillation of the lost world it describes. The 'flower houses' of old Shanghai were technically brothels, but not primarily places for sex; at a time when arranged marriages were the norm, China's male elite patronised them to get an éducation sentimentale. Hou organises the film around two strands of narrative. In one, Cantonese civil servant Wang (Tony Leung) turns his back on his favourite 'flower girl' after catching her with another lover. In the other, a 'gentleman caller' and a cynical 'flower girl' conspire to profit from arranging to cover up the scandal of an attempted suicide. Each scene is a continuous take, bracketed by fades up from and back to black; the one (crucial) exception is the insert of Wang's point-of-view as he witnesses Ms Crimson's unfaithfulness. Hauntingly sad, the film elegantly deranges the viewer's sense of time: this seemingly unchanging world is in fact riven by off-screen incidents - which change everything. Tony Rayns
Time Out review: Sixteen-year-old Lilya (Oskana Akinshina) is cruelly abandoned by her mother to
post-Soviet welfare and an aunt who only wants to steal the little she
has. From here, things go downhill. The aunt turfs her out of their
flat. Her only true friend is Volodya (Artyom Bogucharskij), a suicidal
13-year-old suffering at the fists of his father. Her only asset is her
looks. It's taken for granted she will cash in sooner or later. Then she
meets Andrei, who holds out the promise of a better world, and provides
her with what we know all along will be a one-way ticket to hell on
earth. Writer/director Moodysson's third film is grim and gruelling, a
'feelbad' entertainment signalled by scalding blasts of cacophonous
Rammstein at ear-splitting volume. A flashback structure imbues the
manifold injustices which befall Lilya with a harrowing inevitability.
The film's soul is revealed in the friendship between Lilya and Volodya,
their solace in sorrows shared, her innate kindness and generosity, his
reciprocal fidelity and affection. Moodysson retains his knack for
getting vivid, natural, immensely sympathetic performances out of
children. Their humanity invests the movie with heartbreaking power. Tom Charity
This 35mm screening is part of Curzon's John Schlesinger season. Details here.
BFI introduction to LFF screening in 2015: 1967 saw Julie Christie and Terence Stamp immortalised by The Kinks in
‘Waterloo Sunset’ and cast as lovers in Thomas Hardy’s epic love story.
Headstrong and independent, farmer Bathsheba Everdene is among the most
modern of 19th-century heroines and Christie’s performance beautifully
underlines her as a woman at odds with the conventions of the time. The
film contains a number of stand-out set-pieces, such as Stamp’s
seductive, almost Freudian display of swordsmanship. But what resonates
so deeply is the way in which Schlesinger and cinematographer Nicolas
Roeg frame the passions and tragedy at the film’s heart with the
patterns of rural life and the harsh, sodden beauty of the Dorset
landscape. Almost 50 years on, this restoration reveals the film as an
immersive piece of cinema with Hardy’s cruel ironies and bleak lyricism
fully intact. Robin Baker
John Patterson wrote an excellent article in the Guardian on this re-release. You can read the full article here. This is an extract:
Schlesinger’s Hardy was derided back then for its casting of Julie
Christie and Terence Stamp, mere months after they’d been name-checked
in the Kinks’ Waterloo Sunset, and who then seemed more Swinging London
than Wailing Wessex. Time and distance have eradicated that feeling,
however, and I delighted in the credits as they unfolded: not just Terry
and Julie, but Peter Finch and eternal peasant-pagan Alan Bates, all
perfectly cast; Stamp in particular, as the vile Sergeant Troy, whose
name should really be “destroy”.But behind the camera too, there is joy to be had. Frederic Raphael’s
screenplay, tied to Hardy as it must be, keeps the screenwriter’s more
irritating locutions and “sparkling dialogue” tendencies in check, and
serves Hardy admirably in terms of scale and pacing, while making hay of
double entendres such as Troy’s leering “I’ll unfasten you in no time”.
But perhaps the heart of the movie is the relationship between
production designer Richard Macdonald – the man responsible for Joseph
Losey’s eye-popping “mise-insane” films during the 60s – and
cinematographer Nicolas Roeg, at the height of what I think of as his
Red Period as a cameraman. Best of all is to see a large-scale British
period movie in which millions and millions of MGM’s dollars are clearly
and effectively visible on the screen.
This film is presented by 'Some Kind of Kick', who present 'celluloid rock ‘n’ roll trash on a Saturday night.' Here is their full programme at the Cinema Museum.
Time Out review: Sir Henry's disgusting ancestral home has spawned an industry: a Radio 4
sketch, Peel-show episodes, Bonzo track, complete album, stage
readings. His motto is 'Omnes Blotto'; his home is Knebworth outside, and a dusty heap of rotten food, excrement, and empty bottles within. Vivian Stanshall
has pieced together a shambolic poem, stuffed with extraordinary
one-liners, with the sad, manic skeleton necessary to all great comedy; a
satire tempered with nostalgia. Fixing this down visually is ultimately
as self-defeating as filming a Goon Show: Steve Roberts has opted for a grainy monochrome, and has fortunately resisted the temptation to 'explain'. With the surprising exception of Denise Coffey, the actors quite correctly play the farrago dead straight: Trevor Howard,
in particular, relishes the role of Sir Henry as if shooting for an
Oscar. Too many favourite album lines are missing to prevent a little
disappointment, and the edifice gets close to collapse on occasions, but
this is one film it would have been impossible to get irrefutably
'right'. John Collis
This is part of the Garden Cinema's Screwball Comedy season. Full details here.
Time Out review: An enchanting comedy which starts with Claudette Colbert, as an American chorine
on the make, stranded in Paris in a gold lamé evening gown (what else?).
She is befriended on the one hand by a poor taxi-driver who is really a
Russian count (Don Ameche), and on the other by a wealthy socialite
(John Barrymore) who 'introduces' her to society so that she can oblige by
luring a gigolo away from his wife. Uncanny coincidental parallels with La Règle du Jeu
abound, and although the film echoes Renoir's bark more than his bite,
it has a superbly malicious script by Brackett and Wilder, gorgeous sets
and camerawork, and a matchless cast. All in all, probably Mitchell Leisen's
best film. Tom Milne
Chicago Reader review: A British film about alienation, asphalt, and narrative disconnections,
coproduced by Wim Wenders's German company. Director Christopher Petit, a
former film critic, slips into Wenders's style—the cool, austere
black-and-white images, the blank underplaying—as if he were taking it
for a test drive: he wants to see what it can do, what its strengths are
and where its weaknesses lie. Seizing on an archetypal Wenders
situation—a car trip that becomes a metaphor for an emotional
pilgrimage—Petit inspects and abstracts Wenders's ideas. The film is
dull and distant, though not objectionably so—it seems to be the effect
Petit has in mind. The relationships between his isolated, distracted
characters are reproduced in the movie's low-key appeal to its audience.
With David Beames and Lisa Kreuzer (1979). Dave Kehr
