German Film Festival 2023.

Margarethe von Trotta’s ponderous new art movie Ingeborg Bachmann - Reise in dieWüste / Ingeborg Bachmann - Journey into the Desert follows the name writer’s association with playright Max Frisch and the other celebrities they jam in. It’s a big picture with shooting in Luxembourg, Switzerland, Austria, Italy & Jordan. Unfortunately all this ambition is rewarded with tedium.

From the ringing phone which reveals laughter before current thinking man’s love object Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread, Corsage) wakes institutionalised, this one zig zags between  her success as a celebrity poet and her debilitating affair with dramatist Max Frisch (an imposing Ronald Zehrfeld) which leads to her delivering orations like the celebrated “The Truth is Bearable for Humankind.” The pair find it impossible to live together in his native Zurich or her Rome comfort zone - scene of him being got up uneasily in a Roman tailor’s white suit to the admiration of a passing shop girl. The crunch point comes when Krieps burns the diary, which he has used to incorporate their relationship into his plays - something he takes for granted and she sees as betrayal. Throw in the odd actual-turned-surreal touch like her radio drama’s audience of blind men in black ties or the nightmare of the cigar setting her green dress on fire.

He goes off accompanied by blonde tootsie Luna Wedler, while Krieps heads into the desert with replacement squeeze Tobias Resch - scenes of camel riding and being buried in the burning sand. There’s a nice tango scene. Fraulein Krieps’ admirers are belatedly rewarded by her in  four way group sex.

Along the way, they drop more names than a drunken marquee letterer - include poet Guiseppe Ungaretti (an even more aged Renato Carpentieri from Tenderezza), Hans Werner Henze represented by Basil Eidenbenz, Kleist, Laurence of Arabia and Luchino Visconti, who seems to be the template from which they are working.

Despite all this determined aspiration to high art, the piece come across closer to the old Hollywood two for the price of one artists bios - Chopin and Georges Sand in Song to Remember, Van Gogh and Gauguin in Lust for Life or, rather better, George Sanders’ Gauguin and Herbert Marshall’s Somerset Maugham in the Albert Lewin 1942 The Moon and Sixpence.

Ingeborg Bachmann might resonate with people familiar with its subjects’ work -  or it might not. It has the novelty of a mid Twentieth Century setting and the subdued colour craft aspects are superior but, coming with the memory of Margarethe von Trotta’s sharper (and shorter) political thrillers of the seventies, it is a let down. Watching all that intervening work, that  has yet to reach us, would offer some clues.

 

Standing out from the program’s welter of unfamiliar names, comes Michael Bully Herbig. His
Winetou burlesque Der Schuh des Manitu was the all time biggest earning German film. His new Tausend Zeilen/ A Thousand Lines is a change of pace from that one or his Balloon. It’s a brisk not quite clever enough German A feature which explores what we think of as the Trump Era notion of Fake News, through actually a version of the story of real life exposed Der Speigel journalist Claas Relotius. That one now takes on resonance after the Tucker Carlson sacking.

Thousand Lines - Nay & M'Barek

However one of the advantages or hazards, depending which way you look at it, of my watching movies longer than most people have been breathing, is that some fall into line with material I’ve already enjoyed. The Gold Standard here remains Michael Curtiz’ 1935 Front Page Woman, where George Brent’s manipulation puts rival papers on the streets with news boys shouting different verdicts before the trial  judge comes back from diner to announce the Jury’s decision. Closer to the new movie’s subject we get European films like Jean Yanne’s 1972 Tout le monde il est beau, tout le monde il est gentil, where Yanne’s scoop, where he went into the wilds of the Amazon to get the facts from hostile tribals, is up staged by the report his rival sent back from his air conditioned hotel or Frederic Aubertin’s 2009 Envoyés très spéciaux/ Special Correspondents - the Gerards, Jugnot & Lanvin as reporters faking their kidnapping.

Here rumpled Spanish Journalist Elyas M'Barek is overshadowed by clean cut young star Chronik News Magazine reporter Jonas Nay, who has a string of coups like a Gitmo visit, playing soccer with the boy whose graffiti started a Palestinian conflict or talking to the family of black football champion Colin Kaepernick, all despite the demands of caring for his ailing sister. M’Bareck is unhappy at having to share his assignments on militias policing the Mexican border with Nay, who gets to do the fundamentalists, while he handles the refugee column with its woman pushing a baby in a pram through the desert. M’Barek is surprised with the speed with which his opposite number completes his portion.

Meanwhile M’bareck’s ideal family life with neglected wife Marie Burchard and the kids deteriorates.

At Home Office, the executives are planning to crate their furniture and move into bigger offices, after promotions largely brought by Nay’s successes. The young man is dismissive of a traditional journalist at the staff meeting and berates M’Bareck for not getting into the human material behind the headlines, dragging down the standard Nay had set for their joint article.

There’s a nice comic scene with the fact checker, who goes through the material at speed and confirms that Arizona is on the U.S. border and the other verifiable information, leaving the specifics to the correspondent on the spot. 

Alarmed that his name is on a suspect piece of journalism, M’Bareck voices his suspicions after finding a photo of a Militia member Nay claimed he had interviewed under another name in a file article. He is told jealousy is endangering his continued employment.  Nay, accepting German Press awards with a modest speech applauding serious reporting, is cut to M’Bareck flying himself and his photographer on his own dollar to the militia man’s isolated desert shack in Arizona with the snarling dog and slipping him the two hundred dollars he demands, against company policy of not paying for interviews.

Back in Berlin with his recording, M’bareck is dismissed by the golf player executives as a bad loser who pays for stories and he finds himself out of a job. It’s only when fellow foreigner, sub-editor Sara Fazilat pulls the original of an email, which Nay corrupted, that her superiors realise they are in the middle of a major press scandal. She ends up crating her funiture for the big office.

Performances are everything that’s needed. The office infighting is broken up by striking location work - plausibly Monument Valey and the Palestinian Territories. We get the opening filmed backward and a black and white scene. The effects - characters walking through the graphics, placing the text of articles behind the actors or popping off the discredited items in the repeated scenes illustrating Nay’s scoops - is good and the TV commercial putting forward the new journalism claims of the bogus Chronik magazine is spot on.

Herbig’s works all have different textures but the same ironic cynicism underlies each one.

 

Elyas M'Barek is back in Liebesdings / Love Things from director Anika Decker who wrote the Rabbit Without Ears Movies, a polished and topical romcom, which mixes a critique of show business glamor and a bit of current ideology.

M’Barek is a movie star on his way to his premiere past a row of posters with his face already graffitied. To avoid frantic fans, he dives into the small neighborhood Theater 3000, which turns out to be a failing Feminist venue, where the entertainment includes transexuals’ monologues and dancing tampons. One of the acts outlines her intimidating sex quiz, for prospective partners before she puts out. Swigging on their shlooms beverage wipes M’bareck out and passers-by get ‘phone cam shots of him throwing up on a lamp post. Theater Manager, the appealing Lucie Heinze takes pity and he goes undercover (disguised as a clitoris) in her world of fluid sexuality, while she is taken aback with a his luxury apartment featuring a giant yellow push top pen. (“It’s art!”)

This produces the consequences we expect from the Beautiful People. Their night together is gangbusters but the morning after doesn’t go so well. Living from hand to mouth, she tells him he should connect with reality and he comes back that he’s been a star since he was eighteen and champagne galas, TV interviews and adoring fans are his reality.

However his entourage can’t deflect the damage when mean journalist Alexandra Maria Lara, now no longer the ingenue we remember from Downfall and The Tunnel and here doing an authoritative turn as a mean show business journalist, manages to unearth a youthful scandal. When this gets wide publication M’Barek’s show business prospects vanish, with the exception of a fruit beverage commercial, where he can’t master delivering lines while being whisked skyward harnessed to a rope. In the nicest twist, now that his past has become public, M’Barek resolves to seek out the member of his teen gang that the cops had taken, only to find him become successful accountant Anton Weil, who is himself feeling guilty about not looking for his old associates. Weil’s young daughters are awe struck to find that he knows the star.

It all works out with what passes for charm in a current European feature movie and fills in the time well enough. Production is smooth.

I only watched a small section of the German Film Festival material but, in days when we are
spoiled for choice, I didn’t find myself motivated to explore more.

Barrie Pattison - 2023.

 This one was put behind a wall and then re-instated by Google.

Excessive.

Tropa de Elite/ Elite Squad  & Tropa de Elite 2: O Inimigo Agora é Outro/  Elite
Squad 2: The Enemy Within

So I skimmed through the SBS program for the week and they had something Brazilian called Elite Squad as the late, late film. Well, being a curious insomniac movie completist I am the target audience for such presentations. I tuned in and it wasn’t long before my jaw was hanging open.

In contrasty colour José Padilha (previously director of the festival hit documentary Bus 174) offers grim faced star Wagner Moura narrating as commander of the elite Batalhão de Operações Policiais Especiais (BOPE, the Special Police Operations Battalion of the Rio de Janeiro Military Police). He wants to spend time with his wife and new baby and is  searching for his replacement as the Pope’s nearing visit dictates a clean up of the hill top favellas made no go areas by murderous drug gangs.

Moura - Tropa de Elite

 We’ve seen this juxtaposition of the prosperous ground level privileged and the desperate slums in South American film before, as early as Bruno Barreto’s 1978 Amor Bandido or in City of God. Here the film  flash backs contrast police recruits hard head Caio Junqueira and glasses wearing law student André Ramiro. The fact that Ramiro is black is never an issue. They find law enforcement seething with corruption bankrolled by kick backs from the drug dealers.

Ramiro’s law degree studies compromise him when his fellow students are smoking the dealers’ pot and the privileged class white girl from the charity NGO he makes it with turns out to be a dope runner’s mistress.

The breaking point comes for Junqueira when a distraught mother can’t bury her dead drug look-out son because the body can’t be located, while the cops shift cadavers out of their jurisdictions to stop the murders appearing on their unit statistics.

The two room mate cops have been put to work in the police garage, which is near inoperable because corrupt officers sell the motors out of new cars and replace them with old clapped-out ones. Junqueira hits on the plan to buy the spare parts they need by putting the commander’s car out of action, so that his usual pay off collection is delayed and the duo send in their own vehicle to get the cash. What’s the commander going to do - call the police?

This ends up with the pair transferred to canteen duties and their master mechanic peeling potatoes. Part time brothel owner police lieutenant Wilhelm Cortaz is sure the cops, who want him to go with them on the next pay off pick up, plan on doing him in over taking the bribe money, so the pair set off to cover him with sniper fire from the opposite hill, only to find themselves out gunned.

At this point - flash back to the opening - the  Elite Squad arrive and save them with their own merciless attack. The boys are hooked and sign up for the BOPE selection process which makes marine training in Officer and A Gentleman or Vietnam boot camp in Tigerland seem genteel. The brutal recruitment procedure  usually eliminates all but eight of the hundred applicants. This time it goes down to three. The instructors deliberately target corrupt trainees, crushing Cortaz. Their preparation includes abseiling the cliff face and live fire exercises in the real favella alley ways, where Junqueira proves too gung ho.

They move on the slums and the retaliation takes out Junqueira when he delivers the glasses Ramiro had promised a local kid. Finding  the BOPE skull  tattoo on Junqueira’s body, the gang bangers realize they are doomed - securing the danger area  for the Pope now forgotten.

The dope gangs are equally appalled to find the NGO had a cop among them. They shoot and burning tire necklace a NGO couple, causing a protest march. The girl friend tries to help, getting their promise that they won’t injure the fugitive killer’s girl - cut and the squad have a blood filled plastic bag over the girl's face to get his whereabouts. The unit raids the favella and takes down the dealer, who lies on the ground pleading not to be shot in the face so that his body can be shown in an open casket.

Twisted time structure, high contrast greenish colour, maximum violence and cynicism. This is rivetting.

I’m still digesting it when next week SBS slap on the sequel in the same small hours time slot. We pick up seven (?) years later with hero Moura again narrating as the BOPE methods (“a police force with a skull for it’s symbol”) are the subject of a condemnatory lecture theater session by liberal reformer Irandhir Santos.

The situation is even worse now that armed raids have all but cleared the slum areas of the drug gangs, leaving the corrupt police militia to take over the rackets. There’s now an  alliance of the populist media, the governor going for re-election and the bent coppers. Maura’s ex-wife Maria Ribeiro has married Santos and they are raising Moura’s son.

Shift to Bangui prison, controlled by the murderous street gangs who continue their feuds inside. One lot revolts, finds an opposing leader and sets on fire the cell full of bedding where they have him. The prisoners demand Santos as negotiator and he goes in without a Kevlar vest and manages to stabilize the situation but the Skulls have been called (“BOPA doesn’t give a shit”) with Ramiro in charge and the CCTV shows them waiting guns leveled behind the door the prisoners tried to smash to get more weapons - very Fritz Lang. When the door is opened there is  a massacre leaving the armed prisoners dead and Santos with blood spatter all over his "Human Rights" shirt.

Outraged Santos is on about social cleansing but the public love the TV coverage of the jail shoot-out, stoked by the fat rabble rousing news commentator who does dance steps on his show, so the governor promotes Moura (“I fell upwards”) to sub-commander of intelligence, where he is given control of ‘phone intercepts.

Meanwhile he is growing away from his son, who accepts the outlook of Santos, Moura’s biggest critic. However Moura is called in to retrieve the boy and his girl friend from jail for a marijuana offense for which the kid takes the blame to spare the girl. Father and son get to bond in a judo work out.

The police station in the uncontrolled area of Tanque is held up and their weapons taken. The Tanque station commander has spotted the fact that the raiders’ knowledge of procedure - and their boots - indicated rogue police rather than drug gangs. In retaliation Ramiro and his men secretly replace the bought police at a station in an area where the heavies expect no resistance and gun them down. The captured gang leader reveals the truth to Ramiro, who vows vengeance, so he is shot in the back by the crooked cop, in front of Commander Cortaz, who considered him the friend who had saved his life - surprise twist disposes of the central character of the first film. Think of him as a Brazilian Han Solo.

The poor’s most valuable asset is not the protection money they pay out for police monopoly cable TV and bottle water but their vote in the coming election. The girl journalist on the case tracks down the house where they heavies have stored the stolen weapons and election material together. She is ‘phoning Santos when the bad hats come back and rape and murder her - grim scene of an impatient heavy pulling the teeth out of her charred skull.

Moura gets the copy of her last ‘phone call off the illegal intercept he has placed on Santos’ phone and takes the recording away before his superiors come for it.

He realizes that they will try to off Santos, who is with Moura’s ex wife and his son, and he waits for them taking out the hit man’s car with his pistol, though the boy is shot in the exchange of fire. The scene of reduced-to-a-Suit Moura picking up the machine gun brought by the skulls and blasting rounds into the nasties is cheer worthy.

The resulting publicity returns Santos to parliament and he gives the rostrum in the House of
Representatives to Moura, who declares two third of the members he is speaking to be corrupt.

Same gritty hi-con look with even better production values. Imposing visuals - the chopper over-flying the kids playground or the final aerials of Brazilia as still corrupt survivor whore monger Cortaz flies in.

I’ve gone into surprise killing detail on these because they are unlikely to get any real distribution. I can’t find them on SBS on Demand but, for the determined, they are on You Tube in good English sub-titled copies.

We can see that José Padilha’s admiration goes out to the skulls, glimpsed drilling impeccably in their black uniforms and advancing under fire, leaving the regular police to cower behind them. Pot smoking do gooders are going to be burned alive by the impoverished mob they believe they are helping. Ramirez  notes contemptuously when the population turns out in the street over their deaths. “There are no demonstrations when policemen are killed.” The free press is a clown TV newsman and and an editor who refuses to follow up when one of his own is killed. Padilha’s solution is a not all that plausible parliamentary alliance between the shoot ‘em up lot and the reformers.

I was feeling superior about discovering these outstanding, gritty, obscure action pieces. Not indicated as a repeat, this must be presumed to be the local premier. Then I found they were the most successful Brazilian films of all time, the monster hit in the Spanish language market and Berlin Grand Prix winner. Here they  just sink into the void as most of the outside the festival net material does. It’s disturbing but not surprising that the pair reached us without  promotion, turning up as small hours movies on SBS the week that Australia's multi cultural broadcaster was busy trailering it’s series on Walt Disney. The Sydney Morning Herald TV Guide for the day featured Will Ferrel in Elf.  This was the week Star Wars 7 opened in the multiplexes and The Bélier Family was in the art cinemas. What kind of film is going to be made in an environment where this is the frame of reference? Answer - the kind that gets made in Australia.

In the real world the Elite Squad films were reviewed widely, usually by people who called them fascist & cited The Godfather.  The movie characters themselves dismiss the comparison with Mafia, the hoods saying the Italians eat lasagna while their lot chow down on rice and beans. This one is very ethno specific, complete with samba street carnivals.

Place the films instead in  a sequence where the answer to disorder is to send in the troops. Think President Walter Huston having the army stand gangsters against the wall in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty and shoot them in  the 1933 MGM Gabriel Over the White House. Phil Karlson’s 1955 Phenix City Story ends in martial law but it introduces the caution against vigilante-ism. Elio Petri’s 1970 Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto / Investigation of  Citizen Above Suspicion  is a caution against the excesses of state control and the military, as is Daniele Vicari’s splendid 2012  Diaz - Don’t Clean Up This Blood (title in English).

I have no way of knowing how accurate the two Padhilha films are. Brazilians I asked endorse them but, whether it is sensationalized fiction or documentary actuality, the sure crafted, savage indignation of the production gives them plausibility. Tropa de Elite 1 & 2 make the movie product we are offered here insipid by comparison. 

 

Barrie Pattison 2023.

Scary movies - the early ones.

The Horror Movie - think Poe, Hoffman and Aleister Crowley mixed in with strip cartoon, has pretty well always been a subject of reverence for some. Over many years it was all the transgressive entertainment those who had no access to porn knew about.  There were more than a few never watched anything else. 

Even with its dedicated literature, outlets and producers, complete with devoted followers, surprisingly little was known about its evolution. How many could tell you about Sheldon Lewis? 

You Tube, as might be expected, has come to the rescue with significant, neglected material. A just about watchable copy of Roland West’s 1925 The Monster is there. 

West was an established producer-director in silent Hollywood, an associate of Joseph Schenk and William Cameron Menzies. Now, you are more likely to hear about the scandal that swirled around him and actress Thelma Todd, than his movies, though his horror titles the silent The Bat and 70mm. sound re-make The Bat Whispers still get the occasional showing.    

The Monster - Chaney, Austin, Arthur & James

The Monster is a signpost to the Horror Movie Cycle to come. It places comedy in an Old Dark House years before The Cat & the Canary. It’s an early monster movie Lon Chaney did without Tod Browning, making it easier to separate the contributions the pair made to their work together. 

We’re back in the Twenties American rural town where long lasting comic Johnny Arthur and Hallam Cooley, the two clerks in Watson’s General Store both have their eye on owner Edward McWade’s daughter Gertrude Olmstead. Arthur is mad on becoming a detective and has sent off for his mail order diploma, cuffs and gun. Cooley however has an advantage having used his savings for a dress suit to wear at the McWade’s dance party, where the attraction is a keg of cider.

However, on the dark highway, a hooded figure has lured Dr. Herbert Prior into the ditch, with the mirror across the road routine, which is hard to make out in this copy. The abandoned nursing home is nearby. Is help available there? When the Doc. goes missing, city detective William H. Turner shows up and is scornful of Arthur’s interest in crime fighting.

Back out at the nursing home at night,  the hooded man sends the leads cascading down a chute into the subterranean chambers under the Institute. (like Cameron Menzies cutaway decor in The Bat) There they are greeted by Chaney’s Dr. Ziske in a white coat and sunken eyed make up and Walter James, his shirtless assistant Caliban (!) in a turban, along with crazy Knute Erickson who has this nice line in miming rolling an imaginary cigarette. 

Monster - Chaney & Olmstead

The doctor insists they stay the night - cranking down the steel shutters to make his point and he makes off with the revolver Arthur has given Coolley to protect fearful Olmstead. A door leads to an underground chamber sealed by a rock raised by a winch. Olmstead is rescued from the Terribly Strange Bed in the alcove only to have hands emerge from the sofa to drag her down and the clerks find themselves menaced by the doctor’s electric Death Chair, while Arthur’s attempt at escape, walking the telegraph wires, is frustrated by George Austin in the hood. Olmsted is wheeled in unconscious in a gauze cocoon for Chaney to perform his fiendish operation (don’t show this one to the kids) but Arthur proves resourceful and summons help with his detective school Roman Candle in a so so model shot.

With all this ground breaking it’s a pity The Monster isn’t a better movie. Chaney is of course in his element, all but turning to the audience and rubbing his hands while giving fiendish laughter. West’s handling offers a basic technique with the action mainly played in “American Shot” three quarter length figures. There are a couple of bad eye lines but the piece has generally competent direction. Production values get by. This is one of the few circulating Metro silent films not designed by Cedric Gibbons and W.L. Heywood’s decoration is notably less flamboyant than we might expect. Performances are broad but titles by Thomas Ince’s accomplished writer C. Gardner Sullivan get the most out of the mix of hick comedy and Gothic. “Bowman’s disappearance was Danburg’s biggest thrill since the milkman eloped with the bootlegger’s wife.”

This one wasn't the only silent film with a debt to Poe’s “The System of Dr. Tar and Professor Fether.” Maurice Tourneur did a Le système du docteur Goudron et du professeur Plume / The Lunatics in 1913 and it was a source for German filmmaker Richard Oswald’s two Unheimliche Geschichten films.

Uncanny Tales - Schünzel, Oswald & Veidt.

Gaining a certain status from making 1919's Anders als die Andern, the first film to show homosexuality, Richard Oswald was never a master craftsman or a subtle artist but he was a major player in the German film Industry, from the beginning of WW1 till he fled the Nazis, and he got to work with the country’s best acting talent. Many of his performers would outlast the 3rd Reich or shift to Hollywood. Oswald's son Gerd Oswald would go on to make indifferent Hollywood features and some exceptional TV there - Robert Culp in the Outer Limits : Demon with a Glass Hand. 

In Oswald senior's 1919 Unheimliche Geschichten, called Uncanny Tales in English, customers leave the antiquarian bookshop at dusk and the owner hugs his volumes. However comes midnight in the deserted shop, the three paintings on the wall come to life – Conrad Veidt as Death, Reinhold Schünzel as the Devil and the then notorious Anita Berber as a Harlot.  They open five macabre stories in which we see the trio play out triangle plots.

The first episode "The Apparition" has traveler Veidt rescue Berber from her abusive ex-husband Schünzel, who dogs their steps checking into a hotel. When Veidt returns, he finds Berber’s room wrecked and the staff all deny she ever existed - OK montage dissolving between their faces - one of the few pieces of effective editing in the film, though  they manage well matched cuts and dissolves closer. The piece is mainly played by the cast opened out to camera in front of flat studio decors. It is only when he stops the top hat undertaker following a horse-drawn hearse that Veidt learns Berber died of a plague attack that the hotel wishes to conceal.

This is credited to “Die Erscheinung" a 1912 story by Anselma Heine but is a version of the often filmed Paris Exhibition story, seen as Veit Harlan’s Christina Soderbaum version Covered Tracks/ Verwehte Spuren, Terence Fisher’s So Long at the Fair from Anthony Horne’s 1947 novel and Joseph Newman’s 1953 Dangerous Crossing from a John Dickinson Carr radio play.

Second up is "The Hand" by Robert Liebmann (later to co-write Congress Dances) where Veidt and Schünzel throw dice for dancer Berber, who they both desire. Loser Schünzel kills his rival, but the specter of Veidt’s ghostly hand turns into a Beast with Five Fingers and haunts the murderer.

Eerie Tales: The Hand - Schünzel & Berber.

The third episode uses  Poe’s "The Black Cat", having drunken Schünzel kill wife Berber clinging to her cat. Admirer Veidt becomes suspicious and brings the silk hat cops. The dastard’s crime is revealed by the mewing of the animal he had walled up with the body (which we don’t see) in his cellar - very “Tell Tale Heart.” The shot of Berber, carried head downwards with her hair streaming, strikingly anticipates many monster movie compositions to come. 

Next, adapting Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Suicide Club” has detective Schünzel penetrate a secret society who execute losers in their card game, the ones who draw the Pique As/Ace of Spades. Again we don’t see the playing cards though the dominating wall clock catches attention. Oswald himself is credited with the last story “The Spectre”, played in powdered wigs, where chatelaine Veidt allows his wife Berber to dally with braggart nobleman Schünzel, after he is found injured in the grounds (which we also never see). The intruder is psyched out by the fittings moving without explanation. 

r

Eerie Tales: Berben, Schünzel & Bernhard Goetzke

 

In the book shop, the three apparitions have studied these stories with derision and, at daybreak, they retreat back into their frames only to terrify the bookseller when he finds his paintings have come to life.

For 1919, this is accomplished, with the leads giving animated and carefully differentiated performances and got up in distinctive costumes. Oswald, who also has bit parts, does get traction of out of close-ups where we see passions blaze in a young but assured Veidt’s eyes. The infamous Berber does one of her Dances of Vice (fully clothed but managing the splits) and is not outclassed, though her bad teeth are a distraction. 

The copy doesn’t do their work justice (on YouTube one with English captions is best) but we can see that cameraman Karl Hoffmann and forgotten designer Julius Hahlo are already on top of their game. Oswald and Schünzel both would go on to direct indifferent musicals and emigrate to Hollywood.

Veidt - in The Last Performance.

 

 

 

 For Oswald, his 1932 second go round at Unheimliche Geschichten starred Paul Wegener, a genuine founder figure of the Horror Cinema, clocking up one student of Prague, three Golems, Rex Ingram's The Magician and this one. Released as The Living Dead, it may well be Oswald's best movie, though his loss of status as a leading film maker was accelerated by his unsteady control of  sound technique. Here journalist hero Harald Paulsen (also in Alrune with Paul Wegner and again together in Der fall Molander) is implausibly unconcerned by the devilment around him in some shots and he's able to hear a distant scream from his car off on the road. There's a disturbingly obvious jump in the music and the hissing track fades with the picture. The studio built exteriors are notably small scale. 

As in the 1919 film,  this one cobbles together “The Black Cat” and “The Suicide Club”, here made one continuous narrative. At night, reporter Paulsen is driving his actress lady friend Mary Parker (what happens to her?) to her performance when his radiator boils. The isolated house where he goes for water belongs to Mörder / Paul Wegener whose home is filled with his morbid inventions. He’s working on a miniature electric chair. 

Having heard a woman's scream,  Paulsen summons  Police Inspector Gerhard Bienert (in Lang's M) and his officers to the scene. They are re-assured by Wegener, until they hear the yowl of her cat, which he unknowingly walled up with the body of wife Roma Bahn.

Wegener escapes into John (Noseratu) Gottowt’s next-door Mechanical Museum of Horrors, where the attractions include (clumsy) animatronic displays of the Executions of Emperor Maximilian and Marie Antoinette - along with The Captain from Köpenick (!) which Oswald would film twice. Paulsen gets into a fight with Wegener who brings down an exhibit’s guillotine, slashing the journalist’s arm.

Paulsen goes into Paul (Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse) Henckels' adjacent Unfallstation (spooky neighborhood this) for treatment, not aware when sheet covered Wegener is wheeled past him on a gurney, sent on his way to the Irrenanstalt where they are practicing The System of Dr. Tarr & Prof. Fether. 

Wegener in flight.

There, head doctor Eugen Klöpfer (Grune's Die Straße) assures Paulsen that Gretel Berndt, the blonde girl singing “The Last Rose of Summer” at the key board, is not an inmate but his niece. They pass the cells where the prisoners claim to be the staff - scarey. He invites Paulsen to diner, where suspicions are raised when the diners crowd round and Berndt starts doing her number over again at table, while Klöpfer waves a knife and offers to shave our hero. Flat Cap Porter Carl Heinz Charrell has been making random calls from the switchboard and the bobbies burst in to save Paulsen.

Wegener has escaped again and Paulsen starts investigating an institution at 13 Old James St. which seems to have no entrance. Climbing the fence he finds himself in Wegener’s Suicide Club, where the members are reacting variously to the practice of  sorting through a deck of cards till a member draws the Ace of Spades, calling for his execution. One jokes about having participated for five months, while young Viktor de Kowa (Kaütner's Des Teufels General) is falling apart with the stress.

“Das speil begin” with the diner suited members nervously picking cards from Wegener’s deck to be torn up when they prove not to be the fatal choice. Sure enough Paulsen gets Piq-As and is trapped in his chair by encircling metal bands, which prevent him operating the panel of controls out of reach in the table in front of him. Wegener watches from safety as the giant pendulum clock (Poe mixed with his hobby gadgets) counts down till the room fills with poison gas.

Paulsen makes an unexplained escape and imprisons Wegener in the chair and the cops break in again, with club members and staff being assured that they need not fear the outside world.

Paulsen in pursuit.

Despite its crude technique and illogicalities, this may be Oswald’s best film. In this nocturnal environment, Wegener’s shadow precedes him, studio moonlight throws the outline of the paling fence on the wall and sequences offer replicas of the giant dial of Metropolis, the asylum of Caligari and the tableaux of Waxworks. While the technicians are second rank, it is clear to see the tradition to which they belong.

Extraordinarily atmospheric still today, The Living Dead gives off the sense of “evil” which the cycle will inject into the films noirs to come. We are long on violence to women again. These films have in extreme the feeling of menace that characterises the "Expressionist" cinema, the thing which Theodore Roszak's novel "Flicker" attributes to a Catholic conspiracy. It survives into Edgar Ulmer's work and it's what I found disturbing about Metropolis when I saw it at the age of thirteen. This is something which makes this body of work memorable whatever other qualities it may lack.

 
Oh - and Sheldon Lewis was a D.W. Griffith actor who notched up the villain parts in Pearl White serials, like The Clutching Hand, and a couple of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hydes.

 Barrie Pattison 2023

The Mating Game - Avati.

The Italian Cinema that we know begins post WW2, when a few Americans like Arthur Knight started reporting back from the scene, and it breaks up into overlapping periods - the realist movies, the Festival hits (think Fellini and Antonioni), Hercules/ Django/ the Mafia, Italian comedy, joined in the seventies by Gianni Amelio, Giuseppe Tornatorre, Etore Scola, Daniele Lucchetti and Pupi Avati. These are not mutually exclusive. Marcello Mastroianni plugs in pretty well anywhere on the spectrum. There is however no room for the pop musicals. Tough luck Adriano Celantano.

I was thinking about this because Palace has started a series of one-offs at Norton Street and they aired Avati’s 2011 Il cuore grande delle ragazze / The Big Heart of Girls. Watching this again reminded me how much I’ve enjoyed his work and how hard it is to come by it in sub-titled copies - and of course it’s a strain to keep focussed when you have to dust off the notes after four year gaps.

The Big Heart of Girls (a bit more effort on an English title there fellers) is pretty much unclassifyable. Titles play over the shot of the horse cart with the bride’s white veil trailing on the road behind it - nice image. It’s a nostalgia piece based on Avati’s grandmother and set in the thirties. The land is worked by share croppers under a proprietor. The film seems to have no beef with Mussolini, whose cousin visits local beauty Isabelle Adriani and whose Blackshirts figure inconclusively from time to time.

However, the contented rural setting is already accommodating bellows camera photography and early motor cars. Narrator Alexander Haber's character is seen, as a schoolboy played by Patrizio Pelizzi, teaching his older brother to read. The brother is musician Cesare Cremonini, his brief acting career peaking. We see a photo where Cremonini is surrounded by the local women he made out with. They have difficulty fitting them all in the frame.

The film’s keynote is the forgiving attitude it takes to Cremonini’s womanising. However it looks like this is going to be enough of a good thing and land owner Gianni Cavina has a proposition. He offers “The Gargoyles,” his two plain daughters living at home and derided as unshiftable now that they’ve passed thirty. He wants Cremoni to marry one. The incentive is that the groom’s family will get the security of their tied cottage for another ten years. Cremoni also has his price, a brand new Guzzi. With an eye on the clock for the one hour mandated wooing sessions, he keeps on asking “When do I get the motorcycle.”  Just as it looks settled, Cavina’s “semi virgin” second wife’s daughter (got that?) Micaela Ramazzotti comes back from the convent. Her golden curls stand out in the sea of dark hair and black shawls. Creepy middle-aged men keep on asking her if she has a fiancé. Cremoni is immediately hooked.

The sisters, rather endearingly, take it well and, after some raised voices, it’s a done deal. There are problems however. Michaela’s sex education comes from the nuns and her trousseau dressmaker, none of whom have any practical experience. Cremoni is stressed about keeping it in his pants and his family has to sell everything in sight to raise the cost of the big church wedding. Nevertheless Cavina’s Bridal motorcade sets off with him firing his rifle when passing the landmarks custom designates (front gate, highway, entrance). Unfortunately when they get to the church they booked, it’s closed with the priest in hospital with tonsilitis. This is your classic Avati scene with Cremoni chomping at the bit and half the feast his family has impoverished themselves to provide uneaten - while the blind musicians (very Shimazu) are fed in the loo where they can’t see their surroundings and they won’t put off the guests.

Avati

However there is a last act to come, with the Duce’s cousin’s squeeze showing up at the so nice honeymoon Hotel Termine, which offers the newlyweds the suite where a famous pederast died and sends Ramazotti fleeing South to her aunt in Bari, where she lays out her (sort of) husband’s name on the beach in sea shells, until an ending which should be gross but is rather winning. We find our perception at odds with Haber’s dismissive recollection. This is Avati's act - turning round our pre-existing attitudes. I don't think it would fly today.

The film’s notion that sex is grotesque can be found in the Italian Comedy entries of Pietro Germi and Lina Wertmuller but Avati’s sympathy with his characters makes his work unique. I’m always amazed that he doesn’t occupy one of the spaces reserved for the Viscontis and Almodovars.

Cremoni gets by but he was smart not to give up his day job. Ramazotti, married to Paolo Virzi, was beginning her career as an object of desire in Italian film, notably in Daniele Luchetti’s 2013 Anni felici. Among the mainly unfamiliar faces, spot former glamor stars Erica Blanc and Sydne Rome. The colour on the copy viewed was a bit dupey but there were good English subtitles.

Barrie Pattison 2023

More French Film Festival 2023

In the tradition of Costa Gavras and L'attentat, Cédric Jimenez' Novembre, an account of the French authorities' response to the Bataclan terrorist massacre, proves to be the most substantial film in the event. We never see the atrocities but focus on the security services.

 Location shooting in Athens shows a failed attempt to arrest their terrorist suspect.  Under a black Balaclava there's Department Head Jean Dujardin and pretty soon we are back in Paris at his headquarters, where calm of the night shift is shattered when the ‘phones go crazy with calls about the Stade de France & Bataclan attacks. Overwhelmed with information, his room full of operatives struggle to organise this into something useful and track down the ISIS agents responsible.

Sandrine Kiberlain is manning the ‘phones but doesn’t have much to do. Anaïs Demoustier gets more attention. When she makes a connection that everyone is too busy to follow up, she goes off on her own talking on her phone as she walks past the suspect home with her dog. The subsequent raid with body armored agents pouring through the smashed in door nets an undercover narc. whose boss is indignant and Dujardin chews her out for not following procedure. 

One of the convincing features of this film is the way that despite the best training and equipment, human errors keep on intruding. A raid has the team moving on the wrong floor of the target block. Dujardin loses it interrogating an arrogant arrested Arab suspect, whose confidence is only destroyed when a search of his wallet reveals a Shiite girlfriend photo which Jean threatens to post on social media destroying the pair’s lives. He flies off to talk to the uncle of one suspect and Belgian cash transfers add more information. 

Sorting through Metro surveillance camera data nets visuals of suspects jumping turnstiles in tell tale orange sneakers which leads the operators to believe young Lyna (The French Dispatch) Khoudri ’s account of having spotted the wanted men associates of her girl cousin Sophie Cattani among the homeless under a motorway. She’s brought in for questioning, starting a process that means the frightened cousin’s death and, despite the undetakings Anaïs has made her, lands Lyna in jail for acting responsibly.

For a big action finale, Dujardin leads the balaclava men attack on the flat where the suspects have been located. The valued element of surprise is lost, after their plastic explosive blast fails.  “The door is intact.” The cousin’s screams can be heard and a detonated blast takes out anyone close. The robot camera they send in to check among the debris reveals the scale of
the destruction.

The pacing and staging are superior, giving the piece both conviction and interest. There is a feeling that it would be more plausible without the recognisable faces but the stars are excellent and there’s the discovery that demonstrating that he can do John Wayne as well as L’artist, validates Dujardin’s star status. The poster is him in a flack jacket and the finale is his grave address to the troops. This one is getting an extended run.

 

Also an attempt to generate a film worthy of a significant event, Notre-Dame brûle / Notre-Dame on Fire comes logically from Jean-Jacques Annaud  (Quest for Fire).

The opening locating material, with historical charts, airials and the personnel going through their daily routine is really more involving than the real Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral tour used to be. The casual depiction of activity is made more plausible as we share it with a new security man being inducted for his first day. Workmen doing restoration, over age personnel struggling up ancient stairs, shonky emergency systems and performing a mass that is a tourist spectacle, all set up what will prove a historic event.

As the seriousness of what is happening filters through to Generals Sam Labarthe and Jean-Paul Bordes at Paris Fire HQ, calls from alarmed witnesses are spaced by ones from an anguished woman whose cat is sliding down the steep roof outside her window.  The speeding fire trucks are obstructed by road work and desperate priests demand the rescue of relics which literally cost a king's ransom. Meanwhile the holder of the only vault key is on a day trip to Versailles and has to dash to the scene via defective coin in the slot push bikes.

Absurdist events alternate with genuinely disturbing material, ratcheting up the tension impressively - the blazing roof crashes into seats in the familiar public space, drops of melting lead puncture fire hoses while out of date stand pipes fail and firemen risking their lives have to be withdrawn to safety. Emanuel Macron makes an appearance and needs attention while the fire crews are flat out. The "forest" roof with its timber supports blazes away and there is a genuine risk that the belfry may crash and bring down the famous facade. Crowds gather on the Seine banks. Some are photographing events with their phones while others are praying. Technicians and engineers mix with clerics. In the middle of blazing destruction, the Pompiers chaplain rescues The Host. Saving the Crown of Thorns (twice) gets to dominate events in an dramatically unsatisfactory way. However the scene of a devoted officer putting forward a possibly suicidal plan, to be joined by unhesitating volunteers, is genuinely irresistible.

Arnaud reproduces this, shooting in other Cathedral locations. He often splits the frame - sometimes between actuality and his own staging, without the difference being visible. He manages some extraordinary images - the gargoyle that seems to be emerging from it's own hellish environment and the virgin with the tear on it's face, which surprisingly makes more impact edited into the trailer.

He succeeds in putting up imposing layers of meaning but I've got to go with the critics who dismiss his last scene with the little girl as anti climactic. The girl firefighter, at the end of of her first day of duty saying her next fire won't be anywhere near as good, is a better last thought. What happened to the cat?

Clovis Cornillac's  Couleurs de l'incendie / The Colors of Fire is a big French period (between world wars) drama which show cases it’s design, camera and performances but doesn’t really deliver as drama, with it’s Count of Monte Christo structure predictable from the moment that heiress Lea  Drucker spurns manager of the family banking empire Benoît Poelvoorde, when he moves on her after her father-founder dies.

There's an impressive opening, where the camera weaves among the crowd in the courtyard of the banker’s manor, around his funeral cortege. It travels without edits up the stairs with masochist tutor Jérémy Lopez to the first floor and into the room where young Octave Bossuet  is hiding under the bed. Events are shaped when the boy high dives out of the window onto the coffin.

We get the conspiracy between Poelvoorde, the tutor and her failed banker-uncle Olivier Gourmet and their undoing at the hands of Drucker in alliance with ex-chaufeur cab driver Cornillac in a Lenin beard and cap (bit obvious) who gives her a talking-to for assuming that, because he is working class, he’s also criminally inclined. Benoît’s scheme of bringing Lea down by giving her reliable information on Rumanian and Iraqui oil shares (compare Les brigades du Tigre with both Cornillac and Gourmet) knowing she will be ruined by her distrust, is an nice piece of fiendish infamy, complete with the ego trip bronze bust he's had sculpted, and he is impressive in departing from type. The comic element of his characters here  is suppressed until the moment he finds himself deafened and wiped out.

The Atliers Aeronautiques background with the development and demonstration of the prototype turbo jet motor is possibly the film’s best and most original feature. On the other hand, the digression of the sub-plot with Fanny Ardent as the opera singer, who the son idolises (bravely first revealed caked with her stage make up) giving a command performance for Hitler is just weird but the the dissolved aging on the boy is a striking piece of effects work. 

With it's ambition and skill, it's a pity this finally isn't a better film.

 

Eric Lavaine's Plancha / Happy 50 is yet another French study of the group. Think Vincent, Paul, François et les Autres,  Les petits mouchoirs or Un éléphant ça trompe énormément. When their flight to sunny Greek weather in Paros to celebrate Guillaume de Tonquédec’s fiftieth birthday is cancelled (the travel agent will give back their deposit one forlornly observes) the couples, who holiday together, shift to his ancestral home in Brittany to be greeted by rain. The only wasp in Brittany stings Lambert Wilson’s testicle and and foot in mouth complications are mainly engineered by him while Frank Dubosc is strung out waiting to see if the reorganisation of his work place means that he’s been fired. A blissful Jérôme Commandeur back from business success in Spain with a winning wife & child only aggravates tensions. Wilson running a secret DNA test through an ancestry service creates serious problems. The host staring at a wheelbarrow is the film's best gag - you'll see.

Wilson is top billed with Dubosc (Tout le monde debout / Rolling to You). the pair are on top of their game and surrounded by appealing women and OK second bananas to go with the scenic detail. We even run to an open air dance in local costume.

Umani is the second Gerard Depardieu film in the event. In this one master chef Gerard (first seen in the steam room starkers - note a by-pass scar) has not found happiness despite his up-market M. Quelqu’un chateau restaurant getting three crystal stars. Second wife, a suitably harried Sandrine Bonnaire, is doing the food critic on whom Gerard’s reputation depends and his two sons are not meeting his standards. Sky diving doesn’t fill the void in his life. He’s still haunted by the fact that during his ascent to fame, his demo meal was beaten out by a Japanese competitor’s umami - which introduced him to a fifth taste. Meanwhile old friend fisherman hypnotherapist Pierre Richard has found his first ever pearl in the oysters he’s been harvesting since the Japanese fishermen saved his business by providing a new strain of the shell fish.

Umami - Depardieu & Richard

What does Gerard do, with the assessment by key Internet influencer elegant Assa Sylla looming, but fly off to Japan to seek out the chef who mastered him. Cue cultural dissonance like automatic taxi doors, sleeper lockers, sled dogs, kimona, three wheel bikes and shared volcanic pool baths.

Gerard’s old opponent Kyôzô Nagatsuka has problems of his own and is not interested. He now proves to be reduced to a hole in the wall noodle bar and has a pill popping daughter crushed by her old flame’s revenge porn. However the nips finally prove winningly prepared to open out the secrets of their cuisine to the frog visitors, including playing violin to the pork meat animals. 

 Director-producer-writer-editor-designer and drone pilot Slony Sow also comes on as a thoracic surgeon. His thing is making multiple stories run simultaneously. It’s not as difficult to follow as it might be but, after a while, we realise we are not all that interested in any of them.

The contrasted settings are convincing enough but the character conflicts and resolution are too sketchy and attention wanders. Cast are good and Depardieu is on top of his game once more - watch the unfamiliar flavor experiences reflect on his features in close shot. We are not going to have him all that much longer. French film should come up with vehicles closer to his over sized talent.

Dany Boon is everywhere at the moment - repeating his inspector character in another Adam Sandler - Jen Annison Murder Mystery feature, producing The Black Pharaoh and doing an uncharacteristically serious turn in Christian Carion's La belle course / Driving Madeleine.

He’s a taxi driver who is having trouble meeting the bills. His radio operator calls him out for a job on the far side of Paris, over his objections. This turns out to be ninety two year old Line Renaud whose career goes back to Erich Von Stroheim and La foire aux chimères. She's taking a last look at her house before she’s shuffled off to the old folks' home. Line cajoles Dany into driving her to the places that were important to her. Vincennes has changed beyond recognition prompting flashbacks where her character young is played by Alice Isaac (also in Colors of Fire) - her romance with a WW2 GI, alone raising their child who is all she has to remember the Yankee Soldier, until her new welder boy friend roughs up the kid and she goes all Lorena Bobbitt. Her facing le Palais du Justice becomes subject of very Twenty First Century protests.

As the leads bond, Line manages to save Dany’s license and he takes her to diner as a sentimental gesture. Roll on a suitable tear jerker finale. The film is a pleasant enough showcase for a couple of nice performances, which give the stars a chance to depart from type.

Some French film makers seem to have only one exceptional film in them. Vera Belmont and Rouge Baisir, Yves Boisset’s L’Attentat (though I will admit with some guilt to enjoying Le Taxi mauve) and Cristian Carion’s later work can’t shade his powerful Joyeuse Nöel.

Docteur / The Good Doctor is four years old and gives the impression of having been shoved into the event to make weight. Now-veteran Michel Blanc manages to merge his former knock about comic and commanding character actor personae into one here. He’s a failing doctor, the only one left on call over Xmas and his plea to dispatcher Chantal Lauby for a replacement is treated dismissively. With his back going out, Blanc finds Uber Eats delivery guy Hakim Jemili arriving simultaneously at one of his appointments, with the door code that Blanc has forgotten 

Stretching the imagination, we find one time trainee medic Jemili recruited into doing Blanc's rounds, getting instructions over the 'phone ear piece. Wearing Michel's leather jacket and smart shoes is enough to bluff one of his pizza customers on a return visit.  The duo even acquire unwelcome celebrity status when they avert a mass carbon monoxide poisoning but their limits are tested when Jemeli has to piggy back the good doctor in to perform an unscheduled birth delivery.

The sodium lamp lit streets at Xmas are a plausible setting and the agreeable leads are on top of their game but I can't help feeling that French studios must have rolled out something more impressive during four years.

 

... and far from least we get animator Michel Ocelot's new Le pharaon, le sauvage et la princesse / The Black Pharaoh.

At first, with the instructor voiced by  Aïssa Maïga (in films by Michael Haneke and Michel Gondry) telling her stories to her silhouette class ( a familiar Michel Ocelot device) and then going to the no perspective, subdued colour Egyptian material, this one looked like it would be a cut price effort.

Black Pharoah - Ep. 3

Big mistake! Ocelot’s reproduction of hieroglyphic wall painting is setting us up for spectacular moments like our first view of the galley with its banks of rowers or his traveling sideways through the ranks of the massed army.

Egypt is ruled by a queen mother regent whose strategy to retain power is to insist that only a Pharaoh will be good enough for her Princess daughter. Young Sudanese suitor Tanwekamani is rejected out of hand, so he sets out with his followers, beseeching the giant animal heqded regional Gods of the country to grant him victory. Scarlet Osiris is particularly imposing. Tanwekamani unites the country bloodlessly, when the old rulers flee at his approach. There’s no question but that he’s the match for the princess and he promises his new mother in law a suitable retirement.

The second part of the familiar Ocelot episode format is set in medieval France and makes use of his Lotte Reinger like silhouettes, here adding shadowy facial detail. In his father's castle, the lonely boy makes contact with a captive in the dungeon and hears about the daughter the prisoner misses so much. Guilty of aiding his break out, the boy is condemned to death by his own father but, with the aid of associates, grows to be the Robin Hood like "Wild Beau”, going about dressed in folliage and giving to the poor. The once prisoner returns at the head of his own force and all ends happily.

The three-parter winds up in eighteenth Century Turkey, where a young prince forced to live as a pastry cook, makes a rendez-vous in the abandoned palace catacombs with the sultan's daughter. Forget Snow White or Kristin Bell's Anna in Frozen. This one with her independence and flowing scarlet hair breaking loose, instantly becomes our favorite toon princess. 

Ocelot has the skill of the best children's film makers in reviving the fairy tale world which we have forgotten as adults but still has the power to captivate. Each new film puts up another exquisitely realised ambiance - or as here, three. It's disturbing that he has not reached the public that prizes Disney or Miyazaki. It was these French Film Festivals that revealed him to me and I shall always be grateful.

Barrie Pattison 2023


.

 

Shadows of Chinatown

Time was that you could see half a dozen new Chinese films running each week in Sydney (and Melbourne). Some weeks I did and quite a few of them hit my year's best lists. Well,   that was them and this is now. A trickle of mainland product does still make its way into Event George Street. 

Sometimes I nerve myself up for a taste in the hope they'll deliver another Wolf Warrior - no such luck lately.

Since the eclipse of  Feng Xiaogang, Zhang Yimou has asserted himself as the major figure of Chinese cinema. He’s added Olympic spectaculars to his status as fifth generation survivor and he is the country’s one director whose work is likely to hit our cinemas. After the agreeable Yi miao zhong / One Second, yet another hymn to the past of cinema,  hopes rose with the appearance of his new Manjianghong / Full River Red, the current Chinese New Year box office champion, though we hear disquiet about the way it was given IMAX outlet monopoly distribution.

  Zhang Yimou

There’s no doubt about authorship. It has the near monochrome colour scheme of  Zhang Yimou’s Ying / Shadow. The bright red of the cherry they offer close-ups is arresting in this setting and the arrival of dawn after two hours of gloom is sufficiently striking to have been given more significance. There’s court intrigue in the manner of his Man cheng jin dai huang jin jia / Curse of the Golden Flower and it’s as morbid as his Da hong denglong gaogao gua / Raise the Red Lantern.

The opening grabs attention, with the downward drone shot racing with the squad of soldiers seen running through the alleyways between the tiled roofs of the Chancellor's residence. This one is another leather armor piece, military costume given special significance. It’s Song Dynasty (circa 1146 AD) China, and the Chancellor has set up a negotiation with the opponent Jin Kingdom, only for their ambassador to be murdered and the secret document, in the leather purse equivalent of a Diplomatic bag, to go missing.

 Manjianghong / Full River Red -  Jackson Yee, Shen Teng.

The order has gone out from prime minister Jiayin Lei for an immediate investigation supervised by deputy, misleadingly rotund-comic Yunpeng Yue. The scene with TV personality Shen Teng as the corporal, cheating execution by the drawing of straws, suggests we are in for a conman comedy. Turns out the murderous commander is his uncle Jackson Yee (the Lake Changjing films).

After some fast talking by Shen Teng, the pair are allocated two hours to unravel the mystery on pain of death, with them rapidly figuring that they will also be executed for knowing the state secrets involved.

Things then get to be increasingly complicated. The camera speeds through the lane ways backed by striking bursts of Chinese Yu Opera. The caged raven becomes significant and edged weapons are held to throats. No one is what they seem and there’s an accumulation of bodies. Any character shown sympathy is doomed. The film is big on violence to women.

Some of it is quite ingenious, like a “Purloined Letter” scene where the missing document is sitting on the table in full view as the characters mill about, though only one of them recognises it. 

What starts as a comedy becomes a detective story and ends with a patriotic oration about recovering lost territory (hint, hint) as the massed troops shout the now classic poem by the late General Yue Fei. Despite the considerable film making skill and big budget on display, two and a half hours of all this murder, plotting and betrayal is unpleasant viewing.

It doesn’t leave you curious about those hundreds of Chinese movies we are not getting to see.
 

Of course S.B.S. is another source and they are currently recycling director Shunji Iwai's 2018 Ni hao, Zhihua / Last Letter. Finding a Japanese director at work on a mainland production already seems a novelty but what would I know. I see maybe a dozen of their six hundred title annual output and it turns out Iwai was actually raised in China. 

 He's someone who occasionally figures on the fringe of our awareness. His 1996 Swallowtail Butterfly and 2001 All about Lily Chou-Chou got a few runs and The Last Letter recalls elements of his first movie the 1995 Love Letters, though the place of letter writing in our lives has shifted to the point where they have to have a motivating scene with star Zhou Xun (this film's producer Peter Chan's 2005 Perhaps Love), where her husband destroys her cell phone and they do cutesy communication on Apple symbol cups linked by string.

The plot is complicated to the point of confusion.  Even Hao Quin, the on screen writer, is thrown when he finds the schoolgirl sisters he knew as a child wandering round the building with their large white dog. Turns out that Zou Xun had gone to the thirty year class reunion intending to announce that her sister Zifeng Zang (Aftershock) had died but Xun was immediately mistaken for her by everyone, including Hao Quin, who had a crush on the deceased, then upsetting her sibling survivor, who had fancied him. 

Last Letter - Zhuo Tan, Ge He.

After the funeral the children had re-distributed themselves among their relatives and we get their activities, cross cut with scenes twenty years previous. They find letters to which they fake replies. Hao Quin's obsession with the Zifeng Zang character, who had become the subject of his one autobiographical novel, gets to dominate this welter of sub plots and the film's most effective scene and possibly-unintended focal point is his meeting with Shanghai singer Hu Ge playing Quin's one time object of desire's worker husband who had courted her while working at her University kitchen ("While you were listening to lectures, I was cutting vegetables"). Ge's failed attempt at upward social mobility had left him a violent alcoholic. The dialogue between two men, who had fixated the same woman, is the most compelling element of the film and brings some clarity to what we are seeing.  

Most interesting is the setting in Dalian town in Northeast Chian Liaoning province, once part of Manchuria, with which the director has a family connection. The letters, a pivot of the plot, are written in calligraphy across the page, old people have a dance class in the park, the homes and businesses could be in a modern American or Australian town and the largely available-light winter photography by Japanese cameraman Kanbe Chiqui gives the piece a look different to the other Chinese films we see.

Last Letter, itself largely a remake of director Iwai's earlier work, which was in turn distantly derived from a Murakami Haruki novel, is now scheduled for another filming. It's one for the curious.

Barrie Pattison 2023