LFF: A Conversation on "Antiviral" and Cronenberg Jr.

Craig here with another LFF report. David & I have a chat about Brandon Cronenberg's striking debut feature Antiviral, showing today at the festival.

Craig: It’s all about celebrity skin in Antiviral as characters indulge in, ahem, the pleasures of the flesh in one form or another. This being the first feature from David Cronenberg’s son Brandon, I perhaps expected a plentiful supply of gratuitous bodily harm. Having no idea prior to seeing the film just what it was about –  all I knew was that it was partially set in a mysterious clinic for the stars – the film came as a minor revelation: not only because, for a debut feature, the filmmaking was of an uncommonly high calibre, but also because the most interesting Cronenberg film this year wasn’t brought to us by the oldest member of the Cronenberg clan. 

David: I always seem to begin these conversations with a caveat: this time, it's that I missed Cosmopolis, though the wild variety of reactions has me eager to get my teeth into it. But in a general sense, I agree on your point: Antiviral certainly has echoes of the David Cronenberg of the 1980s, mixing an obsession with the body and its orifices – even if many of these are false ones created with a needle – with a cool depiction of technology's terrifying possibilities.

Craig: Yes, even if he doesn’t entirely map out his own territory, Cronenberg Jr asserts himself as a director of impeccable style. On the one hand, David’s influence is certainly pronounced, as well it might be, but on the other hand, dare I say it (and I hate to say it), Brandon has made the kind of film I was hoping for from Cronenberg Sr. senior this year.

David: This might just be me and my limited experience of Cronenberg Sr., but Antiviral seems quite crisp and clinical where I recall his father's films as visually darker and emotionally grubbier. Brandon's use of space, particularly, reminded me less of his father's filmography and more of Julia Leigh's Sleeping Beauty and Todd Haynes' Safe [continue...]

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NYFF: "Amour" & "No" Are Worthy Oscar Contenders

The Oscar race for Best Foreign Language Film is particularly exciting this year. We have more contenders than ever (71!) and so many strong films that the Academy's always controversial foreign language branch will undoubtedly piss various contingencies off when they announce the finalist list and then the nominees. They could lessen the size of the outcry each year if only their finalist list were 12 films long. It's so strange that they make it small enough (9 films) that those films which miss the nomination are in the minority and, thus, look particularly snubbed... numerically speaking. I've already raved about the Pinoy movie "Bwakaw", and here are two other worthy candidates for this annual honor. Don't miss them if you get a chance to see them

AMOUR (Austria)
“Ladies and Gentlemen, people die. That’s all you need to know.” This line, a recurring catchphrase from aging chanteuse Kiki (Justin Bond) in the now departed Kiki & Herb act, used to make me howl with laughter. It was a perfect punchline, soaked as it was in booze and tragicomic matter-of-factness. People do die. Death is a fact of life but we spend so much time denying it that it often feels completely abstract, an imagined fate rather than an eventual one. But as Anne (Emmanuelle Riva), the elderly woman at the heart of Michael Haneke’s new film reminds us:

Imagination and reality have little in common.”

At first Haneke keeps his customary distance. Were it not for early publicity or the disturbing pre-title sequence that shows us a woman's decomposing body surrounded by flowers, we wouldn't even know who the principle characters were during the post-title opening shot, a crowd watching a piano recital. As in the finale of Haneke's best film (Caché) the director doesn't help you decide where to look; it's your job to find the narrative. But one of the strongest directorial impulses in Amour is Haneke's barely perceptible but undeniably tightening focus on the couple. Each scene seems to bring us closer to Anne and Georges (Jean-Louis Trigninant), a happy well-off couple in their eighties who enjoy literature, cultural events, and visits from their daughter (Isabelle Huppert) and Anne's former student (the pianist Alexandre Tharaud who appears to be playing himself). The first close-ups of note, an utterly captivating shot/reverse shot of the couple as Anne all but vanishes from a conversation in progress, is the bomb dropping...

Michael Haneke with his actors on the set of "Amour"

I don’t want to go on”

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LFF: Black Rock

Craig here with a look at another film showing at the London Film Festival: Kate Aselton's survival thriller Black Rock.

It’s certainly a bad day at Black Rock for Kate Bosworth and her two BFFs. Director/co-star Kate Aselton and Lake Bell both cherish Bosworth’s friendship  but they have their own shaky history festering between them like an open sore. The three women go for a ‘last hurrah’ camping trip to the titular retreat with treasure hunts and restorative bonding in mind. That’s until they chance upon a trio of ex-soldiers, not long back from Helmand Province, on a suspicious shooting trip.

More often than not island settings immediately instil narrative suspense. Indeed, once the women shore up on a deserted beach the potential for drama reveals itself in fraught chatter and mention of either lack of provisions, isolating distance from observable humanity (in the form of, uh-oh, NO MOBILE PHONE RECEPTION), or, as here, all of the above.

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LFF: Blood

Craig here with a report on a new British film showing at the 56th BFI London Film Festival.

Paul Bettany in "Blood"

Nick Murphy’s Blood (showing in the festival’s "Thrill" strand) explores the secret cost of human damage on a small group of people in a north of England town. Bodies are invaded and battered; the red stuff is in plentiful supply. Cops, criminals and their families all reach the end of the tethers in this stern, cold police drama about the murder of a teenage girl and its aftermath. Police detective brothers played by Paul Bettany and Stephen Graham investigate the crime. When they begin to question a local man with a shady past things turn grim and complicated. Blood follows Murphy’s previous film The Awakening (which David and I discussed here) as a LFF selection and, as in that spooky throwback, there are ghostly appearances albeit in more subtle ways. Murphy’s direction is as suitably restrained as before, but he adds a touch more immediacy and grit to this contemporary story. The precise, stripped back tone matches the heavy severity of the material, making the most of the script’s gloomy turns. Tough, thankless work is carried out in chilly conditions (both literally and emotionally) by Bettany and team. Every character appears to be on tenterhooks twenty-four-seven, either harbouring grim secrets or desperately striving for unsavoury answers.

However, the ominous intriguing central mystery eventually gives way to some rather wearing British drama clichés. Rote police dialogue – all hard words spouted with brash perplexity – dominates the script and too-familiar character types come and go as the plot plods to its final stretch. Bettany gives an intermittently sly lead performance and a fraught late encounter with Brian Cox as his dementia-ridden dad is moving. But Blood lacks the kind of searing character interaction and enduring mystery that these kinds of gritty dramas thrive on. Perhaps if I hadn’t recently seen Charlie Brooker’s very funny and spot-on police-drama parody A Touch of Cloth (think Inspector Morse meets Frank Drebin) I might have felt more of a connection. (Coincidentally, Cox appears in both Blood and Cloth and plays strangely similar roles) Even just a dash of levity here and there might have made Blood a more invigorating and less brusquely dour experience. C-

LFF: The French are coming!

David here, heralding the return of the BFI London Film Festival – Craig and I are back again, and we’ll be bringing you various updates across the next two weeks. The 56th festival kicked off last night with the European premiere of Frankenweenie, but my first round-up post has more of a Francophile feel to it…

Matthias Schoenaerts and Marion Cotillard in 'Rust & Bone'

With Rust & Bone, director Jacques Audiard is still in the business of tempering abrasive, down-on-their-luck characters in the French banlieues with a style that smears the poetic and the aggressive into one confrontational melting pot. It seems to be part of Audiard’s intention to throw severe miserablism at his audience just to see if they can survive. Still, such a vibrantly aggressive film with a charged sense of the physical is a rare thing, and Audiard works to balance the lead performances by Marion Cotillard (whom Jose was just raving about) and Matthias Schoenaerts between a dark emotional percolation and a keen awareness of their physicality and the relationship of their bodies. Cotillard is expert at scorching her character Stephanie’s lust and enhanced sense of her own body onto the screen, and the building frisson between Stephanie and Schoenaerts’ Ali happens less through dialogue (the brisk, careless attitude of Ali puts paid to that) and more through the relation of their bodies and faces. The film may tilt wildly into grandiose dramatics or voracious sentimentality and some notes may strike an off chord, but they are all part of Audiard’s passionate approach; they reflect the beautiful, distorted, uncomfortable mess of a world that these two people inhabit. The rust rubs up against the bone and they spark, hurting but creating fire and feeling. (B+) (full review)

Wild in a different way is the narrative conceit of François Ozon’s In the House, confident again after the successful pastiche. French literature teacher Germain (Fabrice Luchini), despairing of his students’ lack of talent and effort, is intrigued by Claude’s (Ernst Umhauer) piece on the homelife of his best friend Rapha (Bastien Ughetto). Pushing his new protégé to enliven his continuing stories, the lines between fiction and reality blur as Claude, Germain and Germain’s wife Jeanne (Kristin Scott Thomas) become more invested and obsessed with the lives of Rapha’s family. There are echoes of younger Ozon in the cautious dissection of a middle-class family home by an Umhauer’s enigmatic potboiler, but the director sticks less rigidly to the theatrical setting of Water Drops on Burning Rocks and 8 Women and delineates various domestic and public spaces with distinctive mise-en-scene. With this consistent shift in setting come the frivolous shifts in tone – Claude’s interpretation of Germain’s literary suggestions remain unpredictable to all but him, and so the audience is thrown between caustic parody, sensual romance, ghostly thriller, and myriads of diverse moods with gleeful abandon. Ultimately, Ozon makes little of what amounts to a toe-dip in social politics, but it skips along at a brisk pace and Umhauer’s pleasingly chilled performance is matched by Emmanuelle Seignier’s melancholy, spaced ennui as Rapha’s mother. In the House is a unique prospect and even if could’ve been so much greater, it’s a pleasant way to pass a couple of hours. (B-)

Jean-Louis Trintignent holds Emmanuelle Riva in 'Amour'

As you might expect, Michael Haneke’s Amour is pretty much the opposite proposition. Haneke presents the story’s end before his title card prompting a rewind to the beginning. The udience knows they’re in for a wearing, emotional experience to reach the beatific sight of a decomposing body surrounded lovingly by petals. We’re in familiarly confrontational territory with Haneke here, but the title suggests the tender centre of this enterprise, inhabited by breathtaking work from Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva. They play a wealthy, elderly French couple whose life becomes confined to their apartment after Anne (Riva) suffers a stroke. Haneke’s camerawork is predominantly his usual tableau-style observation, but increasingly, as Anne worsens, the close-ups proliferate. The actors and the camera draw us deeper into the nauseatingly devastating slide towards death. Such is the power of Anne’s irascible pride that Haneke feels intrusively cruel when he won’t let her escape his camera, cutting across the apartment to catch her wheelchair zooming away from her husband. Questions niggle about why Haneke felt the need to film such a painful story, but it gains infinite legitimacy and value from the presence of Trintignant and Riva, who uncover every emotional nook and cranny of the wounded dignity and painful decisions involved in such a lengthy and dedicated love. (B+)

Follow David on Twitter @randomfurlong for instant, 140-character screening reactions.