Cannes 2009

[Sonic Youth]

Three reviews of "Fish Tank" from the trades.

Fish Tank
14 May, 2009 | By Allan Hunter
Screendaily

Dir. Andrea Arnold. UK. 2009. 124 mins.


Andrea Arnold confidently navigates the pitfalls of the ‘difficult’ second feature with Fish Tank, which confirms her status as a torchbearer for the social realist traditions of Ken Loach and the Dardenne brothers. The heartbreaking tale of a teenage misfit has a grim inevitability to the plotting which is offset by Arnold’s talent for multi-layered characters and naturalistic dialogue and her eye for finding the poetic moments in even the bleakest of lives. Critical support should be strong for Fish Tank although positive reviews and festival prizes could not generate a significant commercial life for Arnold’s debut Red Road. Her second slice-of-realism could prove a hard sell to global audiences.

The opening sequences of Fish Tank will appear so familiar to viewers of British social realist drama that they risk feeling calculated and patronising. Life on a housing estate is a litany of foul-mouthed outbursts and stroppy encounters where every conversation is a confrontation. Mia (Katie Jarvis) is 15 going on 35. The eldest daughter of a single mother, she appears to be at war with the world, lashing out at all comers with verbal and physical abuse. She seems to come from a long line of feisty rebels that stretches from Carol White in Ken Loach’s Cathy Come Home (1966) to Emily Lloyd in Wish You Were Here (1987). She is a difficult youngster to like but the success of Fish Tank lies in Arnold’s ability to make us sympathise with a character that we initially resist.

We are allowed glimpses of a different Mia in her aspirations to become a dancer as she practises her moves in a deserted flat and dares to enter an audition tape for a local talent search. The fact that she yearns for something more than her current circumstances is the start of viewing her as human. We see a very different Mia when she meets her mother’s new boyfriend. Security guard Connor (Michael Fassbender) is sexy and soft-hearted. He takes an interest in Mia and her little sister Tyler. He is funny and flirtatious, generous with his money and his time. A wary Mia can’t help but blossom under his gaze. It is only a matter of time before Connor and Mia act on the gleam that sparkles invitingly in their eyes.

Fish Tank may seem to tell an age-old tale of fatal attraction and blighted lives but Arnold still manages to wrong foot the viewer as events assume the air of Greek tragedy before stepping back from the brink of true disaster. The film is certainly over long but compensations come in the ways that characters are allowed to reveal the virtues and flaws that make for fully-rounded individuals who draw us in to their plight.

Maintaining a style established with Red Road, Arnold favours handheld camerawork that stresses the cramped spaces of Mia’s daily life and the way in which she is trapped. It is entirely significant that she makes strenuous efforts to liberate a sickly horse that is kept chained and padlocked by local travellers.

A running time in excess of two hours also means that Arnold has room to breathe and find the visual touches and quirky observations that lend a more soulful air to an initially abrasive story. The quiet tinkle of a seashell wind chime, a flock of birds taking sudden flight or the day trip in which Connor offers a piggy-back to an injured Mia all contribute a more plaintive air to the texture of the film.

Fish Tank also underlines Arnold’s ability to secure the best from her actors. After last year’s Cannes triumph of Hunger, Michael Fassbender has become a prolific and versatile presence in British film and television (Eden Lake, The Devil’s Whore etc). His charisma is essential to the appeal of Connor and makes him an imminently likeable and plausible figure even as his actions should attract our censure. Following in the wake of Kate Dickie’s extraordinary performance in Red Road, newcomer Katie Jarvis is every bit as impressive as Mia, finding the vulnerability of the teenager without recourse to sentimentality or surrendering any of her anger or sarcasm. It is a performance that should win her a lot of attention and add profile to a film that will have to fight for its audience.

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Fish Tank
By LESLIE FELPERIN
Variety

Brit helmer Andrea Arnold's sophomore feature, "Fish Tank," offers such an entirely credible and -- there's no way around it -- grim portrait of a sullen teenage girl living in a rough housing project in England's Essex that it almost seems banal. However, what makes pic feel special is its unflinching honesty and lack of sentimentality or moralizing, along with assured direction and excellent perfs. Paradoxically, though immediately accessible to auds from the background depicted, "Fish Tank" is destined to swim only in arthouse aquariums, while likely adult-only ratings will keep teens -- who really should see this -- from getting in the door legally.

Wiry 15-year-old Mia Williams (non-pro thesp Katie Jarvis, mesmerizing) has been kicked out of school for unexplained reasons. She now spends her days drinking when she can get her hands on booze and dancing to hip-hop tunes in an abandoned apartment -- just upstairs from the digs she shares with her young mother Joanne (Kierston Wareing, from Ken Loach's "It's a Free World") and little sister Tyler (Rebecca Griffiths, also non-pro) both of whom Mia bickers with constantly.

When Joanne brings home her new b.f., hunky security guard Connor (the suddenly ubiquitous Michael Fassbender, "Hunger"), the attraction between him and Mia is immediately palpable, despite Mia's initially hostile attitude. Although an uncharacteristically good-tempered outing to the countryside vaguely promises that a happy family could be forming, Connor's manifest "grooming" of Mia is textbook pedophile behavior, even if Mia is just a year shy of the age of consent in Blighty.

There are no surprises about where this is heading at the pic's midpoint. Still, the last act throws in a few interesting curveballs -- including a revenge plotline incorporating an unusually believable portrait of how women try to get even -- that makes "Fish Tank" even more of a piece with Arnold's striking Glasgow-set debut, "Red Road." The milieu, on the other hand, is much more redolent of the working-class English council-estate setting of Arnold's Academy-Award-winning short, "Wasp."

Both features showcase Arnold's gift for evoking a woozy sensuality, particularly in situations in which characters' behavior teeters on the edge of transgressive. Witness here how the sound goes all whispery and slow-mo kicks in just a touch every time Mia and Connor get within touching distance of one another. It's both sexy and oh-so-wrong. And yet Connor isn't any kind of stock movie monster; only Catherine Hardwicke's "Thirteen" and a handful of other films have dared to evoke so frankly the nature of teenage femme sexuality, as young women test their power with a mixture of precocity and naivete.

Elsewhere, the pic's fine-grained detailing -- from the totally naturalistic way the characters talk here (steeped in obscenity) to the production design and the musical choices -- bolsters the sense of utter authenticity. Less naturalistic is the decision to lense (executed immaculately by Robbie Ryan) in what looks like Academy ratio, with film instead of digital stock. But although this is a little jarring at first, it makes a kind of emotional sense given the story's claustrophobic atmosphere.

A bit of trimming on the pic's two-hour running time might not have gone amiss, but it's hard to pick out any one scene in the film's generally tight script that could have been easily shed.

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Film Review: Fish Tank
By Ray Bennett
Hollywood Repoter

CANNES -- Following her Festival de Cannes Jury Prize-winning debut feature "Red Road" in 2006, British director Andrea Arnold creates another vivid portrait of a woman in Competition entry "Fish Tank," in which newcomer Katie Jarvis gives a star-making performance as a disaffected teenager.

Co-starring Michael Fassbender ("Hunger") and Kierston Wareing ("It's a Free World"), it's a vivid depiction of a single mom (Wareing) and her two daughters living in a grim council flat on a decaying housing estate on the outskirts of London.

Destined for festival acclaim, the film will attract audiences drawn by Arnold's gift for unblinking observation and some wonderfully naturalistic acting, particularly by Jarvis, who is onscreen throughout.

She plays Mia, a foul-mouthed, aggressively violent and desperately yearning 15-year-old with a slovenly mother, a noisy kid sister (Rebecca Griffith) and dreams of becoming a dancer.

Arnold presents the claustrophobic urban wasteland where they live as a breeding ground for anger and despair. The arrival of mother's new boyfriend, Connor (Fassbender), brings some hope due to his charming confidence and caring manner.

Mother cleans up the house and Connor takes the kids on outings and encourages Mia in her dancing. The director subtly foreshadows the events that follow and while they come as little surprise, they play out in credible fashion.

Only one episode of revenge late in the second half stretches plausibility, but it does not detract from the film's impressive power. With her "Red Road" crew of cinematographer Robbie Ryan, making skillful use of handheld cameras, production designer Helen Scott and editor Nicolas Chaudeurge all contributing sterling work, Arnold creates searing scenes that stick in the mind.

Besides the dancing element, she weaves in a thread involving Mia's compassion for an aging horse and captures the tiny moments of affection that provide the glue that just about keeps deprived families sane.

Fassbender and Wareing give honest and open performances as the conflicted adults and young Griffiths, another first-timer, is memorably sharp as the kid sister. The film belongs to Jarvis, however, and she makes the most of it with expressive features that convey Mia's mixed-up emotions from raging temper to sweet vulnerability. She will go far.



Edited By Sonic Youth on 1242319245

[Sonic Youth]

And before a single competition film was publicly screened, Sony Pictures already bought Michael Haneke's "The White Ribbon".

Which may - may - be the first indication that it's an excellent film and a possible Oscar contender.



Edited By Sonic Youth on 1242263040

[Sonic Youth]

Thirst
11 May, 2009 | By Darcy Paquet
Screendaily

Dir. Park Chan-wook. South Korea-US. 2009. 133mins.


After winning the Cannes Grand Prix with his 2003 revenge epic Oldboy, Park Chan-wook has faltered somewhat (2005’s Sympathy For Lady Vengeance, the poorly received I’m A Cyborg, But That’s OK in 2006), but his visually arresting vampire movie Thirst looks certain to create a stir: adopting a more lyrical mode than before, this complex and supremely inventive work sees the filmmaker back on top form.

Thirst is not, as some observers expected, a return to a more audience friendly approach - Park is aiming far above the heads of mainstream viewers. But even as it confounds some audiences, Thirst’s sheer creativity and cinematic brio will drive word of mouth and propel it to a solid, though not super, international career in theatrical and ancillary markets. Renewed interest in the vampire genre, manifested at the multiplexes by Twilight and in critical circles by Sweden’s Let the Right One In, should add to the work’s commercial potential.

The film has already recorded the biggest opening of the year in its native Korea, where distributor CJ Entertainment pulled in 1.36m admissions ($7.2m) in the six days after its April 30 release. Co-financier Universal Pictures/Focus Features will handle a forthcoming US release, and the film has secured numerous pre-sales around the world including Palisades Tartan for the UK.

Intriguingly, Park takes Emile Zola’s 1867 novel Therese Raquin as the starting point for his story. Sang-hyun (Song) is a Catholic priest who, in an act of moral desperation, volunteers for a dangerous medical experiment in Africa to combat a deadly disease. Contracting the virus, he is at the point of dying when a blood transfusion from an unknown source revives him. Returning to Korea, the symptoms of the disease linger, but he is able to stave them off by giving in to his new, insatiable desire to drink human blood. To his disgust, he realizes that he has become a vampire.

Meanwhile Tae-ju (Kim Ok-vin) is locked in a loveless marriage to a sickly, infantile young man (Shin) doted on by his obsessive mother (Kim Hae-sook). When the priest - a childhood friend of her husband - becomes a regular visitor to her home, Tae-ju’s previously suppressed desires and frustrations rush to the fore. Sang-hyun, locked in his own inner battle between conscience and worldly lust, submits to her advances.

Since his breakthrough with Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance in 2002, Park’s work has been characterised by its visual inventiveness, dark humour, intense acting performances, and strange but compelling shifts in tone. The first 90 minutes of Thirst is a robust display of these talents, but it is anchored in a melancholic lyricism that is new to Park’s oeuvre. Although the focus of its narrative movement is not always clear, in its best moments, Thirst offers something of the poetic force of cinema’s timeless masterpieces.

A key plot development comes at the three quarters mark, and at this point the film displays a shift in style to the kind of highly kinetic Park Chan-wook film many viewers might have expected in the first place. Even the production design undergoes a noticeable transformation. Although logically consistent with the plot’s development, the shift is slightly unnerving, and it robs some power from what might have been an even more heartbreaking final scene.

In the midst of Thirst’s swings in mood and style, it is the restrained, pitch perfect performance of Korea’s leading actor Song Kang-ho (The Host) that serves as the film’s main unifying presence. In this sense he carries the film’s broader themes of guilt, conscience and redemption almost single-handedly.

Tae-ju, modelled after Zola’s Therese, is a less consistent character, despite the best efforts of young actress Kim Ok-vin. One of the film’s weaknesses is that, perhaps relying too much on the implicit link with the novel, Tae-ju’s characterisation in the screenplay lacks depth. Supporting performances, bolstered by a highly experienced cast, are excellent.

Technical aspects of the work, from the smoky colour palates of Jeong Jeong-hun’s cinematography to the deliberate artifice of Ryu Seong-hee’s antique-styled production design, are as good as anything in contemporary Asian cinema.

[Sonic Youth]

(Mike D'Angelo gives "Spring Fever" a 30. In other words, he hated it.)


From The Guardian:

Now admittedly Spring Fever is not a picture for all tastes. It is an opaque, grainy account of homosexual liaisons in modern-day China; a tale of illicit love that is itself illicit (Lou was forced to shoot it in secret, contravening a five-year ban by the Chinese authorities). But it is still an alluring, intriguing film that packs a considerable emotional wallop.


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Spring Fever
Chunfeng chenzuide yewan
(Hong Kong - France)

By DEREK ELLEY
Variety

Three years after tweaking the nose of China's Film Bureau with full-frontal nudity and direct references to the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident in "Summer Palace," mainland helmer Lou Ye is at it again -- this time with lashings of gay sex -- in the five-way ensembler "Spring Fever." Pic circumvents the bureau's five-year filmmaking ban on Lou by being registered as a Hong Kong-French co-production, though beyond fests (especially gay ones) and the hardcore arthouse crowd, this over-long, very Euro-flavored "Spring" won't make many B.O. wickets bloom.

Shot clandestinely in Nanjing, central China, on digital equipment -- cleanly transferred to 35mm, though murky in interiors -- "Spring Fever" aims to evoke an atmosphere in which characters are swept up in a metaphysical fever, which blurs some sexual inclinations while reinforcing others. The movie's poetic Chinese title literally means "A Night Deeply Drunk on the Spring Breeze."

With its shifting, unstable weather -- from spring rain and overcast haze to sunny spells -- the pic does intermittently evoke a time of year when nature is stirring after a long period of hibernation. But the effect is weakened by the lack of visual consistency in d.p. Zeng Jian's lensing, and with a lot of the action taking place in dully lit interiors, the connection between nature and the human world remains more in the pic's English and Chinese titles than in what comes through on the bigscreen. Overall tone, especially in the second half, is more of autumnal melancholy than of spring fever.

Helmer Lou starts off as he means to continue, with a full-on (but genitalia-free) sex sequence between married Wang Ping (Wu Wei) and his male lover, Jiang Cheng (Qin Hao). What Wang doesn't know is that his wife, schoolteacher Lin Xue (Jiang Jiaqi), is having him followed by unemployed Luo Haitao (Chen Sicheng), who snaps photos of the two men together.

During an awkward dinner a trois, in which Jiang poses as Wang's old university friend, Lin plays along. But when Wang later finds out she's had him followed, Lin not only bawls her hubby out at home but also humiliates Jiang at his workplace.

These brief scenes, superbly played by actress Jiang Jiaqi, are among the few authentically emotional and gripping sequences in the movie, which otherwise schematically moves feelings and characters around at the script's convenience.

Things turn more melancholy and moony as Luo -- in a sudden development that's never properly justified dramatically or psychologically -- becomes less interested physically in his g.f. (Tan Zhuo) and more sexually drawn to his initial quarry, Jiang. Ensuing emotional complications over the remaining 75 minutes result in a suicide, much heart-searching (though little of it via meaningful dialogue) and one scene after another of gay lovemaking.

The screenplay is much better constructed than the untidy "Summer Palace," but the pic is still a long, long way from Lou's inventive and involving "Suzhou River" and flawed but impressively ambitious period drama, "Purple Butterfly." As Lou has seemingly catered more and more to Euro tastes (and Western sensibilities), his vision and imagination have become progressively more restricted.

Script has little idea what to do with Wang or either of the female characters, all of whom are left stranded as the pic focuses on Luo's homosexual "affair" with Jiang. Perfs are OK, but with little to chew on in the script, the actors almost seem to blend into each other at times.

Atmospheric score by Iranian composer Peyman Yazdanian ("Summer Palace") adds some color.

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Spring Fever (Chun Feng Chen Zui De Ye Wan)
14 May, 2009 | By Howard Feinstein
Screendaily

Dir. Lou Ye. Hong Kong/France. 2009. 115mins.


Using the flower as a metaphor is risky business for an artist, given its overexposure and abuse. Borrowing from stories from the 1920s from gifted Chinese author Yu Dafu, director Lou Ye, aided by Zeng Jian’s astonishing camerawork, manages to hit a poignant note with floral imagery in Spring Fever.

Close-ups of flowers not only open and close the film, they also pop up intermittently, mirroring shifts in both the story line and the state of mind of its gay protagonist. This integration of visuals and narrative, however, is the exception rather than the rule in this ambitious and - by mainland Chinese standards - daring project. The screenplay is so convoluted and contains so many loose ends that the intense style (fragmented editing, jerky, handheld camera) only highlights the movie’s occasional lapses into incoherence. Add to that relatively explicit sex scenes between males, and the result is small chance of finding an audience in most markets, including Lou Ye’s native China (where he is technically banned from filmmaking on account of the overt politics of Summer Palace). Gay festivals and possibly a few sophisticated urban markets should express interest.

The passionate relationship between a closeted, married intellectual, Wang Ping (Wu Wei), and the film’s central figure, travel agent by day, transvestite by night Jiang Cheng (Qin Hao) - a more stereotypical movie homosexual - is more daring by Chinese standards than it would be in most western countries, where it comes off as quaint and hackneyed. Lou Ye references Francois Truffaut’s classic ménage-a-trois Jules and Jim as an inspiration, but the film owes much more to Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together.

The gay Chinese men in the latter are manual laborers in Argentina, where they are not subjected to the same social constraints as provincial Nanjing residents Wang and Jiang. One of the fellows in Happy Together falls for a younger, naïve heterosexual co-worker; in Spring Fever, Jiang dumps the conflicted Wang, then goes after straight Luo Haitao (Chen Sicheng), whom Wang’s jealous and vindictive wife has hired to follow and film them in flagrante. The inclusion of Luo’s girlfriend in the web of relationships complicates matters for the viewer as much as it does for the men. Tossing in a full-time cross-dresser friend of Jiang’s who becomes his lover, a relationship that flies in the face of real life, serves as an upbeat ending but feels tacked on. Lou Ye does delve successfully into more universal subjects such as loyalty, betrayal, and obsession, but an overall triteness undermines their impact.

Like the 19th-century German philosopher Schopenhauer, Yu Dafu saw weeds in any field of flowers. In spite of the beauty of the movie’s lotuses, Lou Ye conveys the writer’s cynicism. On-screen text reads, “The sky is covered by grey clouds, like decomposing bodies;” pounding rain follows the troubled characters throughout the film. Yet the attempt at optimism prevails. When one of the men finally pulls himself together, the director once again quotes Yu Dafu: “Flowers always know the season in which they must bloom.”

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Film Review: Spring Fever
By Maggie Lee
Hollywood Reporter

CANNES -- A heterosexual man hired by a woman to spy on her husband's homosexual liaisons becomes seduced by his subject of reconnaissance in "Spring Fever," Lou Ye's artistically uneven, emotionally strained but at times sullenly poetic depiction of a sexually confused love pentangle. The first half intriguingly depicts the characters' various stages of secrecy, denial and bewilderment. However, the second half lapses into dramatic impasses as Lou gets distracted by pretentious literary allusions.

Shooting secretly in spite of his 5-year ban on filmmaking by Chinese authorities, Lou's work will straddle both the gay film circuit and the usual European art house channels through the experienced marketing of French co-producer Rosem Films and international sales group Wild Bunch.

Lou's treatment of a supposedly taboo subject in China and its particular social context neither shocks nor surpasses seminal works like "Lan Yu" and "East Palace, West Palace." The sex scenes, duskily lit in Lou's characteristic style, and shot with a foggy, grainy texture, are a tame shadow of China's cult queer auteur Cui Zi'en's underground homo-erotica.

The film opens promisingly with evocations of moist sensuality: a pristine shot of a drizzling water lily in a pond fluidly shifts to two men on the road. They get frisky while peeing over a bridge, and promptly make passionate love in a hut while outside, the rain pelts a water lily in a trough. Later, they walk in the woods and a man crosses their path.

In flashback, the man is revealed to be Luo Haitao (Chen Sicheng), hired by schoolteacher Lin Xue to investigate her husband Wang Ping's infidelity. This leads to Wang's breakup with both Lin and his boyfriend Jiang Cheng (Hao Qin). While tailing Jiang to a gay club, and seeing him sing in drag, Luo is drawn into an ambiguous companionship with him which unsettles his girlfriend Li Jing (Tan Zhuo). They form a menage a trois similar to that between Jiang, Wang and his wife, that also recalls the romantic spirit of "Jules et Jim." The mood is marred by an ugly twist and downbeat end.

The visual virtuosity of Lou's earlier films appears in fleeting moments. The elegiac score by Iranian composer Peyman Yazdanian blends well with synthesized Chinese ethnic music to imbue the opaque performances, and the indistinct Nanjing suburban setting with a lyrical quality.

Compared with his half-baked attempt at fusing personal sexuality with political history (Tiananmen Square) in "Summer Palace", this film is a considerable improvement as it generates intensity through the extreme intimacy among its minimalist cast (accentuated by restless closeups and deliberately asymmetrical compositions) while offsetting them against an authentic social backdrop.

The references to Yu Dafu, a 1930s Chinese equivalent of D.H. Lawrence, will seem oblique to a Western audience (the Chinese title comes from his novel "Night of Drunken Spring Breeze").



Edited By Sonic Youth on 1242325723

[Sonic Youth]

It's here.

Last year, the festival brought AMPAS two Foreign Language Film nominees (Waltz With Bashir and the Palme d'Or winner The Class), a Best Actress nominee (Angelina Jolie, Changleing), a Best Supporting Actress winner (Penelpe Cruz, Vicki Cristina Barcelona), and an Animated Feature nom (Kung Fu Panda), and a few technical noms (for Changeling and maybe others). Not a bad track record.

For those who only moderately care about that, it's always exciting to follow the festival and see if anything outstanding emerges. "Up" has already received the usual excellent reviews for Pixar.

The competition slate:

ANTICHRIST - Lars von Trier
BRIGHT STAR - Jane Campion
BROKEN EMBRACES - Pedro Almodovar
ENTER THE VOID - Gaspar Noe
THE EXECUTION OF P - Brillante Mendoza
FACE - Tsai Ming-liang
FISH TANK - Andrea Arnold
IN THE BEGINNING - Xavier Giannoli
INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS - Quentin Tarantino
LOOKING FOR ERIC - Ken Loach
MAP OF THE SOUNDS OF TOKYO - Isabel Coixet
A PROPHET - Jacques Audiard
SPRING FEVER - Lou Ye
TAKING WOODSTOCK - Ang Lee
THIRST - Park Chan-wook
THE TIME THAT REMAINS - Elia Suleiman
VENGEANCE - Johnnie To
VINCERE - Marco Bellocchio
THE WHITE RIBBON - Michael Haneke
WILD GRASS - Alain Resnais