The ferocity and frailty of war

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

21 November

97 = S : 17 / A : 16 / C : 17 / M : 15 / P : 16 / F : 16

A rating and review of Land and Freedom (1995)

S = script

A = acting

C = cinematography

M = music

P = pacing

F = feel

9 = mid-point of scale (all scored out of 17, 17 x 6 = 102)



* Contains spoilers *

This film, set relatively early in the Spanish Civil War, not only has some gorgeous music by George Fenton, which only momentarily attracts one’s attention when it should not, but some very good acting and scripting. Director Ken Loach, working with cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, fills the screen with the immediacy of faces, and, at the times when David Carr (Ian Hurt) is part of the militia (POUM), immerses one in the vibrancy of that life and comradeship.

Loach also puts a distance on it, by the medium of (what turns out to be) David’s granddaughter Kim reading the letters that he sent back from the front, with a deliberate alienation that he is somehow able to send back photographs of those alongside whom he is fighting – despite never seeing a camera, one might come up with an explanation where he gets films developed on leave, but it seems wiser to infer that Loach intends it symbolically.

The effect of those photos being looked through puts the events that are being so vividly shown, and with such a colour palette, back into history as ‘old photos’, along with the folded press clippings : unless we can stop and think, clearly the latter had not been sent with the former, but have ended up together as a subjective account along with (in the newspaper) a supposedly objective one.

Hurt is never better than when his voice is heard reading his letters aloud as Kim looks at them, and the images from abroad. On screen, probably deliberately, he seems a shadow of what we hear, which makes him perfect to be afloat in a world of politics and coalitions that are convenient only for a time – there may be a film that does not leave one confused about the rights and wrongs of the situation, of which Eyes on the Sky and The Forest are but two, and in need of a reliable history*, but Loach captures the incomprehension of people who find themselves on opposite sides.

The scene around the table in the town in Aragon that has been liberated is telling : Loach has the local people at the centre of the scene, but, at the margins, three pondering shots of members of the militia in civvies and casting glances, or speaking quietly, to each other. Before they are invited into the discussion, this makes it look like a mistake that they have been given nothing to add, but, afterwards, they make quite clear that they have views, the differences in which feed into the succeeding action.

Add to this guilt, the horrors of war and of retribution, a love story (Blanca, full of conviction, well played by Rosana Pastor), and needless death, and there is a powerful film, which maintains its pace, and does not deliver short on how divided those united against the fascists were. Loach, although he is known for left-wing inclinations, pulls no punches on that account.



End-notes

* Before the screening at Cambridge Film Festival, curator of the Catalan series, Ramon Lamarca, helped alleviate some difficulty regarding the anti-fascists and the International Brigade, whereas the husband whose family is at the centre of things is, although a conservative, not for that a fascist. The town shown being captured, which may be Mirambel or Morella (whose people are thanked in the credits), appeared to be the local town in the Catalan film.


If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here

Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Don't be Afraid of This Film

This is a Festival review of Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (2010)

More views of - or at - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

18 September

This is a Festival review of Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (2010)

* Contains spoilers *

I gather that Guillermo del Toro liked the t.v. story from which Don’t be Afraid of the Dark was adapted. It was perfectly understandable, in view of what appears to interest him, that it attracted him, but he may not have stopped to ask himself whether it would please anyone else.

For, given that he co-wrote the script, and that Pan’s Labyrinth holds together in a way that, for me, this simply did not, I have to ask why there were so many flaws, and why, with such a poorly conceived script, the film was made at all. (There may have been flaws in the original, but that was no reason to recreate them.) It is probably enough just to list some, in no particular order:

· Unless invoking magic, a Polaroid® camera that very obviously has five singe-use flash-bulbs cannot keep taking flash photographs indefinitely (for no reason, we had a shot of a collection of cameras earlier on);

· The extensive injuries inflicted on Mr Harris could not have been construed as resulting from any accident – no one, for example, could get a puncture wound (from the screw-driver) in the back of his leg at the same time as multiple lacerations to face and hands, and it is utterly implausible that the extent of the injuries and their causes would have been missed, at the scene or in hospital (end of residence, end of film);

· Accepted that it is a given of this sort of film (whatever it may be) that people just act stupidly (and despite the attempt at a sinister twist at the end), it made no sense for Kim (Katie Holmes) to go to the library after seeing Harris, rather than rescuing Sally (Bailee Madison) first;

· Creatures that can move objects without touching them (Mr Harris again, e.g. the Stanley® knife) do not need the agency of those objects to turn off light-switches, etc.;

· Sally may have been shocked (but what by? by people bursting into the library, who, as ever, seem to take a quiet eternity to do so?), but why did she show her father a photograph, not the creature that she had not been too shocked to manage to squash?;

· And what suddenly persuades him to believe her, when nothing else has happened? I did not recall the trade name, but (at her tender age – the States and child medication again!) she is probably taking an anti-depressant, and so has to be disbelieved!


Trying to set aside questions of genre, making sudden loud noises does not constitute horror (or suspense), e.g. the gratuitous thump in the soundtrack when Mr Harris apprehends Sally when she first discovers the basement window. Later, when the pace of the attack has stepped up (as, of course, it could have done at any point), there is just overloading of the senses, achieved by pounding music, other chaotic loud sounds, and confused visual displays that are typical of any so-called action film, but which, if it is one's intention, do not make one afraid, but raise anxiety.

We suspect that no one will make it out alive - anyone doing so is a bonus (but the adults have behaved so foolishly when they had the chance before). As to what the ending moments suggest about Kim, who actually cares?

True, it did seem, at one point (when she has been tripped on the stairs: these clever rhesus-monkey-like creatures, knowing how to tension wire - not there later, when Sally comes down - and which way down the stairs she'd come), that Kim was suggesting Sally as their kill instead of her (and, yawn, there may be earlier ambiguities).

Yet she does rescue Sally, she may or may not be dead (or transformed), and, if she isn't dead, who was the creatures' required victim?

Tweet away @TheAgentApsley