Showing posts with label Luc Besson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Luc Besson. Show all posts

Sunday 5 October 2014

From the archive : Dry white, best served lightly chilled

This is a Festival review of Les aventures extraordinaires d'Adèle Blanc-Sec (2010)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
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6 October

This is a Festival review of Les aventures extraordinaires d'Adèle Blanc-Sec (2010), written 16/17 September 2010 - in the days when one submitted one's response to Cambridge Film Festival's web-site in its style, and hoped that it would appear...


AVENTURES



This is a spirited and very funny romp, variously parodying and paying tribute to, amongst other things, everything from Spielberg to the phenomenon that is TOMB-RAIDER and the INDIANA JONES and JURASSIC PARK films, and it was a really brilliantly enjoyable choice for the start of the festival this year.

The title and the write-up in the festival booklet would lead one to expect no less, not least with the resonance that the French word ‘aventures’ has (I think that it is lacking in our similar English word), and that incongruously added to the heroine’s double-barrelled surname, which flagged up (if one translated it, even if one knew nothing (as I did) of Jacques Tardi) that we were to be prepared for the incredible passing calmly as the plausible (which some find convenient to call ‘magical realism’).

Besson brought his own kind of magic aplenty (which, for me, was already in the air – and very welcome – with the recent screening here of the delightful animation THE ILLUSIONIST), together with a mix that included a slightly gauche (but nevertheless engaging and helpful) nuclear physicist from the pre-Christian era, and an enjoyment of SFX that was only occasionally marred by what were (possibly quite deliberate) slight defects in the execution.

(For example, the heroine mounted a creature (not just a camel) bareback in a (successful) attempt to bring it to heel, and the seemingly unintended blurring that accompanied her return to earth with it subdued (and in harmony with her) could have been a way of undercutting our temptation ‘to believe’ too deeply in what was, essentially, a fable, charmingly distilled from the whole project’s origins in and indebtedness to the world of the illustrated page (and maybe to such films as DRAGONHEART and the trilogy of LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy). I have no doubt that some of the elements and themes were also more closely linked to that pictorial world than I, without other knowledge of it, could identify or fully appreciate, but such is the stuff of taking something from one medium to another (as with the Tati homage).

The film’s quirkiness and Egyptian theme were nicely set by the opening title-sequence, which turned out to be projected onto and panning across an obelisk that, when the edge was reached, at once brought us into focus on a familiar scene and set us in Paris. The Paris of 1911, as the initial and familiar technique of voiceover announced some important characters to be introduced to us in succession. And so their lives interacted (or, in the case of one who was asleep, failed to at that time), and brought us, via the (sometimes) hesitant character of Andrej to the start proper, with the artefact-exploring activities of the person to whom reviews traditionally like to refer as the eponymous female lead.

In the stereotyping of the villains who enter the tomb, one might be able to escape imputing the French-speaking racism towards its African empire to anything other than the plot and its time. (They come complete with an evil eye and other deformities to signal their standing, and with a brazen greed that one knew could not be leading them to their good, much as one knows that all sorts of grasping in Bond plots will (albeit with his hand to assist in it) work against their ultimate aim – and there was a delightfully typical Bond-type moment at the end of this sequence).

However, one could just as easily see a likely reference back to the cultural politics of the time of when Harrison Ford first had adventures as Jones on the screen. In that regard, but still in the spirit of parody, it could have been a deliberate unsettling of our (would-be?) more modern mores regarding (at least talking openly about) the supposed features, attitudes or beliefs that we (want to) believe link with cultural origin.

The pace of the film was, to my mind, perfect, and the little jokes of repetition with the prison scenes, the way that the action moved from place to place and character to character, and the (apparent) rootedness of the piece in its era (at least until the clock’s hands go momentarily awry) all served to echo this concept of time with which we tend to engage as a timepiece that we consult from day to day, but which Besson’s vision prompts us to approach more closely and in a different way. For that reason, I found the allusions to other forays in this field as different as BACK TO THE FUTURE, GROUNDHOG DAY and Scorsese’s (maybe overlooked) AFTER HOURS) to be undisguised and telling.

On another level, the film even embodied a challenging form of extreme (if unplanned) piercing that I had thought only to be the stuff of my very recent imagination until I saw it here: that was some surprise for me, as was the way in which it was introduced brought about a slight misdirection as to that person’s ‘life-status’ was (if I may call it that, since it has a bearing on the whole). In showing us how that had arisen, in a semi-tragic flashback (on account of the implausibility factor, which is one that is familiar from the other films already mentioned), there was a telescoped mockery of the development of lawn tennis that I was by no means alone in finding quite hilarious at the same time that I knew that it led to someone’s being maimed.

There is much more to say, and I know that ADVENTURES would repay my early viewing, but don’t think that I can make the re-run. As usual, those who left at the titles missed something, an amusing scene from the subplot that eventually (and briefly) brought Andrej and Adele together, and a flashback to a part of the film that we knew we were being taken away from, despite its being partly unresolved. It showed a possible ending to an unwilling alliance (on one side at least) that was not without its precedents, but which, for some reason, most put me in mind of the closing scenes of ‘Whinfrey’s Last Case’ in Michael Palin and Terry Jones’ series RIPPING YARNS.

What that extra snippet didn’t do was in any way to undermine the demise of one pair of highly linked characters, and their fate stood, in juxtaposition to the ‘happy ending’ of Adele being reunited with her sister. That being said, Adele was soon faced with a scheming peril that may (or may not – I am a little hesitant, unlike some heard leaving the screening, to detect scope for a sequel here) serve to end her affirmative approach to life (or, at least, until some time as her own mortal residue might be recovered.) In her case, we probably trusted to her resourcefulness to overcome, and, in the case of the inter-title peril awaiting the killer, maybe did not much care.

Life, death and our attitudes to both have been familiar parts of Besson’s work as far back as SUBWAY, with its choice of tone in ending that led (for those not wanting something else, and who would, for that reason, be deeply unhappy with where BRAZIL leaves us) to a quiet acceptance of what has gone before as life that was lived and worth living whilst it was (and as long as it could be) lived. It is not a heavy note, but it could set one thinking, if one looked beyond the jokes, whilst at the same time, relishing them greatly.

Some of those jokes themselves are not without an import or filmic referent (e.g. pairing the Jurassic period with the Isle of Jura (not, though, really known for anything other than its deer, whisky and George Orwell’s inhabitation), claiming a different historical specialism acts as an excuse not to help and to avoid being detected, and a chain of command that delegates down and down with an ever-diminishing deadline). Others humorous elements are more free in their inventiveness, and, although I am unsure whether there was a definite nod to another recent feature, the spontaneous laughter brought about by seeing the policeman, reluctantly teamed with a hired killer and in costume of the latter’s specification, suddenly viewed from behind was full and infectious.

Yet, for me, it is this theme of mortality and what it is to try to catch at life (for oneself or for others) that I will take away. It also engages nicely in theme with a radio adaptation of Faust that I hope to catch at the weekend (as well as with the revival of The Makropoulos Case in London at English National Opera). The newly resurrected, going off to explore and enjoy France’s capital, have a connection with that ready acceptance of mortality, and enjoying what one has whilst one has it, that struck chords with the South American tradition of enjoyment of bones and skulls, and, maybe, with what we miss in Hallowe’en (itself a key moment in Goethe’s great two-part play).


AJD




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

Saturday 1 December 2012

Short films at Festival Central (4) - Man in Fear (2011)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


2 December

* Contains spoilers *

Director / writer : Will Jewell

This film gives a delightful interchange between a constable manning a desk in the station (Tim Healy, credited by IMDb as Sargent (sic) Brown, though he does not, as I recollect, have a Sergeant’s stripes) and the film’s protagonist Anthony Fox (Luke Treadaway), which, whilst not literally at the centre of Man in Fear, at least gives us an insight into what Fox fears.

Not in a derivative way, I was reminded of a scene in Luc Besson’s Angel-A (2005), where a similar desperation leads André Moussah (Jamel Debbouze) to seek arrest in the cells as sanctuary (equally, there’s Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life), but Healy’s PC was delightfully erudite, delightfully abrupt, and simply, in a superbly bluff British way, not willing to entertain what he was being told or what was done. (Not until afterwards, anyway.)

Beforehand, Treadaway brought us all the early fluster from North by Northwest (1959) of trying to prove the reality of what is happening to him, only to find that no one wants to listen, of being confronted by this PC who throws Damien Hirst and his suspended sharks in his face. In between, is the audience, to whom Fox's paranoia is palpable, and in whose hands - almost - his character’s fate seems to lie.

Much more so than Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant), evading the fate of being Kaplan, Fox has a sense of vulnerability, of being – unsympathetically - thought to be in psychosis, when maybe his big overspilling bundle shows what he says…

A palpable playing with the borderline between being ‘in fear’ and what others will make of one’s fear, this film is a gem, given 9.0 on IMDb.


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Saturday 17 November 2012

Before the Fall

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17 November

Myth, legend, symbol or allegory, we will generally be familiar with The Garden of Eden and what happens there.

Interesting enough, and, for some, the origins of a theology of original sin, but that begs a bigger question:


What was the nature of Adam and Eve before any of it happened?


My starting-point for asking (although there is almost certainly, as part of the theology of sin, a whole doctrine of our unfallen state) is that few, Pallas Athene and maybe Benjamin Button apart, come into existence as fully formed adults - their nakedness adverts to a state before clothes or fig-leaves, but also to the fact that (whether or not they have had sex) they did not come into being as a result of sex.

There are those who like to ask how incest was unavoidable, if their offspring were to procreate, but a better question is who they were, what they knew, and how they viewed their world. Was who they were - as well as what they knew - changed in the instant of eating of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil?

Snow White (the pole to The Wicked Queen) only needs one bite of the Queen's poisoned apple; Neo just takes the red pill to see the mirror ripple and his arm silver; Alice follows the instructions (in the same Wonderland that Neo's pill keeps him in) and grows and shrinks. But a few examples of how a moment's ingestion makes a world of difference...

What would it be like not to know good and evil? We think of children (some of us think of the overturned legal principle of Doli incapax), we think of angels, and, though we were once children (and some feel closer to that than others do), and cannot imagine much more than the appearance of angels (except when Frank Capra and Luc Besson do it for us), none of this seems like the possibly timeless state that our pair was in.

Maybe Milton helps us 'flesh out' that notion of a state of being before culpability, or maybe our guiltiness, our sense of responsibility, failure and despair shuts out that possibility of actively identifying or imagining anything other than this - at best, maybe, the anthropologists of old, talking about tribes in a state of nature, wanted to read into them some sort of innocence or unknowingness that was never there...


I do not know, but I think, reminded as I am of Paradise Lost yet again, I shall go back to John Milton, and try to read a book on each day of Christmas.



Wednesday 29 August 2012

Luc Besson looks prolific

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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30 August
* Contains some spoilers *

That is the impression created by Besson's page on www.imdb.com.

I have caught up with Angel-A (2005), and found it an engrossing adventure for Jamel Debbouze as André and Rie Rasmussen playing Angela as Capra met City of Angels (1998), not in Los Angeles, but Paris. Rasmussen I feel sure that I should have known (although I turn out not to know
her other work, but she was a good emotional and physical foil to Debbouze (who played a strong role in Let's Talk About the Rain (2008)), and they worked well as a team, stalking around an often deserted city, although there is many a twilight shot just of him, walking across a deserted bridge.

Bridges give a sort of loose connection of theme with Leconte's The Girl on the Bridge (1999), but the real tie is with a take on It's a Wonderful Life (1946) (whose Donna Reed so impressed me at a screening, appropriately on Christmas Eve, when last seen): Angela is bold and self-assured in life and in her sexiness in a way that André is not, and she is a pre-echo of the title role in Besson's The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec (2010), as is the humour.

With Jimmy Stewart, it is easy to see that he does not deserve his lot, though he cannot see all that he has done to improve people's lives, whereas with André, not that it matters, it is the beauty of what Angela can see in him that turns out to count, both for him and for her, in this well-imagined and gloriously photographed embrace with Paris, and with these two people who dance around it.

Monday 23 January 2012

The Future or How do you choose a satisying film? (Part 1)

The Future or How do you choose a satisying film? (Part 1)

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


23 January

The Future or How do you choose a satisying film? (Part 1)

* Contains spoilers *

For sure, there's no easy way to do it, when:

* It can be hard to avoid trailers totally, which - whoever makes the things - dish up (as Percy Grainger described his arrangements of Bach) bits of the film (and maybe even bits that don't make it to the version that goes on general release and which you will see) in an often unrepresentative way¹ ;

* The man who can make Midnight in Paris (2011), no great masterpiece though it actually is², can also produce Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), where, I believe, the point of interest is not Vicky or Cristina (whichever is which) and what they get up to, but very nearly the third named, if it weren't for the performance from Ms Cruz;

* Likewise, we were given Pan's Labyrinth (2006) by the director who followed it up with (?!) Don't be Afraid of the Dark (2010);

* Not knowing Luc Besson's canon that well (except Subway (1985) [and also The Fifth Element (1997)]), but being well aware that it was not that / either type of film, The Lady (2011) still wasn't what I expected at all in the wake of 2010's Festival opener (which said a lot, but probably not too much, in its title), The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec³ (2010);

* Even the publicity image used for The Future (2011), of much of the top half of Miranda July protruding diagonally from a sash-window (and dressed in a frilly white(ish) dress with black features), is a striking one. However, it actually captures a moment, for me, of utter inconsequence (save to demonstrate a write-up's description of audiences finding her work / acting either 'kooky or cute')⁴.


Which leads us, neatly or otherwise, on to Part 2 - to be found at The Future or How do you choose a satisying film? (Part 2)...



End-notes

¹ Trailers often enough create a longing to see where that moment fits in, what happens next, when it turns out not to be that interesting. (And, of course, they (distributors, directors, whoever) know that it's not that interesting, but they show it to you out of context to create an appetite that they know that they cannot satisfy.)

² Review to come, some time: it was started in the third week of its run, and unnecessarily long delayed, although oft picked at in the meantime.

³ Call it versatility (DVD, again), I guess, which is what one gets in the range of Woody Allen's work, from mock-documentary Zelig (1983) about Leonard Zelig, 'the human chameleon', to a fraught, but chilling, drama in Interiors (1978).

⁴ Except that, for what one could loosely call The Future's plot, it is part of the zany way in which (as writer) July chooses to set her character up with another man: he is being asked to say whether he can hear the shout that she is making - or about to make, or has just made - from said window, although, from what he has already told her (us) about where he is in LA, he is almost assuredly out of earshot.