Showing posts with label Rafi Pitts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rafi Pitts. Show all posts

Monday 20 March 2017

A few Tweets about Asghar Farhadi's traumatic The Salesman (Forushande) (2016)

A few Tweets about Asghar Farhadi's traumatic The Salesman (Forushande) (2016)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


20 March

A few Tweets about Asghar Farhadi's traumatic The Salesman (Forushande) (2016)












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

Sunday 8 July 2012

Another The Hunter

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


9 July

* Contains spoilers *
This is one with Willem Dafoe, not Rafi Pitts (The Hunter (2010)), though there may be similarities.
We are shown, early on, that Dafoe's character, Martin David, is supposed to have traits of what is understood in film circles (e.g. As Good as it Gets (1997)) to be OCD. (I know someone about whom another thought that the acronym stood for her Obsessive Cleaning Disorder.) Thankfully, by now, Channel 4 - in its Channel 4 Goes Mad season - might have cleared that up.
Therefore we should not be surprised that, when he flies to Hobart and arrives at his base for his mission (the chaotic home of Lucy (Frances O'Connor) and her two children, near the settlement of Cascade), he is horrified by the state of the bath - and, suitably armed from the stores, blitzes it with feeling.
Moment of truth: As if Martin would choose to work where, all over the world, he is roughing it in the wild and not have come across similar squalor in the bases with which he is provided, but perhaps not have had any readily available means of clearing it up. (The novel from which this is taken might have explained, but it was written by Julia Leigh, the same Leigh who brought us what, for me, was a sterile experience in Sleeping Beauty (2011)...)
What is almost better is that the way in which the film is directed, much of the time, fails to spell things out (the link with The Hunter (2010)) , but then it does feel it necessary to leave hefty clues in mental-health territory (and this is a film all about Territory, a redeeming feature):
For example, an unmissable packet of Xanax on Lucy's bedside table, or her later* telling Martin about her missing husband's busy mental-life, and that she believed that her husband believed in what he was frightened of. That in addition to what we have been shown about a neurotically fastidious Martin, and the unspeaking Jamie** (Finn Woodlock), who, for some reason, was silent in the language of words, but not really (more later, when he does talk).

That said, Lucy's daughter, Katie (Sass, at just one point, but credited under that name by IMDb, and played energetically by Morgana Davies) and Jamie / Bike have informed Martin that there is an outside dunny, so God knows how he ever does deal with that! For he is shown, when first entering the bar (after the shock of the house and then seeking a room there instead), going there to use the toilet, but being required to pay for the first of two non-thirst-quenching drinks, which is so because he is greeted by the logger rednecks, champing to bulldoze down the forest.
Whatever Martin does to satisfy his bodily needs, during and between his twelve-day forays (in the latter times, he returns to Julia’s house (bungalow?). Katie and Jamie initially encounter Martin when he has just opened the door of Julia’s room, and found her prone and asleep: at this moment, because of the time of day, it is clear enough that this is going to turn out to be the sleep of escape, and that Julia will be experiencing some mental-health issue.
They then regularly walk into his room without knocking, call his choral or operatic choices of music shouting, and nose around and ask questions. Love at first sight, in another moment of truth, as Martin comes to value Julia's family and family life. The fastidiousness seems somehow gone (submerged?), and we are meant to view this hardened loner as softened up - a Damascus moment, which informs the rest of the trajectory, but without any obvious road to it, or, otherwise put, any impelling reason to think that any of this can really be new, unlessgenuinely the scales have dropped.


This film, to be palatable, does rely heavily on the very well-done cinematography of beautiful landscapes, which distract us from the fact that we are otherwise just in Tasmanian forest and wilderness with Dafoe, and the little that he really gets up to is honestly not all that interesting (possibly because, unlike Bear Grylls, pretending to be alone, and telling us what 'you would' do, if you chose to be in the ridiculous scrapes with which he is involved, he has no need to tell anyone why he sets this or that trap, etc.).

Early on, he shoots a kangaroo, but doing so turns out not to be for food, however, as he throws the carcass away, and we then see what I took to be two of the Tasmanian Devils - which he is supposedly there, as his cover story, to study - eating it. Maybe he wanted them to eat that meat rather than his. (Later, we see him bait traps with parts of the organs from when he gutted the creature.) Somehow, though, the disparate acts do not match one's notion of a man surviving in the wild by his own wits - for all the haunted looks and stalking around, it was as if some alienation effect deliberately brought me back to the fact that this was Willem, not Martin.

As to Dafoe eating, we have a moment or two of him consuming something unidentifiable from a billy-can, but only forty minutes in. We know, actually, very little about his eating other than in one meal cooked by Julia, and one seemingly cooked by him, and it is not possible to say what he eats of what is on his plate. It is also not that he does not drink, as he twice orders non-beneficial beer (and it is impossible to say why he braves the loggers again to order the second one, except to set up a confrontation), but he refuses the Shiraz that Julia offers, and Katie says that Martin drinks tea.

All in all, for all that his principal, Redleaf (too much like red bush?), is made out to seem shadowy, what Martin does all the time seems patently mercenary, and Redleaf seems no more like a player behind the scenes than he a hunter than what he is searching for real. Again, all at a remove - maybe a clever remove, because, with Leigh's direction (and screenplay), I was bored to tears, but that is belied by sentimentality (not leastleading to and at the end):

Yes, predictably, Martin has one of those moments of hesitation. Unfortunately, because (in the implausible way in which such plots all too often unfold) he is (really for the first time, like Tom Baker in Genesis of the Daleks?), at the age of 55+, in a situation where he can no longer believe in what he has been hired to do...
Watch out for a blue flask and see it, if you can, as a totem, a sacramental vessel, a memory, but maybe just another bright visual cliché (you know the sort, if you try), which is actually a rather lazy linkage, meant to tie things up when the corresponding facts suggest more a Drive-type You can run, but you can't hide! form of resolution.

End-notes
* When Martin has cured her by the expedient (he's just off hunting again for the best part of two weeks) of instructing the children that she does not need this (and two other pill-boxes, whose contents remain unknown, but, just possibly, a sleeping tablet)).
** Or is his 'real' name Bike, as the credits suggest?

Friday 27 January 2012

Self-parking garages at Writer's Rest

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


27 January

There's a discussion going on about cars that drive themselves (that age-old dream - of some, anyway!).

I have just posted this comment in a 'spin-off thread'* to the original posting:



Hmm. I'm not sure that this concept is a new one - if I am not raving, it originated in Japan (probably Tokyo), where, clearly, efficient use of the available space is of paramount importance. (It may be now in West Hollywood.)

In essence, I think that it is little more than a giant car-transporter (those huge things on the roads that look so dangerous on so many counts:

* What if the cars touch (in varying degrees of touching from a knock to a squash)?;

* What if the whole thing falls over?;

* What if a car - as in the films - tumbles off the back and into one's path, and would one's reactions be good enough?.


Self-parking garages are a mechanization of using storage space, as I recall, a bit like the capsule hotel - you get a bed for the night, but it's cheap and basic, as you're occupying a space not much larger than a coffin!

I believe that, with the self-parking concept, you leave the garage with fitting your car into the space available, rather than driving around and around a car-park, where a large surface-area is, of course, wasted in this search by providing the route for the cars to get around, and from floor to floor.

I think that it's computer-controlled mechanization, in fact, with hydraulics, sensors, etc. If I'm right, it's little different from the technology that we have already taken for granted with robots building vehicles for us in car-plants:

There's a very atmospheric scene in such a plant in
The Hunter (2010) (write-up on my blog**, and the Cambridge Film Festival web-site), where Ali (writer / director / actor Rafi Pitts), who is a security guard on night duties, makes a patrol. There is no one around, but the robots are busy welding and the like.


Full blog at
http://writersrest.com/2012/01/24/let-the-robot-drive/#comment-1108


End-notes

* Some such...

** Postings at:
The Hunter re-emerges and Back to The Hunter.


Sunday 18 December 2011

Back to The Hunter

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


19 December

* Contains a goodly number of spoilers *

As planned, I watched The Hunter last night, but this time on DVD - how some of those scenes cried out for a cinema screen! That apart, however well people receive it (the trailer is intriguing, but I assume that it was made for cinema release, but I never saw the film announced after last year's festival, or I would have watched it again), they cannot escape the fact that it is well lit and photographed.

How they receive it depends, I think, on how much they are content with the film's pace (I think that it needs to unfold as it does, but I have read that others differ and are quite irritated with what they get for the time spent), and with being left with an abiding enigma, rather an unwinding and, maybe, some sort of resolution.

What partly goes with this, I think, is that there is very little heard dialogue, and its absence is apparent: we are the other side of the glass, for example, witnessing the transaction, when Ali Alavi (Rafi Pitts), takes a hotel room, and only come inside when he is going to the room, with what turns out to be a spectacular view. (Not to divert too much, we are only too aware, in the same way, of the limitations of what we are being shown, because we could not have known, from the scene at the hotel, what it gives onto, just as, when Ali first goes to his flat, we could not have known in front of what he was parking, or what its living area gives onto at the front.)

All in all, this means that we have to make inferences (because we will never know what Ali hunts in the woods, or whether it is just the difficulty of the shot that makes him stand down from it, before we see him, at a later point entirely, going for a kill and shooting), and that there are very few facts. These are those facts:

* Ali has been in prison, but we will never know why (some sort of crime, or for political reasons - he is always listening to the political debate going on, but never appears to react to it), where, or for how long

* The term of his sentence is only consistent with having believed (as he may still believe) that Saba is his daughter, and thus with Sara's having being impregnated by him before his imprisonment and found to be with child during it - but that may not be a fact, as he somehow sees her as she pleads with an unseen official (or officials), presumably if not for AI, then for adoption, because of what she says that she said to Ali to give him hope

* The police contact him to report Sara's death

* He learns that there was a conflict between protesters and police (and later goes to the scene, where we see the positions of fallen bodies drawn on the ground), and that fire from one side or the other seems to have hit her accidentally

* Ali seems to have no notion of what the protest was or why (as he is told, alone, without Saba) Sara would have been there

* He finds the officer's questioning about his working nights and when he sees Sara and Saba intrusive - they appear to be interested in the strength of the relationship, as if he might have had a motive himself, perhaps because, as we know, they have not yet identified the gun that fired the shot

* He appears to identify the body - it is a long shot, from another room (maybe even the doorway of that far room), and he says nothing in words, but the police take Sara to have been identified from how he reacts (when he is asked to identify a body that may be Saba, it is the same scene and camera angle, but his reaction is even more ambiguous) - the police, of course, would know what he was later signing about identifying the bodies, but we do not, and that is part of the fog in which Rafi Pitts deliberately leaves us

* He visits and lies to Sara's mother (who is unaware of her own daughter's death) about why his daughter is not with him to see her on her (Saba's) birthday, leaves the family cat with her (supposedly at Saba's request), and takes off - he has made preparations to leave, by taking care of the remainng thing in the flat, the cat

* Having driven around and chosen a vantage-point (after a helicopter has been flying over), and taken out his hunting-rifle, he takes a bead on a car through his telescopic-sights until it passes

* When a police-car shortly after comes along the same stretch of road, he does the same, and he shoots - it seems as though it may have been a mistake, but he shoots again in what we realize is confirmation of his intent, and then kills the passenger, when he gets out (on the side facing us)

* After staying the night in the hotel, a helicopter is again in evidence, and, seemingly acting on its presence, Ali goes to a scrap dealer and changes his car

* The only other fact, important or not, is that when the two officers chase and catch him, the one who does not want to shoot him as a cop-killer (and who claims to be a fellow human being) says that the other officer has killed other prisoners whom he didn't like, and is going to try to frame him, if he kills Ali, too


Time, now, to see the interview from the DVD with director / Ali, Rafi Pitts...


Friday 14 October 2011

The Hunter, one year on

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


14 October

I have been reminded of a film from last year's Festival, The Hunter (2010), whose main character, Ali Alavi, is played by its director, Rafi Pitts. At the time (a bit like Kosmos at this year's Festival), it seemed likely to be too subtle to be readily understood (though not quite as the film's official wording would suggest):

In an act of vengeance, a young man randomly kills two police officers. He escapes to the forest, where he is arrested by two other officers. The three men are surrounded by trees, the woods. They are lost in a maze, a desolate landscape, where the boundaries between the hunter and the hunted are difficult to perceive (edited for punctuation).

On the Rotten Tomatoes web-site (
www.rottentomatoes.com), Jason Wood (in Little White Lies) is quoted as saying 'Seemingly destined to go largely under-appreciated, this is a work of precision and complexity'. (Given that someone - presumably by mistake - has posted a review of the film from 2011 of the same name on IMDb's web-page for this film (www.imdb.com/title/tt1190072), there is evidence of under-appreciation that it even exists as a separate entity!)

Looking at what both who Wood is (or appears to be?) in relation to the film's distribution and what has written (
www.littlewhitelies.co.uk/theatrical-reviews/the-hunter-12001), he is clearly not going to give away exactly what happens or, more importantly, the rationale behind it. But there are two short sections (amongst others) that I think most worth quoting, the first for where the film is, the second for where it may have come from:

[...] And yet the film also feels incredibly universal. In its sense of intrigue, unrest and corruption in high places, it perhaps has more in common with a number of iconic American films of the 1970s.

[...] Minimalism has been a watchword for this confident, intelligent and distinctive filmmaker, and in his pared-down aesthetic, introspection and nominal dialogue Pitts exhibits echoes of Jean-Pierre Melville and recalls Walter Hill’s
The Driver (edited for punctuation).


At the screening, I definitely felt as Wood does in the first quotation - it was a very intelligent take on those earlier films, with a good dose of redneck lawlessness thrown in for good measure.


As for the specific echoes that he identifies, I will need to consider them, and also to look at obtaining my own copy of The Hunter. What I will say is this, by way of indicating my own thinking about the film: what is it that we are told about how Ali's wife comes to be killed?