A field of view

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

8 July

* Contains spoilers *

People who would find Tarkovsky ‘just boring’ won’t like – or ‘get’ – this film, as I know from glancing at a review on IMDb that churlishly gives it two stars. As if it has broken some sort of naturalistic promise that cinema makes, or one to be exciting (though this film is).

That review claims that being filmed in monochrome makes the English countryside look ordinary. It does nothing of the sort, and is filmed with a real sense of wonder – just look at the short where the four men are first walking down into the space to see why. (Meanwhile, the conspiracy theorists are at work, claiming that it stole someone else’s idea.)

I don’t care – though I did stop to wonder – whether a mid-seventeenth century field would be as big as that*, but our sense of time and space are only as big as our capacity to believe that the four main actors have been transported out of the English Civil War to join O’Neill – the hedgerow is to the field as the wardrobe is to Narnia. Apart from a knowing Essex joke, Amy Jump gives us little in her able script to dislocate us, and, for all that I care, the men may be from some other age, though they speak a passably historical English.

I think that the mushrooms / toadstools are a red herring as a way o understanding this film. Again, I don’t much care whether such hallucinogenic fare was to be had (as who is not to say that this is an accident of this field), or whether hardened soldiers (or those living more closely to the land) would not be used to what they were eating. When, although Whitehead (Reece Shearsmith) does not eat of it, the men adopt a stew that is already being made (presumably by O’Neil), many of the mushrooms that they add are unremarkable, except at the end, when they are of a more wild nature.

If they have any effect, it is to urge them in the effort to pull up a carved stake – but a stake with a life of its own, whereas my reviewer interpreted them as trying to plough the field – whereas hallucinogenics usually lead to heady inertia and contemplation. Of course, the action may not really have been taking place, as the way in which the stake reels them back in is somewhat magical.

Which brings me to the effects. Stunning in their overpowering intensity, they are at the heart of a film where one never know who is alive, who dead, and some lives are cheaper than others. Power, control, and what one will do to prevent evil are the themes on which this film muses, and it gives us no easy answers or ending.

Inevitably, it reminds of other things such as The Pardoner’s Tale in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and it has a literary feel that complements the earthiness of a man noisily trying to excrete or of having his genitals inspected to see what ails him, which is also Chaucerian. That link, too, with C. S Lewis is quite strong, with the notion of whether one could have been away an age but no time has past, and of another place where all is played out.

This is a piece of cinema that has well been worth the wait, and which should repay another viewing – I can only guess at what impact it must have been made with those watching on Film 4, but I would not be surprised if they did not take a second look on a proper screen…


End-notes

* The issue of enclosure would probably not have borne on it as such, but this sort of huge field was brought to our landscape by mechanized agriculture and two hundred further years.


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The road to wherever

This is a review of Lore (2012)

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

28 February

This is a review of Lore (2012)

* Contains spoilers *

Lore (2012) is a film that, along the way of the journeys that we see made, shares beliefs current at the time of the fall of The Third Reich. In the case of Lore's family, neither parent is an ordinary German citizen, because he is a high-ranking SS officer and she appears implicated in unethical medical experimentation, and Lore is in the Hitlerjugend: occasional near-religious fervency for Hitler, and a disbelief in the American reports and evidence of atrocity, are the stuff of utterance in these times, when the idea that Holocaust denial could be legislated against seems impossible.

The film is not those beliefs or utterances, but they are an integral part of the travel that is encompassed from the Schwarzwald, in the far south-west, to the Baltic north of Hamburg to an island akin to, but not, Föhr, where we leave Lore. (Not before, as elsewhere, a tactile quality in the rich mud has been experienced, and the otherness of crossing by causeway to this island has vividly been shown.)

Lore, as the eldest of five, has been put in charge of getting her brothers and sisters up to the North because her mother, having denounced her husband to him as a Feigling (coward) proudly strides off to deliver herself to the forces of occupation - one of the first striking moments for Lore is when, having raced after her mother and caught her up, she finds her mother already so resigned to what she is doing that she appears to have nothing to spare for Lore and the family after those parting instructions.

What follows is the journey, the confrontation with death, brutality and violence, and it is almost all the time just the passage of the five siblings, plus Thomas when he joins their number and (and as long as) makes himself useful. Director / co-screenwriter Cate Shortland and Saskia Rosendahl as Lore brilliantly show her teetering at the edge of whether she should associate with Thomas, as an assumed Jew, or feel sexually excited by him and his touch, just as, in her fascination for the various corpses, she challenges upbringing that she should not have curiosity, and should not harm others or steal.

This fractured sense of belonging in and relating to a world that is no longer the same Germany, but even split into three zones that they have to negotiate, is there in the cinematography of the characters, with part of a face here, maybe not in focus, a focus that varies through the shot to lead to a disjunction, or a conflict between the scene and the figure in it. By contrast, the sensual, even visceral, quality of nature is fed into every frame in which it alone features, in panorama and in close detail, touches reminiscent of great masters such as Tarkovsky, but with more of a sense of urgency, though none less of integration into the narrative.

The film shows a quest, and we have to decide - as does Lore - why, for what, and what matters, because all that she knew before and trusted now seems unreliable. What does happen next matters less than that Lore has made this journey and unlearnt much in the process. Getting to where we must leave her, having been allowed to be part of that transformation (although we always knew that we stood outside it), we leave her as herself, as Lore


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