This week at Gone Cinema Poaching, I consider John Woo’s Red Cliff, albeit the US release that runs about half as long as the 5 Hour Chinese Cut.
The film has its merits, but is ultimately far too incomplete to consider worthy.
Modern Horror films rarely take their time unfolding, usually pounding visceral material early and often. But Pontypool, the new film from Canadian director Bruce McDonald (The Tracey Fragments), slowly engulfs the viewer, containing the entire film within a single location then utilizing a complex sound design to surround the space with offscreen terror. This makes the opening act a highly effective re-invention of the Zombie apocalypse, as disc jockey Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie) and his small crew try to make sense of the shocking eye-witness accounts phoned in from their small Ontario town. Conflicting stories from panicked citizens blur the situation and Mazzy’s cocky arrogance soon turns to sincere fright. McDonald handles these early scenes with delicate care, using close-ups to pressurize character emotion as the exterior audio feeds begin to grow more extreme and the walls of the underground radio station close in.
But the brilliant ambiguity of the first half quickly dissolves into random exposition and contrivance as McDonald attempts to explain the cause of the violent outbreak and mass psychosis, ultimately lessoning and simplifying the impact of the set-up. The words of the script end up defiling the haunting audio storytelling taking place, and our imaginations aren’t able to run wild any more. Which is a shame, because at its best, Pontypool ambitiously deconstructs the end of the world down to a series of screams, pleas for help, police sirens, and helicopter gun fire. As Mazzy and company listen in horror, we are forced to wonder when and where the damn will break, and McDonald layers on the possibilities using frequencies of sound and to contemplate a new form of interior destruction that words should never describe.
Without the presence of Tilda Swinton, Julia would be a catastrophic mess. As the alcoholic, morally questionable kidnapper in Erick Zonca’s film, Swinton’s shifty twitches in personality, her honest desperation, her beautifully imporivisational adeptness, keep this otherwise scattered film from running off the tracks completely. We live and breath with Julia through her most vulnerable, idiotic, and ultimately compassionate decisions, yet for every revelatory moment there’s an enigmatic and asinine filmmaking decision hurling her into a deeper, convoluted hell.
There are many strong proponents of this film that I deeply respect, but it’s amazing to me these critics can so easily reconcile the abysmal sense of pacing Zonca shows throughout the lengthy story, setting the movie in motion to a specific direction, then through some formulaic force of screenwriting propel Julia and Tom, the young boy she’s holding hostage, into a completely different one. This approach grates the life out Swinton’s momentum, creating a tension between performance and directing that is both strange and disheartening. Maybe this very attribute is what they admire most, but a character’s drunken haziness does not give credence for the filmmaking to be equally mindless and hazy.
Not to say Julia doesn’t have moments to admire. The opening sequence crammed with drunken bodies, Julia wasted out of her mind flinging against other women like a bowling ball knocking over pins, calls to mind the smokey locales and characters of Cassavetes. And thankfully Julia’s relationship with Tom never fully redeems her, achieving a deep complexity by slowly revealing the impact of her actions and the details of her life more important than money or booze. For all these superb moments, Zonca shreds the film with endless plot twists, chase sequences, and standoffs where Julia feels completely out of place. Julia is up to her eyeballs in trouble from the start, but never once does the Zonca make any of these physical conflicts as real as the personal turmoil going on inside Swinton’s daring performance.
As the title would suggest, Le Silence de Lorna (Lorna’s Silence) concerns itself with exploring the inner turmoil of Lorna (Arta Dobroshi), an Albanian immigrant living in Belgium who happens to be embroiled in a fake marriage scheme. The muddy plot involving Russian gangsters and Belgium hustlers evolves at a snails pace, but the Dardennes are more concerned with the moral ambiguity inside Lorna after she helps double-cross her puppet-husband (Jeremie Regnier) for a future with another man.
The Dardennes once again manipulate time throughout, sometimes jumping days with a single edit throwing the audience into catch-up mode. But this makes their films challenging, and what continuously draws me back to their fractured morality plays. Time and space are never secure, and in Lorna’s case, constantly changing from the inside out. Lorna’s torment produces deep guilt, but doesn’t reveal itself until the convolution of the outside world subsides, and the silence of the woods allows us to finally understand her actions.
Le Silence de Lorna lives and breathes with Arta Dobroshi’s performance, a central mission statement against the obviously male-dominated narrative and environment. For most of the film, Lorna acts as a pinball between one male hierarchy to the next, a singular figure pushed to the brink by greed and manipulation. While Le Silence de Lorna may not be as masterful as The Son or La Promesse at constructing tragedy out of the small details in life, it still succeeds in revealing the subtle shifts toward madness inherent in the process.
In her short career as a feature filmmaker, Lucrecia Martel has deepened the complex well of Art Cinema, developing an enigmatic collusion between close visual framing and layered ambient sound design, all while mining for universal contradictions and local tragedies within Argentina’s widening class divide. With The Headless Woman, her latest and most harrowing film, Martel finally transcends the minor failures of La Cienaga and The Holy Girl (vague characterizations, scattered plot-lines) and focuses her gaze, constructing a singular vision of trauma, guilt, and disavowal, a perfect realization of her previous obsessions.
The Headless Woman begins quietly enough, in the barren outskirts of an Argentinean town where three boys chase each other through the thick brush. Two are brothers, and one jumps down into a canal, asking his sibling to follow. The younger boy jumps in, only to find he’s been tricked. The older, stronger brother has already catapulted himself from the space. Martel holds the camera on the younger boy attempting to get out, running up the slab of concrete, failing to rise to safe ground. Then darkness, as Martel moves on leaving the boy’s fate ambiguous but indelible.
This opening is crucial for many reasons. The boys represent the native Indian lower classes often found in Martel’s films, emblems of repression that are pushed to the fringes by people of wealth and status. Also the concrete canal evokes a clear visualization of the unending quagmire between classes in Argentina. The film then cuts to Veronica (Maria Onetta), Martel’s focus on the Argentine elite. While driving home on these same dusty country roads, Veronica hits something while answering her cell phone. The camera never leaves the interior of the car as Veronica’s face turns from shock to panic. Martel gives a short glimpse of a body from afar, but the audience is never given clear evidence of what Veronica has struck. Is it an animal, or the boy previously trapped in the canal?
The uncertainty haunts Veronica’s upper class existence for the entire rest of the film. But in The Headless Woman, this plot device does not function as it would in Hollywood filmmaking. There will be no revenge, no psycho-killer seeking retribution. The film concerns itself with Veronica’s collage of emotions after she panics and drives away from the scene. Martel sends Veronica back to her world of privilege and wealth a tainted woman, and the development of both her layered reaction and those of the men around her make the film a masterful exploration of character and context. Accountability disappears as corners are cut, evidence is destroyed, and the entire fair gets brushed under the rug without protest.
Martel makes Veronica the center of every scene, stalking her with the camera enacting a visual parallel for her psychological state. Natural sounds fade in and out, scenes overlap onto each other, and life continues on without further incident. No police investigation, just interior conflict. Is Veronica truly shaken by the possibility of killing a child, or is she merely scared of getting caught? Maria Onetta’s eyes explore Veronica’s entire character arc, but never answer this disturbing question, making this mostly silent performance one of the year’s best. The Headless Woman ends in one stunning scene of guilt morphing into indifference, collecting the social artifacts of Martel’s oeuvre in a casual social setting, unmasking the skeletons of everyday life with a final moment of numbing silence.
Silence is torture, and torture is silence. So goes Steve McQueen’s riveting debut Hunger, a brutally restrained biopic about IRA prisoner Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender), who in 1981 conducted a hunger strike while attempting to gain political status from the Thatcher-led UK government. McQueen makes Sands’ story the centerpiece of a larger mosaic within the prison, where guards, prisoners, and riot cops all construct a collective fabric woven by isolation, fear, and loyalty. While most of the film takes place inside cells, meeting rooms, and infirmaries – moments simmering with a predetermined sense of tragedy and loneliness – the supposed “free” spaces outside, like public roads and parking lots, remain vacant, even menacing throughout, as if war could break out at any time in even the calmest suburban neighborhoods.
Hunger whittles the standard biopic conventions down to an elemental level, where character information, bursts of violence, and crucial politics rush by in a flash, lasting just long enough for a vapor of subtext to potently linger. McQueen brilliantly builds his narrative out of silence within horrific spaces, relying on the textures of the place to speak for its characters. Feces cover the walls in Jackson Pollack-like patterns, urine flows from under doorways, and blood stains overlap on the concrete floors, stubborn displays of disobedience from the inside out.
Everything builds off of Michael Fassbender’s haunting physical performance, both before his body transforms into a riddled mesh of bones and sores, and certainly after. There’s really only one major dialogue scene in the film, and it’s a 16 minute stunner between Sands and Father Dominic Moran (Liam Cunningham) shot in one static long take. Here, McQueen sums up his film’s thesis – ideological suffering and physical pain are completely different entities, yet connected by the failures of compassion and communication.
Hunger takes this momentum and churns one final silent coup, a slow, mostly still disintegration of body but not mind, showing Sands at rest remembering the simple beauty of his origins, unwavering in his dedication to the cause. Is it real, romanticized, or just memories merging together to justify his sacrifice? This mental battle is both a scary, devastating, and thought-provoking finale to a film dedicated to the horrors of interior conflict.
Trains have long been a key cinematic emblem, poetic lifelines of movement simultaneously bringing people closer together and farther apart. In Shane Meadow’s brilliant Somers Town, these skeletons of transportation reside just out of reach, offscreen treasures of potential travel waiting to be discovered by each character, both young and old. But they also represent a collective displacement – for young Polish immigrant Marek (Piotr Jagiello) living with his father in London, and the British runaway Tomo (Thomas Turgoose) he befriends – pushing each away from traumatic pasts toward uncertain futures. It’s this dynamic that makes what seems like a simple story brim with subtext.
When Marek and Tomo meet by chance in a coffee shop, their social compasses share a common confusion of identity, drawing them together into an essential friendship. Their relationship is completely organic and Meadows handles his young actors with the perfect combination of honesty and sympathy. Filmed mostly in stunning black and white photography, Somers Town captures both characters as they discover the minor disappointments of young love and the harsh realities of the adult world. But Meadows always keeps a longing hope on the horizon, and in the final moments Kings Cross Train station provides an epic symbol of possibility for the young lads.
Shane Meadows has quickly become one of my favorite directors and one of Britain’s finest, miraculously jumping from genre to genre without sacrificing his unique tenderness and humanity. Although tonally as different as they come, Dead Man’s Shoes, This Is England, and now Somers Town all dissect traditional family structures by addressing complexities of class hidden beneath the surface, revealing a dichotomy between trauma and possibility that resonates beyond the final frame. For Somers Town, this approach works especially well at fleshing out Marek and Tomo’s shared experience, whether they’re watching the trains arrive or depart.
