Films

Woman of the Dunes/Suna no onna, Japan 1964

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Friday November 4th at 4.30 p.m. and Wednesday November 9th at 1.00 p.m.

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This is one of the classic films screening at the Leeds International Film festival and one of the few in the original format of 35mm. It is part of a retrospective ‘Soundtracks’ and the film has a minimalist and modernist electronic score by Japanese composer Takemitsu Toru. He was a regular collaborator with the film director Teshigahara Hiroshi and this is the latter’s most notable film. It won the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes International Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Foreign-Language Film category.

It is an example of the modernist film-making found in the Japanese New Wave of the 1960s. It is a film of ambiguities but with a fascinating narrative and characters. An etymologist goes to the beach collect specimens for the day but events prevent his return to the city in the evening. The story develops in beautifully unexpected ways.  Visually the film is a tour de force, especially in the black and white deep focus cinematography of Segawa Hiroshi. The imagery at times is abstract and the music of Takemitsu adds to the unconventional feel of the film.

The film also has a strong set of social themes running through it. These receive extra emphasis from the opening and closing credits which offer an added dimension to the allegory. The film runs for just over two hours and exercises at time a hypnotic feel. Not to be missed on the big screen.

I, Daniel Blake UK/France/Belgium 2016

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Screening daily from Friday October 21st until Thursday November 3rd               [excepting Sunday October 30th]

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The new film directed by Ken Loach comes garlanded with the Palme d’Or from the Cannes Film Festival. As usual it is scripted by Paul Laverty and has been part-funded by the BBC, the BFI and European companies. The film is set in Newcastle-upon-Tyne among the northern English working class. And the plot revolves round the travails of ordinary working people attempting to cope with an unsympathetic and exploitative state system. Thus it combines situations and themes that have dominated Loach’s films since the seminal Cathy Come Home (1966).

Ken Loach’s long and illustrious career makes him one of the most productive of contemporary British film-makers and the oldest recipient of the Cannes Festival’s premier award. Yet his work has a continuity and repetition that makes all his films easily recognisable. We are told that, as is his wont, the film was shot chronologically. It uses both experienced and non-professional performers. And it relies to a degree on the long shot and the long take, giving it an observational style. Note, despite the clips in the Versus… documentary this film screens in standard widescreen, 1.85:1 and is in colour. It was shot on Kodak film stock but is being distributed on a DCP.

In an interview this week Loach took the BBC and television generally to task for their failings in representing the working class of Britain in any meaningful manner. So his continuing engagement with this world and with the politics of resistance makes the film essential viewing.

Ousmane Sembène ‘Father of African Film’

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Sunday October 9th 2.30 p.m.

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The Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène was a key pioneer in the development of an indigenous African cinema. Now a new documentary by Samba Gadjigo, SEMBÈNE! (2015), is screening along with a Q&A with the director. Also there will be a screening of La Noire de… / Black Girl, (1966). And later, on October 18th, there will be a screening of his final film Moolaadé (2004).

Sembène’s films are rarely seen in the UK but they are powerful, emotionally involving but also politically incisive. Both screenings are well worth the visit to the cinema: they are few such opportunities and the quality of Sembène and his colleagues work deserves the big screen.

3 Reasons To See…The Girl With All The Gifts

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1. The cast: Gemma Arterton, Glenn Close and newcomer Sennia Nanua make up a strong female cast. Paddy Considine also stars; remember when he came to the Picture House to show Tyrannosaur?

2. Mark Kermode is another Hyde Park visitor who loves the film:

3. Director Colm McCarthy previously directed the entire second series of BBC’s Peaky Blinders

The Girl With All The Gifts is showing daily at Hyde Park Picture House from Friday 30th September.

 

3 Reasons To See…Hunt For The Wilderpeople

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  1. What We Do In The Shadows was writer/director Taika Waititi’s previous film and the winner of the Audience Award at LIFF28. Unusually for me, it was a film I saw three times in the cinema and thought it got better each time.
  2. Everybody loves it. Until very recently Wilderpeople had 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, meaning it hadn’t received a negative review from any critics. It’s now dropped to 98% but that’s still ‘Certified Fresh‘.  On Letterboxd (“a social network for sharing your taste in film”) it has been one of the highest rated films of the year.
  3. Taika Waititi is also directing Thor: Ragnarok (2017) and found time to make this short film, possibly the best entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe yet:

Hunt For The Wilderpeople is screening daily at Hyde Park Picture House from Friday 23rd September.

In the Mood for Love, Hong Kong 2000

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24th September – 2.30 PM

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Bill Walton takes a look at In The Mood For Love ahead of Saturday’s 35mm screening and panel discussion on the Chinese film industry.

“He remembers those vanished years. As though looking through a dusty window pane, the past is something he could see, but not touch. And everything he sees is blurred and indistinct.”

The magic of cinema offers many tantalising glimpses into other cultures, other times, other ways of seeing. Whether it’s transgender sex workers in California (Tangerine, 2015), censorship in Iran (Taxi Tehran, 2015), the self-justification by Indonesian death squads (The Act of Killing, 2012), corrupt officials in Russia (Leviathan, 2013), or life on a council estate in Bradford, Yorkshire (The Selfish Giant, 2013) … we can always gain from such different ways of seeing the world.

In the Mood for Love brings to life Hong Kong in the ‘60s. While there is a powerful code of propriety it cannot completely crush the intense desires for intimacy between a man and women whose marriages are not going well. The film subtly explores loneliness and hope, love and betrayal. The cultural context is integral to the story. I found that Wong Kar-wai’s attempts to tackle such themes in the United States (My Blueberry Nights, 2007) did not work nearly as well.

Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung): “Feelings can creep up just like that. I thought I was in control.”

Everything about this film is beautiful, from the acting, the photography (Christopher Doyle), and the haunting music, to the design of the credits. No wonder it was recently voted by critics to be one of the greatest films of the 21st Century. This screening has been arranged with the Business Confucius Institute and will be preceded by a panel discussion examining the state of contemporary Chinese cinema.

Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung): You notice things if you pay attention.

Gene Wilder 1933 to 2016

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Teri Garr, Gene Wilder and Marty Feldman, 'Young Frankenstein'

Teri Garr, Gene Wilder and Marty Feldman, ‘Young Frankenstein’

Recently deceased Gene Wilder was an impressive film actor, mainly in comic roles and best when playing some sort of likable eccentric. Wilder progressed from Broadway to films; opening his career with producer and director Mel Brooks. His best work was probably with Brooks: The Producers (1967), especially in the last 45 minutes, revels in bad taste, performed with marvellous aplomb by Wilder and one-time blacklisted Zero Mostel. Blazing Saddles (1974)  is one of the best send-ups of the western.  But the key film is one on which Wilder also had writing credits, Young Frankenstein (1974). His performance as the grandchild of the infamous innovator was splendid. And the film also enjoyed a host of excellent supporting characters, notably Marty Feldman as Igor.

Wilder also teamed up several times with Afro-American actor Richard Pryor, early on in Blazing Saddles. Then in Silver Streak (1976) and Stir Crazy (1980)  which were both very funny but also in advance of the times in their pairing of white and black protagonists. Pryor’s tutoring of Wilder in ‘street cred’ is great.

The coming Saturday the Hyde Park is screening Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971), an accomplished musical adaptation from the Roald Dahl novel. It is also the centenary of the latter much-loved writer.

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There is one other of Wilder’s films that would pay revisiting. He has a small role, as an undertaker, in Bonnie and Clyde (1957), still one of the outstanding examples of the gangster genre. Wilder received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting actor in The Producers  and as co-scriptwriter for Young Frankenstein.

Things to Come / L’avenir, France 2016

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From 9th September – 15th September

Mia Hansen-Løve wins the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival

Mia Hansen-Løve wins the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival

French cinema seems better than either the British or the USA industries in bringing on the talents of women filmmakers. And this film which opens this week is a good example. It won the prestigious Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival.

The director, Mia Hansen-Løve, is Parisian who has directed several fine films including Father of My Children (Le père de mes enfants 2009), Goodbye First Love (Un amour de jeunesse 2011) and Eden (2014). She writes her own screenplays successfully, something that many young directors would be well advised to avoid. She also has some experience of acting in films, which probably helps her work. And she partners the filmmaker Oliver Assayas, which probably also helps, though they have very distinctive styles and interests.

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Starring in the film is one of the outstanding contemporary actresses Isabelle Hubert, a fellow Parisian. She has deservedly received a profile and extended interview in the September issue of Sight & Sound. She was recently seen at the Hyde Park Picture House in Valley of Love (2015). This was not a great film but was worth watching for the performances of Hubert and of her co-star Gérard Depardieu. Both are formidable presences in European cinema, and indeed beyond. My earliest memory of Isabelle Hubert is dashing from NFT Screen I to NFT Screen II to watch The Lacemaker (La dentellière, 1977). It was a great introduction and I have enjoyed every facet of her career since. Not all her films are great, but if she has appeared in a bad movie it is one I have missed.

So reckon a real treat in store and a must to see.

Sid & Nancy UK 1986

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Saturday 3rd September at 6pm

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Love Kills – Celebrating the 30th anniversary of Sid & Nancy

 As everyone knows, the ingredients for a perfect love story always follow certain rules – sex, drugs, murder, heroin overdoses.

Welcome to love – Alex Cox style.

Sid & Nancy: Love Kills, Cox’s seminal and gritty retelling of the doomed love affair of Sex Pistols’ bassist Sid Vicious and his American groupie-turned-girlfriend Nancy Spungen, turns 30 this year.

Yet it’s lost none of its edginess and vitality, in part largely due to the charismatic turns of its protagonists: Gary Oldman, in his first major film role, and Chloe Webb.

This is not a bio-pic in the conventional sense of the term – Cox isn’t interested in the childhood or peaks and troughs of his characters’ lives: this is a portrayal of the destruction of two people, infatuated with each other and with heroin, and their inevitable and nihilistic end. That destruction permeated into the making of the film: Oldman lost so much weight to play the emaciated punk icon he ended up in hospital.

Throw in an appearance by Courtney Love as a junkie (Love originally auditioned for Nancy – how prophetic would that have been in her later unstable relationship with Kurt Cobain!?), music by Joe Strummer and The Pogues – and, bizarrely, rumours that all five original members of Guns N’ Roses appeared as extras, long before they even met to form a band! – and you have the making of a great rock n’ roll opera that pulls no punches.

Interestingly, if anyone’s interested in checking out the copious amount of research Cox did in preparation for this film, his two huge notebooks can be viewed at the Bradford Media Museum!

Deep Water / Eaux Profondes France 1981

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Monday 29th August – 4.20pm

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The latest film screening in the Adapting Miss Highsmith season at Hyde Park Picture House, is Michel Deville’s thriller of marital disharmony, Deep Water (Eaux profondes, 1981), adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s novel of the same name.

The season of films, showing on DCPs at select cinemas in the UK, was curated by Edinburgh’s Filmhouse in association Waterstones bookshops (and supported by the BFI) and has a total of 13 films, 12 features and 1 short, that represent the majority of major film adaptations of Patricia Highsmith’s work. Only two of these (Todd Haynes’s Carol and the short, A Mighty Nice Man, directed by Jonathan Dee) were helmed by a director from Highsmith’s home country, suggesting that her popularity was greater in Europe.

Monday’s film, Eaux Profondes was directed by Michel Deville, a lesser known director from the French Nouvelle Vague era. He is a director known primarily for his erotic comedies and dramas, but this film, funnily enough, recalls the psychological thrillers of Claude Chabrol.

The plot concerns a married couple Vic (Jean-louis Trintignant playing a familiar character from Highsmith’s thrillers, a charismatic psychopath) and Melanie (Isabelle Huppert), whose relationship is fraught with jealousy. Vic appears to have secretive affairs, and also does little to stop his much younger wife flirting and possibly sleeping with other men, then when Vic’s jealousy drives him to murder, suspicions towards him create fresh tension in their lives.

Check out the Adapting Miss Highsmith website for more info on the season: https://adaptingmisshighsmith.com