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OKAY Film of the Week (22)

Bill Forsyth’s work often looks at first glance rather light and “small”, like it was made for TV. Gregory’s Girl merely followed a geeky Glasgow teen’s search for love. And this week’s Okay Film of the Week Local Hero is a seemingly humble story about an oil executive’s misadventures in a tiny Scottish village. But both movies end up tackling the big questions - and absorbing their audiences - through their careful and loving attention to the details of their characters.

The latter also contains standout cinematography and an hilariously quirky turn from Burt Lancaster as an astrology-obsessed oil magnate. It’s in the small things that it shines: the cold-war Russian sailor coming ashore to check his stock portfolio; the west-African vicar; the “most famous phone box in Scotland” ringing plaintively, unanswered, at the end.

The joke is an old one - the city boy breezes into town thinking he can gull the hicks but is soon surprised by their sophistication. But it’s told with such warmth and style, and its ending is so bittersweet, that it bears revisiting nearly thirty years on.

“OKAY film” of the week (21)

Andreas Dresen’s Grill Point or Halbe Treppe took the Jury Grand Prix Prize at the Berlinale 2002 and marked the starting point for a very succesful decade of filmmaking. In 2008 Dresen won the Jury Award in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard competition with Cloud 9  before taking the lead prize in the same section with Stopped on Track in 2011 - which also won Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actor in a Supporting Role and Best Film at last month’s German Film Awards.

Halbe Treppe (literally meaning”half the stairs”) can be translated as “midway” or even better “in transition”. The film tells the story of two normal couples in their late forties, who have literally arrived at the midpoint of their life. Everything is okay but life is far from great for anybody. Things change dramatically when two of the central characters start having an affair with each other.

The film underlines Andreas Dresen’s talent in shining light on the life of alleged ‘ordinary  people. But even more impressive is the method Dresen works with - a hallmark of his films and surely a key ingredient in his success: improvisation. Even though all of the scenes are notoriously planned and scripted, Dresen allows his actors full freedom and as much space as possible to improvise as required.

The result is breathtaking and leads to incredible performances from actors, who were often unknown before they started working with the director. Any method is far from a sure thing and this one above all needs a lot of empathy, especially from the director. However if you are looking for a funny, touching and entertaining film, showcasing remarkable perfomances along the way Halbe Treppe is a very good choice.

(unfortunately we could not find an English Trailer online so here is a short and very interesting interview with the director)

“OKAY film” of the week (20)

Anthony Mann’s The Naked Spur is a Western with all the right ingredients.

Three men with a common goal but a very different agenda, one very smart villain accompanied by a beautiful blonde girl and a $5000 reward at the end of the road, already make for a great story. Throw in some first class actors like James Stewart, Janet Leigh or Robert Ryan and you got yourself a true classic.

Anthony Mann directs this in many (good) ways typical Western with such speed and dynamic, that one is very often reminded of the 80s action classics which have made Hollywood what it is today. Mann surely is one of the godfathers of modern American cinema and this film is a very good example why.

Built upon a script that rightly deserved its Oscar nomination, Mann shows how modern the classic Western genre can really get. The Naked Spur is much more than just Indians, cowboys, guns and scenic mountain ranges, it is above all a moral tale about greed, revenge, honour, lust and love.

If you are a full-on Western hater this one probably isn’t for you. However if you like to spend two hours on the sofa chasing through the Rocky Mountains in Technicolor, The Naked Spur is a safe bet.

“OKAY film” of the week (19)

Kenji Mizoguchi’s final piece Akasen Chitai or Street of Shame is this week’s OKAY film.

Like most of Mizoguchi’s work it deals with the (unjust) status of women in Japanese society, but unlike his better known films like The Life of Oharu or Ugetsu Monogatari, it plays in what was then the present - the early 1950s.

Unfortunately the director himself never got to witness the reactions his film provoked, as he passed away only weeks after its completion.

Street of Shame is about a group of prostitutes who are faced with losing their primary source of income when prostitution is scheduled to be officially banned from the streets of Tokyo. Japan’s Anti-Prostitution law was passed the year the film was produced.

Portraying a multitutde of protagonists with a staging finesse that is at times mind-blowing, Mizoguchi delivers a story that is at once gripping and deeply unsettling. Eventually it exposes the hypocrisy of a society that at no point treats women as fully equal yet wants to dictate the moral foundation for their daily life.

The film anticipated many of today’s praised TV series with its psychologically complex writing. And with camera movements as dynamic as a modern action flick, it’s no conincidence that Akira Kurosawa - at times his biggest rival - called Mizoguchi “my favourite Japanese director”.

“OKAY film” of the week (18)

The Night of the Shooting Stars by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani belongs to that micro-genre of films where war is seen through the eyes of a child, in this case an eight-year-old Italian girl. Years later, now grown up, she tells her son of a flight from a hilltop village undertaken by Tuscan peasants in the last days of World War Two. For the young girl it’s a thrilling adventure. Her memories mix with those of the Tavianis to create a huge canvas - the fascists and the partisans, retreating Germans and advancing Allies - that is often desperate and violent, but also undeniably romantic and exciting.

The film pays tribute to neo-realism and doesn’t flinch at the horror of war. But it also uses the device of memory to vault into extraordinary scenes of imagination and magic. A hastily-convened wedding outside a disused church and a battle in a cornfield become lyrically charged when replayed through the young girl’s eyes. It’s a film with both scope and detail, and great heart.

“OKAY film” of the week (17)

Rain all day, at least here for us in London. So what’s better than a good film in your DVD player and who’d be better suited than Alfred Hitchcock?

Well here is one of his earlier masterpieces, which, while unfortunately never getting the same recognition as films like Vertigo, North by Northwest or Rear Window, surely belongs to the best of its kind.

Like many good Hollywood films from the forties, Rebecca starts off in the South of France, in Monaco to be precise. What begins as a romantic fling soon becomes a living nightmare. Joan Fontaine finds herself alone in a big mansion on the Cornwall coast, haunted by the ghost or better memento of her predecessor, that is her husband’s ex-wife, whos name lends the film its title.

Like with all things Hitchcock you can expect some very well-crafted Angst, lots of blonde women and an overall feeling of rather weird sexual tension. Naturally not the most romantic setting, but then again, things are bound to go wrong if you agree to a proposal being made from another room. But see for yourself….

“OKAY film” of the week (16)

Lance Hammer’s 2008 feature film debut Ballast is our OKAY film of this week.

Ballast is one these fine examples where the limitations of independent cinema - actors, locations, crew, budget - turn into its biggest advantages. Shot in the cold, wet, open fields of the Mississipi Delta in winter, it tells the story of young boy James and his uncle Lawrence.

Looking at the condition they and the people around live in, once could easily call this a sad film. There is death, abuse, drugs, violence and a breath-taking climate of poverty and social injustice, which in the light of the more recent post-Katrina developments, lets you doubt again if the term “modern democracy” really fits for a country like the USA - for more on this we recommend David Simon’s late HBO piece Treme.

The strength of the film is that it moves slowly and especially that it takes its characters seriously. The result is a compelling drama, that is far away from the (boring) stylised lower class romance which European arthouse cinema has been slapping out in heaps over the last years.

The combination of Hammer’s effective directing style, mostly based on improvisation (most of the actors are non-professionals), and the stunning cinematography of British DOP Lol Crawley - who went on to shoot Four Lions back home - results in a film which shows the best that US independent cinema has to offer.

We wouldn’t go as far as calling it Dardenne’ish but yes Hammer’s style has something from the Belgium brothers (imagine Brussels, but in Alabama). After all the 2008 Directing and Cinematography Awards at Sundance were very well deserved.

“OKAY film” of the week (15)

Obsession is one of those rare cases where sophisticated filmmaking and pure entertainment come together for what we find to be a true  cinema masterpiece.

The fact that Brian De Palma - in case you wondered, also the man behind films like Scarface, The Bonfire of Vanities or Carlito’s Way -  is such a succesful visual storyteller has a lot to do with being an absolute movie buff himself. Above all his influences however stands one figure, shadowing De Palma’s work like nothing else: Alfred Hitchcock.

Almost every De Palma film is an open Hitchcock hommage, often very bluntly copying or let’s say lending plot points, editing styles or even the mis-en-scènes from the great master.

Obsession has all the typical Hitchcock ingredients. Crime, mistaken identiy, suppressed sexual desire, a lot of angst and finally a gripping score from Hitchcock’s house composer Bernard Herrmann. All together they make for a thriller that is full of suspense and highly psychological.

“OKAY film” of the week (14)

For many Jean-Pierre Melville is the most American of all French directors.
On the one hand this is based on his love for all things US. Melville used to drive around Paris in large convertible American cars. When forced to hide his Jewish decent during the German occupation it was no coincidence that he adapted his surname from one of the United States’ most famous writers.

Melville adored great American movie directors like John Ford or (especially) William Wyler. It it is no surprise that he was very keen on portraying - in parts highly intellectual - topics in a manner that were not only technically ground-breaking but foremost visually enticing.

For him actors - much like in Hollywood - were on screen to be icons, heightened untouchable versions of the everyday man. Unsurprisingly Alain Delon, an actor that embodied this clean-cut performance style like no other quickly became his go-to lead.

Melville’s work can be divided into two categories. First gangster films in which Melville worshipped the Film Noir classics of Hollywood’s golden age. Secondly films about the French resistance which in many ways had played a big part in Melville’s personal life as well.

For this director, a man of action and a radical individualist, filmmaking was a natural succession of the guerrilla lifestyle adapted during the war. His way was the right way, one was either with him or against him.
Very early Melville had build his own little studio in Paris (again a Hollywood reference) where he lived and worked. Many elements of his “home” were thus included and re-appear in his films.

Army of Shadows from 1969 is one of the few of his works that taps into both categories mentioned above. A very expensive production, shot in Lyon, Marseille, Paris and London, it portrayed the doings of the organised group that defied Nazi occupation often by way of utterly brutal methods - an army literally operating in the dark. The way the film was shot and lit corresponded to its title, again paying in its form homage to American Film Noir.

Today Army of Shadows seems to recall many American political thrillers which were released much later (and to much bigger worldwide success).

Also it clearly shows Melville’s very own world-view: Only the strongest survive.

“OKAY film” of the week (13)

The beauty of cinema often lies in its ability to tell us stories that - apart from sci-fi or fantasy - would never be possible in the real world. François Truffaut, in many ways one of the greatest filmmakers of all times, is a specialist when it comes to creating characters that, however shown in a perfectly real world setting, push the boundaries of what is possible in everyday life.

As an avid disciple of the poetic realism cinema of Jean Renoir or Marcel Carné, Truffaut stressed the term poetic as much as reality allowed it.

Charles Denner as Bertrand Morane in The Man who loved Women is one of his finest examples. He is a man who simply can’t stop himself from loving all the women.

Morane is everything else but a simple philanderer or womaniser. Much more he represents the ultimate embodiment of man’s passion for the female sex. His admiration is absolute in as far as it is (of course) sexual but also aesthetic and intellectual. Because he loves all the women he naturally wants to please all of them - again sexually and intellectually.

Of course he must fail, as pleasing one must mean disappointing another. Morane is a tragic hero par excellence. In the end he is left with only one solution to end his passion qua suffering.

Like no other Truffaut manages to simultaneously show the beauty as well as tragedy of love in its demand for exclusivity. Along the way he delivers a stunning hommage to all the women of the world. While Bertrand Morane is in the end nobody else but François Truffaut himself.