Amelie director Jean-Pierre Jeunet�s new film Micmacs is an entertaining and inventive caper about the international arms trade told with the director�s signature visual flair. Opening with a bang, the first section races through the early life of Bazil (Danny Boon), whose solider father is killed by a landmine in Algeria. His distraught mother is taken away by the men in white coats, and young Bazil ends up in an orphanage. Years later, he�s working as a video-shop clerk when a stray bullet from a gangland shooting ends up lodged in his brain.
Out of hospital, broke and homeless, Bazil falls in with a group of eccentric misfits, the Micmacs of the title, who live in a cocoon of recycled rubbish on the outskirts of Paris. The gang is led by the maternal Tambouille (Yolande Moreau) and includes numbers genius Calculette (Marie-Julie Baup), human cannonball Fracasse (Jeunet regular Dominique Pinon) and contortionist Caoutchouc (Julie Ferrier).
One day, while diving through a skip for fresh junk, Bazil notices that the two buildings on either side of the street have very familiar corporate logos. One is the firm that made the bullet in his cerebellum. The other made the landmine that did for his dear papa. Charged with a determination to put an end to both companies, he teams up with the Micmacs to pitch both company CEOs (Andre Dussolier and Nicolas Marie) against one another.
Jeunet prefers to show his audience the story, rather than have his characters explain it, so Micmacs is packed with short, snappy, almost silent sequences that, taken together, closely resemble a plot. The elaborate stings which Bazil and friends mount on the two arms dealers make up most of the film�s running time and each is more entertaining and elaborate than the last, using all of Jeunet�s considerable wit.
The execution and editing of these cinematic conceits is astonishing, as is the director�s complicated set design and hand-made props. With Boon�s mobile face and graceful movement, Micmacs is a live-action cartoon, like Buster Keaton�s take on Snow White & The Seven Dwarves, a mood further enhanced by the thunderous score taken from the archive of 1940s noir at Warner Brothers. Micmacs is a master-class in production design and visual invention, but that�s about all it is. Jeunet�s many fans will be thrilled but those seeking a deeper story, or any story at all, might be disappointed.
A Single Man is told from the point of view of its hero, George (Colin Firth), the single man in question. George is 52 and gay. It has been eight months since his partner Jim (Matthew Goode), died in a car accident while visiting his family, alone, in Colorado. In the house they shared together in Los Angeles, George still grieves. His work, teaching English at a local college, gives him no joy. His only friend, fellow ex-pat Charley (Julianne Moore), is a sad, lonely alcoholic who, like George, has no other friend in the world.
The film opens on what might be the last day of George�s life, in 1962. The first thing he does is check the pistol sitting in a bedside drawer, so the conclusion that he might use it at some stage is unavoidable. George is an obsessively neat man, and performs the same daily routine as he always does, setting out an immaculate suit, finding the perfect tie, polishing his already gleaming shoes. He heads off to class, where he uses a lecture on Aldous Huxley to talk about the myriad ways that humans differ from one another. His students don�t pay much attention, except the cheerful Kenny (Nicholas Hoult), who has a bright smile and handsome face and wonders if his lecturer will take drugs with him. George is tempted, but he has made his plans. And so the day unfolds in a series of careful arrangements, chance encounters and heartbreaking memories.
There�s a line of dialogue that passes almost unnoticed in a scene that acts as a touchstone for the entire film: �Sometimes awful things have their own kind of beauty�. A Single Man is directed by fashion designer Tom Ford, who made his name re-inventing Italian fashion house Gucci in the 1990s. Ford adapted Christopher Isherwood�s dark novel himself, and when no studio was willing to finance the film, paid for it out of his own pocket. The result is a fine debut, impressively photographed and composed, delicately phrased and paced.
Oscar nominated for the role, and hotly tipped to take home the statue, Colin Firth firmly puts aside memories of his Bridget Jones caricature to deliver a performance of astonishing restraint and emotional grace. Unable to reveal his true nature, George has lived his life from behind a mask, assuming an identity that, after decades, is finally starting to chafe. His tasteful furnishings, perfect clothes and gentlemanly demeanour have replaced his real self, with Ford emphasising the cool, coldly flawless world he has built around himself; his pristine house filled with tasteful furniture, his spotless car and down to the clinically white handkerchief George wears in his lapel pocket. The film belongs to Firth, who turns this sad character study into a tender, universal story of heartache and loss.
Adapted by South African writer Anthony Peckham from a book by journalist John Carlin, Invictus tells the story of how Nelson Mandela (Morgan Freeman, finally) conspired with Springbok captain, Francois Pienaar (Matt Damon) to turn the 1995 Rugby World Cup final into a moment of national solidarity.
Invictus opens with a prologue taken from the day, five years previously, when Mandela was released from Robbin Island prison after 27 years in jail. Now elected president, and beset on all sides by racial, economic and diplomatic problems, Mandela is casting around for a symbol of the new South Africa. He finds it in Pienaar�s rugby team, long ostracised from international sport, which not only play host to the world�s players, but have a slim chance of winning. Mandela�s support for the Springboks is not without controversy. They are a predominantly white team, with just one black player. They wear the green and gold, the same colours as the flag of the apartheid South Africa, and they play rugby, the white sport of privilege.
Telling a vast national story in under two hours requires judicious editing but Eastwood�s narrative contractions and compressions are occasionally jarringly clumsy. Mandela�s estranged wife Winnie is never seen and is represented by a broken beaded bracelet, a symbol of their broken marriage. A series of flashbacks to Mandela�s time in prison, brought about by Pienaar and the team visiting the island, come across as overly poetic and corny. Eastwood also turns Mandela�s security team, made up of black ANC members and white former Special Branch officers, into a co-operative melting-pot emblematic of the new society. These sequences, although earnestly played, come off as trite and underdeveloped, shoehorned into the wider narrative in an effort to provide an emotional background.
There are times in the middle section of the film when the momentum slows down to a lumbering trot; lengthy re-stagings of key moments in the tournament mirrored by equally ponderous political machinations taking place backstage. Far too much time is devoted to bloodless recreations of tackles, tries and drop goals, cut between endless shots of the multi-cultural crowd waving rainbow flags.
Even if you don�t know the difference between a ruck and a maul, Eastwood�s film closely follows the set trajectory of the triumphal sports movie, even down to the final being settled on the last kick of the ball. Given such a predictable outcome, is Invictus a story worth telling? When Freeman is on screen, it is. Like the man he plays, Freeman exudes charisma and gravitas in equal measure. He has captured Mandela�s stiff stance and the awkward cadences of his speech perfectly, but to his enormous credit, the performance is more an inhabitation than an impersonation.
Hirokazu Kore-eda�s unassuming Japanese family drama Still Walking opens, like so many Asian films, with images of food being prepared. A lavish meal is assembled in a small kitchen by the elderly Tosiko (Kirin Kiki) and her young daughter Chinami (the monosyllabically named Japanese cult actress You). They are getting ready to host their son Ryota (Hiroshi Abe), his sweet new wife Yukari (Yui Natsukawa) and her young son Atsushi (Shohei Tanaka), the first time he has visited since he got married. Rightly or wrongly, Ryota believes his taciturn father Kyohei (Yoshio Harada), a retired doctor, disapproves of his marriage to a widowed mother and despairs of his chances to find a career as an art restorer.
At the same time, Chinami and her dopey, always-smiling salesman husband are hoping to move into the spare room, a proposal that her mother finds less than appealing. She is settled in her ways, tending to her husband and their garden. The already tense family gathering is made more uncomfortable by falling around the anniversary of the death of the family�s eldest son Junpei, a doctor like his father, who drowned while saving another man�s life a couple of years before. Junpei�s absence haunts the film like a ghost, particularly for Ryota who believes his parents would have preferred that he had been the one to die.
Like the recent Departures, Still Walking is a film about coping with grief through repetition and ritual. Some, like anointing a gravestone with water, are benign, but the other ceremonies that have built up around the tragic death are more sinister. From a cast of talented actors, Kirin Kiki stands out as the blunt and bickering grandmother. She is superb in every scene, her quick hands providing the family with delicate edible treats and her equally quick tongue providing the film with its best moment as she explains the malevolent thinking behind her fa�ade of kindness to the boy her dead son saved. �I'm not cruel,� she tells her son, �It�s normal�.
There are moments throughout that recall the Japanese master director Yasujiro Ozu; lengthy, floor-level domestic still-lives and delicate images of the colourful garden that surrounds the house. The tone, like Ozu�s, is melancholic, tense and muted. At the heart of the film is the dining table, where the family eat, bicker, gossip and, slowly, unburden themselves. The story, which takes place over a single day and night, builds through an accretion of tiny details, oppressive silences and muttered asides, fleeting glances and fluttering gestures. Conversations begin at one point and, almost imperceptibly, conclude at another, some way distant. The root of the drama is revealed obliquely, a slow simmer of long-held grievances that never quite boils over. Restraint, in the end, wins out, but this grimly-held control only highlights the bright flashes of realistic emotion scattered all the way through what is a captivating film.
A Prophet, the new film from French genre stylist Jacques Audriard (The Beat That My Heart Skipped) is a remarkable crime epic, told with the director�s signature visual flair, centred on a young French Muslim�s struggle to survive a six-year sentence in a tough prison.
A petty criminal, Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim) arrives for his first day in the prison as an innocent thrown to the lions. Almost silent and obviously terrified, Malik is not yet a true criminal as much as he is a desperate young man. We are told he knows nobody in the jail, has no friends or family outside, no education, no resources and no plan for survival. The story of A Prophet is about how Malik comes to formulate a way out, not through the traditional escape of digging through walls but the construction of a new life outside, financially and psychologically.
The first movement of Audiard�s crime opera has Malik fall under the benign spell of Cesar Luchiani (Audriard favourite Niels Arestrup), a Corsican Mafioso who threatens to kill him unless he murders a fellow inmate, Reyeb (Hichem Yacoubi). As the Corsican keeps a close eye on proceedings, Malik puts his plan to befriend and seduce the target, practising the execution in his cell. He has no choice but to kill, and from that point on Audiard slowly and masterfully tightens the noose around the young man�s neck as the Corsican returns with further favours to ask and threats to enforce. In the film�s most audacious move, Reyeb returns as a ghost to train his own killer in how to survive.
From that point on, Audiard moves Malik carefully through an occasionally confusing maze of criminal characters, divided loyalties, sensational set-pieces plans and absorbing confrontations. A Prophet is worth seeing if for no other reason than the intensely powerful central performance from newcomer Tahar Rahim who reminded me throughout of a young Robert De Niro, bristling with energy and an ability to twist his lumpy face into extraordinarily sincere expressions.
Audriard�s toneless palette of concrete grey and criss-crossed steel makes the prison a vision of a modernist hell, the cell walls looming over the inmates, their tiny rooms filled with remnants of the outside becoming shrines to regret and revenge. The photography and editing is exemplary; the early scenes shot with a half-closed iris emphasise Malik�s new claustrophobia before the camera finds the courage to stalk the corridors, trailing the young hoodlum as he finds his feet and a way out.
Audriard and his co-screenwriters Thomas Bidegain, Abdel Raouf Dafri and Nicolas Peufaillit have combined to tell an elegantly structured story in which the accretion of tiny details and fascinating characters make A Prophet gripping from beginning to end. This is a sinewy genre story about hard nuts doing hard time that has the capacity and intelligence to address issues like social exclusion, criminal rehabilitation, state corruption and French national identity. It might be only the end of January, but A Prophet is one of the films of 2010.
Writer director Jason Reitman follows his charming teen-pregnancy comedy Juno with an adaptation of Walter Kim�s novel, Up In The Air, in which introverted HR specialist Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), travels around the US firing people from struggling corporations.
With his perfectly knotted ties and dapper suits, Bingham comes across as smooth and successful executive but he lives a strange life. Home, a mostly-empty apartment in Omaha, is just somewhere to store his suitcases. There is no Mrs Bingham, and he avoids contact with his family, even as his younger sister (Melanie Lynsky) prepares to get married. In his wry voice-over, he tells us all about the �322 days a year� he spends in airports and hotels, sharing a few tips about how to be a savvy frequent-flyer. Among his most prized possessions are various loyalty cards, oblongs of embossed plastic that allow him to access the jet-set lifestyle - perks and upgrades - with a sweep of his hand and a smile.
Bingham works for a company run by the up-tight Craig (Jason Bateman), who specialise in firing employees for corporations that lack the skills or the decency to do it themselves. Business is booming. Every day, he arrives at reception, sets up a desk with his list of names and piles of severance brochures and starts his spiel about �seeking out new opportunities�. Throughout the film Reitman employs long sequences of face-to-face interviews with the newly downsized as they talk about unemployment. If you�re wondering why these people seem normal and sincere, it�s because they are. Barring a few extended cameos from familiar faces JJ Simmons and Zach Galifianakis, these are ordinary real people telling their own stories of how they coped with losing their jobs.
Even with those touches of poignant realism, Up In The Air remains a comedy derived from a character study. The story, like Bingham�s face, lights up when he meets kindred-spirit Alex (Vera Farmiga) in a hotel bar and they start comparing the size of their stacks of plastic, like Las Vegas gamblers. Before long, they are synchronising their calendars and arranging rendezvous on the road, pit-stops across America that slowly thaw Bingham�s frozen concepts of romance. Then, new developments at work pose a challenge to his set routines. Natalie (Anna Kendrick), an ambitious junior executive, has come up with a new way of firing people over the internet. Bingham is appalled. Not only does the technology threaten to do to him what he has been doing unto others for years, it removes the human equation from his work. His well-practised common-sense lines will sound hollow when coming through a tinny computer speaker. His sympathetic brow-wrinkles and comforting nods will lose their effects when played out on a flat-screen monitor.
Even if the sight of a smiling George Clooney in a well-cut suit has become a cinematic clich�, the actor extends himself in the role of a lonely executive to give an honest, heartfelt performance that plays up to his own image as a smooth-talking charmer as much as it exposes him as a solitary figure, lost in a plush, premium-grade world of single-serving meals and tiny shampoo bottles. His performance is matched in nuance and vulnerability by Farmiga, who is much more than mere romantic window-dressing and whose back-story, when revealed, offers a salty ironic bite.
Although fashioned from the pain and misery of sudden unemployment, under Reitman�s certain direction Up In The Air finds a delicate balance between zeitgeisty comedy and trenchant reportage to become a signature film for our recessionary times.
The Road is one of the most frightening, dark and despairing books to have been written in the last decade but it struck a chord with readers, selling millions of copies around the world and winning the Pulitzer Prize for its author, Cormac McCarthy.
The last film adapted from one of McCarthy�s novels, The Coen Brothers� No Country for Old Men, went on to win four Oscars, including Best Film, and similar success looks likely for Australian director John Hillcoat�s hypnotically bleak film, a chilling vision of the end of days that sticks closely to the story McCarthy hammered out in his unique staccato style.
The apocalypse is a recurring theme in recent cinema, with filmmakers tripping over themselves to forecast how the curtain will drop on planet earth. Roland Emmerich�s tongue-in-cheek adventure 2012 bewildered us with neutrinos before scrambling for the safety of the Ark. Hillcoat gives us, simply, fire. An unexplained cataclysmic blaze races across the world, turning everything in its path to ashes. An unnamed man (Viggo Mortensen) and his ten year old son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) walk through a country reduced to embers and swirls of smoke, an unchanging grey sky smothering a blasted planet in sooty rain. There is almost nothing to eat and little clean water. Everything is covered in choking ash. The man and his son are pushing a shopping-trolley with their few possessions along an endless road, moving south in the hope of finding the sun and any sign of life.
As the two walk, they encounter other survivors, a blind old man (Robert Duvall), a thief (Michael Kenneth Williams, Omar Little from The Wire), and an unseen assailant with a bow and arrow. The man keeps a gun strapped to his chest with just two bullets remaining, a safeguard against being captured alive by the gangs of cannibals who roam the roads, looking for survivors. He snatches a few hours of sleep when he can, disturbed by dreams of his wife (Charlize Theron), who deserted them years ago, when she walked out into the blaze, unable to contemplate the future.
To say any more would ruin the story for those who have not read McCarthy�s book. Hillcoat and his screenwriter Joe Penhall have removed some of McCarthy�s more gruesome episodes and placed their emphasis on the spiritual elements of the story but much of the overwhelming threat, violence and despair remains. The Road is a feel-bad film, relentlessly so, but it is a beautiful one; conceived and realised with dreadful exactitude.
