Foring Radio

An audacious but ultimately inert attempt to revitalise Emily Bront�s much-adapted 1847 Gothic novel Wuthering Heights for a new generation, Andrea Arnold�s gritty film shares strands of DNA with Cary Fukunaga�s recent Jane Eyre in framing a historical fiction in an ultra-realistic physical and emotional landscape.

Forget notions of Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon striding across a sound-stage moor. This is not your grandfather�s Wuthering Heights. Opening with images of a rain-soaked, wind-swept Yorkshire, Arnold takes us inside the drab eponymous farmhouse where young teenager Cathy Earnshaw (played first by newcomer Shannon Beer and later by Kaya Scodelario) lives with her stern father (Paul Hinton) and cruel older brother Hindley (Lee Shaw). One night, the father returns from town with a stranger, a young black escaped slave who he takes into the house as an act of charity. Although her first reaction is to spit on the bedraggled young man, Cathy and Heathcliff (Solomon Glave, and later, newcomer James Howson) soon become friends. 

She teaches him to speak English, sitting patiently with him as he struggles to speak or wandering the muddy hills, watching the birds. Heathcliff is treated as a member of the family, but when Mr Earnshaw dies and Hindley inherits the farm, the youngster is reduced to the level of a servant and sent to live in an outhouse, where a hatred for the people who once praised themselves for their good work festers. Heathcliff continues to feel close to Cathy, a free-spirited, bright girl, even when she is encouraged to spend time with their wealthy neighbours the Lintons, forming a bond with their eldest son that might result in a beneficial marriage. Years later, the connection that formed between the young teenagers will return to damage both of them in tragic ways.

Working from a script by Olivia Hetreed (who previously adapted Tracy Chevalier's Girl With A Pearl Earring), Arnold deserves respect for radically reinterpreting a classic novel, coming at the familiar story from a new perspective of gender, race and class division. Taking her lead from Bront�s description of Heathcliff as �a dark-skinned gypsy�, the director has, for the first time, cast a black actor as the anti-hero, a novel touch that quickly becomes irrelevant; Glave and later, Howson, give performances that are far deeper than the colour of their skin. But the same cannot be said for the rest of the cast who, typically for Arnold, are made up of a combination of professional and non-professional actors. 

The film�s greatest weakness lies in the fact that the story does not survive the mid-way switch between younger and older characters, the later players being unable to match the emotional honesty of the first half, despite the story�s intricate complications being laid out in an unerringly straight line. There is little dialogue, with the characters speaking in an odd blend of archaic and modern language, a distracting touch that sits uneasily with the director�s carefully crafted naturalism and cinematographer Robbie Ryan�s tactile and immediate images. Nimbly photographed in a free-form hand-held style, interspersed with tightly framed images of decomposing nature, dead animals and rotting fruit, Wuthering Heights is a chilly, curiously lifeless film; over-considered, over-extended and ultimately, underwhelming.

Writer and director Tom Hall�s droll and daring Irish sex comedy Sensation is the coming of age story of a timid Limerick farmer who meets a New Zealand call girl, falls in love for the first time and learns something about how the world works.

Opening with a scene where lonely, mid-twenties Donal (Domhnall Gleeson) masturbates in a field while his flock of sheep look on, bemused, Hall sets a confidently complicated tone pitched somewhere between comedy and tragedy. Returning to the farmhouse, Donal finds his widowed father dead on the stair-lift and, having buried the old man with due reverence, immediately sets about spending his inheritance on sex. Using the internet handle "sweetdick", virginal Donal books an appointment with Courtney (Luanne Gordon), a call girl in the city, who arrives on a house-call to the farm and stays the night. Smitten and sated, Donal makes breakfast the next morning as Courtney explains that she is in fact Kim, a wandering Kiwi who fell into sex work during her time in London and now works independently from an apartment in Limerick city.

Soon, Donal and Kim's relationship has moved from strictly service-client into something more enduring, and endearing. Too long living under the strict gaze of his father, whose notions of sexual relationships are medieval at best, Donal is ready to experience something of life. Flush with cash, he sees the potential when Kim explains her long-held ambition to open her own escort service. The two join forces. He sells his flock of sheep and makes plans with the local property developer Liam (Owen Roe) to unload the land while Kim goes about recruiting some young women. With Kim providing the know-how and Donal putting up the money, they rent an apartment, launch a website and wait for the customers to arrive. Donal�s only friend, the otherwise idle Karl (newcomer Patrick Ryan) volunteers to work the door, providing both the apartment and Donal with the illusion of security.
 

Operating as discreetly as is possible in a small community, they start receiving clients and making money but emotions soon get in the way. Having gained some gumption by his exposure to the worldly Kim, Donal is transformed into a better groomed, sharper dressed and more confident young man, no longer tongue-tied around pretty shop-assistant Melanie (Kelly Campbell) and able to stand up to Roe�s sleazy huckster as he tries to hustle him into a bad deal for the farm. But Donal�s late-arriving loss of innocence doesn�t include any instruction on how to deal with relationships and as quickly as they came together, Donal and Kim find themselves drifting apart.

�This isn�t Pretty Woman�, Kim says in a heated moment, and she�s right. Sensation isn�t a glamorised story of outlaw entrepreneurship or a how-to-guide for budding sex-workers, but rather a faintly desperate story of rural isolation and social unease, where the overriding emotion is repression and shame. What prevents the straightforward story from slipping into simplicity interesting are the superb performances from the entire cast, with Gleeson proving he can carry a movie on his own and Gordon providing a convincing mix of brittleness and sensitivity. Credibly played and intelligently scripted, Sensation is a curious film (not least because Irish cinema rarely addresses sex as a theme), but one that will reward a enquiring audience.

After almost a decade of silence, Scottish director Lynne Ramsay is back with a bang with an exquisitely realised adaptation of Lionel Shriver�s bestselling novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, the story of a mother who must clean up the dreadful mess left behind when her psychopathic son commits mass murder at his school.

The film opens with a long overture as Eva (Tilda Swinton, superb) is hoisted aloft among a writhing mass of bodies at the Tomatina festival in Spain. The screen fills with red (the colour Ramsay uses throughout as a touchstone), a chill foreshadowing the bloody events to come. Free-spirited Eva has travelled the world as a writer, a career that comes to a stop when she meets the faintly gormless Franklin (John C Reilly) and settles down in New York. They marry and shortly afterwards, she gives birth to Kevin. A fussy, noisy baby, Kevin cannot settle in the city so the family move to the suburbs. It doesn�t help. Eva cannot connect with Kevin (brilliantly played as a malevolent imp by Jasper Newell), who seems intent on destroying the house and breaking up the family. 

Kevin is uncontrollable and unteachable. He refuses to be potty trained. He destroys his toys and smears paint on the walls. He seems to have an innate gift for playing his parents off of one another, convincing his oblivious father that everything is fine while openly mocking his despairing mother. Time passes but things do not improve. At the age of fifteen (and now played by Ezra Miller), Kevin is an intelligent young man but he is isolated from his peers and sneeringly cynical. He spends his days online, alone in his unnervingly neat bedroom. One unexceptional morning, he leaves the house, never to return.

This is not a film about a school shooting, not really. We are never witness to precisely what Kevin does; Ramsay distils Shriver�s wordy novel to shift focus onto the consequences of his actions for his family, Eva in particular. WNTTAK is a film about blood, the blood bond between mother and son, the blood he spills through his actions, the blood that still runs through Eva's dreams. Vilified by the community, she must live out the rest of her days in purgatory. She will always be the mother of the boy that massacred his classmates, somehow just as culpable as if she had committed the crime herself. How can she carry on? Was Kevin just a bad seed, a statistical anomaly, or did Eva have a hand in making him into a monster

As Ramsay switches back and forth in time, Eva endlessly replays the story of Kevin�s life, haunted by her own conscience as she continues to question and doubt herself, her marriage and her future. The director never settles the question, leaving it to Swinton�s extraordinary face to fill in the blanks in what is an exceptionally intimate and brittle performance, present in almost every scene and actively filtering her own tortured conscience. The film�s other great strength is Irish cinematographer Seamus McGarvey�s beautiful photography; delicately composed, strikingly severe and washed again and again in tones of crimson red.

Even as Woody Allen�s star has waxed and waned in the last decade, he has always been adored in France. For his 41st film, the writer and director consummates this love affair for Midnight In Paris, a warm and funny fantasy about the eternal allure of the City of Light. Allen's valentine opens with a montage of postcard-pretty shots of boulevards wet by recent rain and an upbeat jazzy score as Owen Wilson explains, in his unmistakable Texan twang, how the French capital is one of the most exciting cities in the world. Wilson�s Gil is a Hollywood screenwriter whose only regret is that he didn�t stay in Paris years ago, when he had the chance, and hone his skills as a novelist. Instead, he returned to Los Angeles and became a hired hack for the movies, successful but unfulfilled.

Now returned on holiday with his fianc�e Inez (Rachel McAdams) and her wealthy parents (Kurt Fuller and Mimi Kennedy), Gil has fallen in love with Paris again. Looking for inspiration for his debut novel about a man who runs a nostalgia shop, Gil has taken to walking the streets in the rain, soaking in the city�s unique ambience (although Allen has somehow scoured the place of graffiti and his characters never once step in dog mess or get lost on the Metro). While her fianc�e wanders aimlessly around the city, the much less enthusiastic Inez goes shopping for pricey antiques with her snippy mother and tours the galleries and museums with her old friends, pompous know-it-all Paul (an amusingly unbearable Michael Sheen) and his simpering wife Carol (Nina Arianda).

Gil can�t stand them. One evening, after a wine tasting, he takes another solo walk around the city. Slightly drunk, he takes a rest on a church steps as a clock strikes midnight. A vintage Peugeot drives up and the equally inebriated occupants beckon him into the car. They drive him off to a party where everyone appears to be dressed in vintage clothes and � the first clue that something is amiss � are smoking indoors. To his astonishment, Gil finds that he has somehow been dragged back through time to the era between the world wars, a time when exiled American writers and artists were drawn to the bohemian city. He has a wide-eyed chat with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston and Alison Pill), shares a bottle of wine with Ernest Hemmingway (Corey Stoll) and gets a tutorial on writing from Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates).

While passing an hour in Stein�s art-filled studio, he meets Adriana (Marion Cotillard), a fashion designer who has been lover and muse to a series of artists, including Picasso and Modigliani. He falls in love, not only with the beautiful girl but with everything: the people, their ideas, the time and the place. They are so much more exciting than real life in 2010, with its blowhards and braggarts. So he returns again and again to his magical spot, where he can listen for the chimes and step into the past.

If Paris is the real star of the film, Wilson�s charming performance is the key to its considerable appeal. Gil is so awed by meeting his heroes, so excited about the possibility of interacting with genius, his enthusiasm radiates off the screen. Allen has considered the allure of history before, in films like Zelig and The Purple Rose of Cairo, exploring the notion that the past always seems much more vibrant and consistent than the time his characters live in. This time, the director uses the concept of time travel to explore Gil�s unease at his contemporary situation, inextricably tied to McAdams� shallow wife-to-be, despised by her snooty parents and trapped in a job whose rewards are only financial. He is out of sorts and out of place, so why not go somewhere he can feel more at ease? But the more time he spends in the past, the less he wants to return to the present.

Allen doesn�t offer any explanations for his magical time-slip, instead using the caprice as a platform for his unassuming hero to interact with a parade of legends in cameo, including Adrien Brody as Salvador Dali, Tom Cordier as Man Ray and Sonia Rolland as Jos�phine Baker. The sole awkward misstep in Allen's otherwise graceful fantasy is a moment where Gil meets the Spanish filmmaker Luis Bu�uel and pitches him an idea for a movie where the guests at a swanky dinner party find themselves unable to leave. In a throwaway scene, Gil goes from being a fortunate witness to history to actively offering his heroes tips on how to do the very things he admires them for doing.

For a long time, it seemed that Allen was so bereft of inspiration he might have taken the wittering of an oddly-dressed visitor from the future to heart. How else would you explain Cassandra's Dream, a film whose time we can only hope will never come. With Midnight in Paris, the director puts a stop to a long run of deeply mediocre films, making the most of a dazzling, fun idea and a cast on top form.

It�s the end of the world as we know it and nobody feels fine in Lars von Trier�s Melancholia, the Danish provocateur�s take on the apocalypse which blends soaring celestial special effects with gloomy, earthy melodrama.

As with von Trier�s previous film, the punishing morality play Anti-Christ, Melancholia opens with an eight-minute overture; a collection of slow-motion tableaux set to Wagner�s Tristan and Isolde. We see glimpses of the story to come as a woman in a wedding dress floats impassively down a stream, in a nod to Millais� Ophelia, or stands in a field as blue electricity sparks from her fingertips. Birds fall from the sky as a staring horse collapses in a heap. We see another woman drag a young boy across a golf course, a look of anguish in her face as she sinks up to her ankles in the suddenly boggy ground. And we see the cosmos, a black sheet of stars against which von Trier places the Earth and the newly-discovered planet Melancholia, as they glide inexorably towards one another.

The rest of the film is divided into two sections of more-or-less equal length. The first chapter, reminiscent of von Trier�s friend and Dogme 95 collaborator Thomas Winterberg�s caustic family drama Festen, opens with the woman in the bridal dress, Justine (Kirsten Dunst) and her newlywed husband, Michael (Alexander Skarsgard), sitting in a stretch limousine as it attempts to negotiate a winding driveway. They are hours late for their own reception at a palatial hotel, hosted by Justine�s sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), who lives there with her wealthy husband Jack (Kiefer Sutherland) and young son. As the wedding party sits to eat a long-delayed meal, von Trier slowly reveals deep divisions between the other family members, especially the sister�s divorced parents, their gadfly father (John Hurt) and cantankerous mother (Charlotte Rampling). Justine works in advertising and her slimy boss (Stellan Skarsg�rd) hovers at her shoulder like a wasp, pressuring her to deliver a new slogan for a fashion campaign. The only glimpses of humour are the barbed asides from the despairing wedding planner, played with a sniff by Udo Kier. As the evening wears on, Justine�s behaviour becomes increasingly strange as she falls prey to anxiety, doubt and paranoia. The evening ends in disaster, of no consequence when set against the impending apocalypse, but disaster nonetheless.

A few weeks later, the second chapter sees Justine�s depression evolve into a complete nervous collapse. Slumped and unresponsive, Claire moves her sister into the mansion to look after her. Isolated from the rest of the world and, for some reason, unable to cross a bridge to get into town, the three adults and one child rattle around the house as the planet Melancholia makes its relentless way towards Earth. Amateur astronomist Jack believes the scientists, who say the galactic interloper will pass harmlessly by. Justine and Claire trust their instinct, which tells them that the sky is falling down and that the ever-growing blue ball in the sky will signal the end of everything.

Melancholia is not quite on the same level of cruelty as Anti-Christ but, as a companion piece, it carries the same dread air of awkward manipulation and tiresome fatalism. Von Trier crashes planets together but I never felt the earth move, despite a brave and compelling performance from Dunst (who won the Best Actress award at Cannes even as the director was expelled from the festival for making boorish remarks about Jews and Nazis). Compare von Trier�s thesis on the end of time with the graceful expression of its beginnings in Terrence Malick�s Tree of Life. Malick sees the glory and wonder in creation and displays it like a treasure, while von Trier looks at the same world as it blinks out of existence and sees only squalor and sadness.

Brilliantly played, technically adroit and at times breathtakingly beautiful, Melancholia is still a cold and uncaring provocation, a poke in the eye with an ornately carved stick. You can admire the craftsmanship, even as it blinds you.