2013 Alliance Francaise French Film Festival: Looking For Hortense (Pascal Bonitzer, 2012)

The curiously named Cherchez Hortense (Looking for Hortense), co-written (with Agathe de Sacy) and directed by Pascal Bonitzer, is breezy, humanistic, handsomely lensed, but ultimately an unspectacular French dramedy. With sprinkles of a mid-life existential crisis come redemption tale, a strained father-son relationship, the unraveling of a tired marriage and a semblance of a social commentary, Bonitzer incorporates too many strands in his narrative. It is neither dramatic nor funny enough to leave a lasting impression.

We are initially led to believe that the story will follow Kristen Scott-Thomas’ theatre-director Iva, but following the opening scene of her stressing about a scene in her new play, and acknowledging her handsome cast member’s attraction to her, the story then shifts to her lethargic husband Damien (Jean Pierre Bacri), whom we follow for the remainder of the film. He is a lecturer in Chinese customs at a business school, but is predominantly housebound taking care of the couple’s son Noe (Marin Orcand Tourres), with Iva working late, and suspiciously staying out later.

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Review: Barbara (Christian Petzold, 2012)

Barbara is released in cinemas March 7 through Madman Films. 

Christian Petzold’s Barbara is an elegantly photographed, but fidgety-paced character drama. As an undercurrent of East/West tension ripples below  the surface Petzold’s understated direction creates a suffocating atmosphere influenced by conflicting emotion, and impressive performances from Nina Hoss and Ronald Zehrfield. Barbara is a film that moves slow and requires attentiveness. The payoff, which is admittedly moving, doesn’t quite reward the particular build-up.

Set in East Germany, Barbara tells the story of a doctor (Hoss, Yella) who has been exiled from Berlin to a country hospital after requesting an exit visa. As she warily acquaints herself with her new apartment and colleagues – including her friendly boss Andre (Zehrfield, In the Face of the Crime) – Barbara is secretly plotting her escape with her West lover, Jorg (Mark Waschke). Unannounced visits by the Stasi, who thoroughly conduct shakedowns of her apartment and person for contraband, keep Barbara on edge, and result in her being standoffish and suspicious of her colleagues. Barbara reveals her skills as a pediatric surgeon, showing compassion towards her young patients. Barbara morphs into a thriller of sorts, clouding Andre’s motivations for extending such kindness and sensitivity, and having found unexpected responsibility and purpose, Barbara’s specific agenda.

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Review: Cloud Atlas (Tom Tykwer, Lana and Andy Wachowski, 2012)

Have you ever experienced a flash of déjà vu, or feel like your life has been affected by some unexpected karma? Are we all connected to people from the past and do our actions influence the future? These questions (and many more) are tackled by the collaborative team of Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) and Lana and Andy Wachowski (The Matrix, Speed Racer), whose ambitious large-scale screen adaptation of David Mitchell’s dense, multi-narrative 2004 novel, Cloud Atlas, is a masterful achievement. The film’s four-year journey to the screen was a difficult one, and with the production budget predominantly supplied by independent sources, it is one of the most expensive independent films ever made. Unfortunately, a poor showing at the U.S box office has resulted in a limited Australian release. Though some may find navigating these boldly assembled interweaving of stories frustrating and unmanageable, Cloud Atlas repeatedly rewards patience and becomes a masterfully epic experience that should not be missed.

Cloud Atlas tells six simultaneous stories, and unlike in the novel, where I believe the stories are introduced consecutively and leak into one another, here they are cut together to create the feeling of parallel existence, despite being separated by decades and centuries. What could a San Francisco lawyer journeying through the South Pacific in 1849, a young British composer in 1936, a journalist who stumbles across a conspiracy in 1973, an aging publisher wrongly admitted to a retirement home in 2012, a Neo-Soul clone/liberator in 2144 and a tribesman in an unknown post-apocalyptic future possibly have in common? As we explore each of these fascinating tales, we find not only the same actors appearing in wildly different roles, we watch as each of the characters are met with conflict and antagonism (often unjust authority) and must rely on acts of love, kindness, and bravery to overcome them. Over time, a killer becomes a hero and unlikely friendship inspires a revolution.

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Recap: Oscar Predictions

Just to recap, here's who I have picked to win today.

I would like to note, that having written these a while back I now think that Robert De Niro is going to win Best Supporting Actor, and with Argo expected to take out Best Picture I can't see it losing Best Adapted Screenplay either. Still, these categories are all competitive and anything could happen.

Best Pic: Argo
Best Director: Ang Lee, Life of Pi
Best Actor: Daniel Day Lewis, Lincoln
Best Actress: Emmanuelle Riva, Amour
Best Supporting Actor: Christoph Waltz, Django Unchained
Best Supporting Actress: Anne Hathaway, Les Miserables
Best Original Screenplay: Quentin Tarantino, Django Unchained
Best Adapted Screenplay: David O. Russell, Silver Linings Playbook
Best Animated Film: Frankenweenie
Best Documentary Feature: Searching For Sugar Man
Best Foreign Language Film: Amour
Best Cinematography: Life of Pi
Best Editing: Argo
Best Original Score: Life of Pi
Best Production Design: Lincoln
Best Costume Design: Anna Karenina
Best Original Song: Skyfall
Best Sound Mixing: Life of Pi
Best Sound Editing: Zero Dark Thirty
Best Make-up and Hairstyling: Les Miserables
Best Visual Effects: Life of Pi

New Releases (28/02/13)

What a terrific line-up in cinemas this week: The Imposter, Cloud Atlas, Side Effects, The Paperboy and I Give It A Year.

Side Effects - Provocative thriller about Emily and Martin (Rooney Mara and Channing Tatum), a successful New York couple whose world unravels when a new drug prescribed by Emily's psychiatrist (Jude Law) - intended to treat anxiety - has unexpected side effects. Believed to be Steven Soderbergh's final film before retirement.

Cloud Atlas - Cloud Atlas explores how the actions and consequences of individual lives impact one another throughout the past, the present and the future. Action, mystery and romance weave dramatically through the story as one soul is shaped from a killer into a hero and a single act of kindness ripples across centuries to inspire a revolution in the distant future. Each member of the ensemble appears in multiple roles as the stories move through time. Full review to come soon.

Definitive Top 30 of 2012

As I have done the last few years at the end of February, I am revealing my definitive list of 2012 films. My list at the conclusion of 2012 involved the films released in Australia during the calendar year that I had seen for the first time, plus any festival viewing. As we don't get most of the Oscar heavy hitters (like Django Unchained, Zero Dark Thirty) until January/February here in Australia, these films are not considered. As it stands, viewed between March 1, 2012 and today, here are my Top 30 2012 films.

New Release Review: The Imposter (Bart Layton, 2012)

I first watched The Imposter at last year's Melbourne International Film Festival. This review first appeared in my diary coverage.  

In 1994, a 13-year-old boy, Nicholas Barclay disappears from his rural hometown in San Antonio, Texas without a trace. Three and a half years later, his family is contacted with the news that Nicholas has turned up...in an orphanage in southern Spain. He has a story of kidnap, abuse and torture - at the hands of the military - and is evidently a very different person to the blue-eyed, blonde-haired youth who went missing. Not all is as it seems, and we soon learn that the boy welcomed home by Nicholas' overjoyed, yet completely oblivious family is not Nicholas Barclay at all, but Frederic Bourdin, a 23-year-old French man. The Imposter is a truly mind-blowing documentary which blends real-life testimony with sleekly photographed re-enactments. Despite hearing both sides of the tale, and we gather further insight from investigating parties and those involved with the reuniting of the family with their supposed son, we still leave feeling like we are no closer to complete authority on the truth behind this bizarre story.

During my post-screening research I learned that there have been some hostile responses to The Imposter with claims made that Bart Layton trivialised the boy's disappearance, made a mockery of the family - who are either really dumb, are so susceptible in their grief they will accept anyone into their home, or are hiding some sinister secrets - and offered up very little new for those already familiar with the story. I guess it does work better for viewers who have no idea that this extraordinary series of events even took place, but there are still some astounding revelations and dramatic turns that should fool the initiated too. It is a story that is too good to be true, and while this might seem like an obvious statement, the accounts are so cloudy that we feel like we can no longer accept what is perceived to be the truth. Manipulation is part of what makes this such an engrossing study, and the fact that something like this has taken place really is hard to process. Also, the way the film is structured, edited and scored, it rivals some of the great whodunit mysteries. It is bewildering, edge-of-your-seat entertainment.

Is West of Memphis cinematic closure for the West Memphis Three?

By now everyone should have heard of the West Memphis Three case. Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley Jr. (aged 16-18 at the time) were convicted of the murder of three eight-year-old boys, Steve Branch, Michael Moore and Christopher Byers in West Memphis, by the State of Arkansas in 1994. Damien was sentenced to death, with Jason and Jessie sentenced to life imprisonment. In 1996 a groundbreaking HBO documentary chronicling the case, Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills (Joe Berlinger, Bruce Sinofsky), aired and immediately brought public attention to what many believed to be a disastrous miscarriage of justice. Damien, on Death Row, especially attracted supporters and over the next sixteen years a very thorough, but continuously stonewalled re-investigation has taken place in the hopes of overturning these convictions and finding the real killer/s.

Two more powerful documentaries, Paradise Lost: Revelations (2000)and the Academy Award nominated Paradise Lost: Purgatory (2011), have since aired, but complementing the trilogy is the Fran Walsh, Peter Jackson and Damien Echols produced, West of Memphis. Peter and Fran, like Pearl Jam front man Eddie Vedder, actor Johnny Depp and musicians Henry Rollins and Natalie Maines were high profile celebrities with influence who befriended and supported Damien and his wife Lorri Davis (married after years of correspondence in 1999) and helped finance the investigation.

As expected, West of Memphis is an incredible achievement. It is gripping and maddening throughout and comprised of a stunning volume of formerly unseen footage. The damning new evidence highlights a fresh suspect and the world learns more of the corruption & lies that plagued the case from the start. It is also a profoundly moving example of the power of public defiance against corrupt law enforcement, malicious supposition, double standards, perjury and an inept criminal justice system that has gone un-flagged for too long.

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