Read JB Cooper’s review of the Henry Reichold Nokia N86 Exhibition over at the TravelIntelligence Blog.

Read JB Cooper’s review of Shank over at OrsonsWell.

Most will know Bernard Rose for the urban slasher Candyman (Candyman Candyman Candyman Candyman). That was back in ’92. Since then, Rose has made a successful second career piggybacking off the two classic masters The Kreutzer Sonata draws upon. He directed Immortal Beloved, a biopic of-sorts about Beethoven, before turning his camera upon Tolstoy. First up was Anna Karenina, a bore-draw featuring Sophie Marceau, then Ivans XTC, a vigorous modern day interpretation of The Death of Ivan Ilyich. (Somewhere in between those Rose found the need to make Snuff Movie, but we’ll leave that well alone.)

And so to The Kreutzer Sonata. Tolstoy’s novella decries the ability of sex and music to move us to foreign states of being through the story of a man who jealously kills his wife after she plays Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 9 (also called The Kreutzer Sonata) with a dashing and brio-istic violinist. Yes, that’s a spoiler; no, it doesn’t matter. Rose opens his adaptation with the ending, so you’d have found out soon enough anyway.

The film transplants 19th Century Russia to modern-day L.A., a formula Rose tested with success in Ivans XTC. Into mansions and winebars step moody-brooding Edgar (Danny Huston), and Abby (Elisabeth Rohm), his Beverly Hills wife. Their onscreen connection is remarkable, with Rose clearly allowing great freedom in his scene-to-scene direction.

Rohm, in particular, is magnificent as the has-she-hasn’t-she spouse subjected to spiraling suspicions of adultery. The Kreutzer Sonata is Edgar’s story; he narrates the film and commands the camera. When Edgar flees to Colorado, the film follows. When Edgar wakes in a random hotel room, the camera is waiting. Abby only gets one scene to herself in the entire movie, so for The Kreutzer Sonata to work, the audience has to share Edgar’s sense of being teased and tormented by her. Like Edgar, we have to suspect her and want her; be willing to attack her fidelity and jump to its defense. Rohm accordingly manages to appear both flighty and entrapped, and her suggestive (and not so suggestive) onscreen sexuality exhibits a faultless awareness of how far she can push the role.

The bristling animalism between Edgar and Abby makes for palm-rubbing watching; their sexuality and sexual distrust is captivating and knowingly real. It works perfectly in the dramatic structure of Russian classic literature, which is nothing if not an interrogation of heightened emotions set to a soaring sense of narrative.

Rose’s imagination isn’t always up to the task of converting the novella, however. The film’s sense of time flails about without control, which makes it hard to know just how important any one scene is supposed to be at any one moment. And then there is Edgar’s voice-over, which is the scriptwriting equivalent of gaffer tape. Well, ok, I take that back: it’s too easy to rail against voice-overs. But they must at least be done carefully. Edgar’s isn’t. Early on, he finds himself in an unmarked hotel room. “I shuddered with rage and terror”, he rumbles, before turning on some cringe-porn and botching a wank. It’s a thoroughly obvious way of portraying Edgar’s propensity to slip from the terrifying to the ridiculous, and it’s completely inadequate in comparison to Abby’s sexual articulation. It also means that every time Edgar says something ominous thereafter, you expect him to reach down his pants.

Fortunately, these aberrations are not terminal. The basic story is tremendous – well, it would be. Huston and Rohm make a sexually captivating couple. And Rose’s digital camera does a good job of catching their improvisations. Ok, visually The Kreutzer Sonata is nowhere near as inventive as other digital projects (Inland Empire and Festen immediately spring to mind), but the camerawork here is effective and affective enough to further the argument for the distribution of more low-fi films.

But first, The Kreutzer Sonata needs to be picked up by more than just the Apollo…

Click here to read JB Cooper’s article on being fed opium at Rohet Garh, a luxury hotel in Rajasthan, India.

The nice people at Axiom Films recently sent me a copy of Goodbye Solo (it’s just come out on DVD), so I’m armed with a handy excuse to revisit one of last year’s most acclaimed films.

On its release, Goodbye Solo was received with that gushing sincerity critics reserve for non-obnoxious indie cinema. Ben Walters of Time Out found the film to be “shot through with beauty and humility”; Neil Smith wrote in Total Film that Goodbye Solo was made of “humour, grace and compassion”; Roger Ebert enthused it was “the best film in town“. All very nicey nicey.

Then someone mentioned Realism and a small blogging war broke out. That someone was A.O. Scott of The New York Times. Grouping Goodbye Solo with its contemporary releases Ballast, Wendy and Lucy, and Treeless Mountain, Scott came to the conclusion that director Ramin Bahrami was leading a Stateside return to Neorealism (yes, that’s right: post-war, black and white, car-headlamp lit, lefty Italian cinema). It was all a gush too far for The New Yorker’s Richard Brody, who felt compelled to write an eight-point rebuttal two days before Scott’s piece was even published in print. Scott quickly retreated behind a wall of critical hooey, suggested he and Brody agree to disagree, and everyone went on living as before. Ho-de-hum.

To cut a long introduction short: Goodbye Solo was widely accepted to be a good film, but, save for a few wishywashy adjectives and a self-serving storm-in-a-teablog, no-one could really say why.

Watching the film now with a year’s worth of retrospect, I can’t help but feel the problem (if it is a problem) begins and ends in the ease with which Bahrami’s film watches. Goodbye Solo is set in a disenfranchised, isolated, lonely sphere of America. It hunches its shoulders to ticket-for-one late-night movie screenings, rubs its eyes through graveyard shifts in immigrant-driven taxis, and rests its head on clapped-out motel sofas. It tells the story of a man named William who wants to kill himself though won’t say why. It paces its narrative with all the drive of an inmate on death row. Everything about this film suggests its viewer should either be humbled, harrowed, or bored. And yet Goodbye Solo is a distinctly feel-good movie to watch.

Part of this undoubtedly stems from Solo, the taxi driver who realises William’s deathly intent and eventually acquiesces to ferrying him along the River Styx. A Senegalese-American, Solo is warm, affectionate, magnetic, and sensitive: a scriptwriter’s dream. He is also fluid. No-one changes or compromises in Goodbye Solo apart from Solo, who has to come to terms with William’s silent determination to die. The water in the wilting flower’s vase, Solo continues to supply William nutrients while himself being altered in hue. It makes him very human, very real.

But Realism (capital R), that will-o-the-wisp of modern film criticism, isn’t really at stake in Goodbye Solo. Certainly not Neorealism, which was socially minded posturing dressed up in filmmaking politik. If anything, Goodbye Solo shares more in common with what came after Neorealism – Fellini’s apocryphal tales of the early 50’s, where society was only interesting insofar as it was a part of the alienated individual. Even that assertion is dubious, though: To talk earnestly of Goodbye Solo in terms of Realism is to open a can of hogwash that isn’t on the shelf in the first place.

Unlike the high-falutin’ debate Goodbye Solo engendered (one keen blogger found it to be a study in dialectics), the film sets its horizons very low. This is a love story, pure and simple. Bahrami isn’t really interested in the wider socio-political implications of his characters. Solo doesn’t drive others around enough, William doesn’t shut down enough, and there’s too little outside context (no one else in the film gets more than five minutes screen time) to suggest otherwise. Instead, like the best love stories, Goodbye Solo is interested in its characters as characters; not as frameworks burdened with theory.

Bahrami’s filmmaking never loses sight of that fact. His camera serves his story, not vice versa. Its frame offers easy-on-the-eye, unclouded compositions; its editing rhythm is gentle, never overt. Not once does Goodbye Solo step outside its remit to suggest things are afoot that are not. Instead, Bahrami tells an engaging story about two interesting men with taste and simplicity. Goodbye Solo is fantastically easy and fun to watch as a result.

Sometimes you just have to kick back and enjoy a film for what it is. Pure and simple.

Neo-classical avant-gardist Peter Greenaway returns to indie cinemas near you with Nightwatching, a boisterous and beguiling film straight out of cinema’s academic leftfield. Cut from the same canvas as The Draughtsman’s Contract, Nightwatching sees Greenaway again throw himself into artsy period restoration, this time in chase of answers to the legend that is Rembrandt. The themes of painter as outsider and of cinema as artifice are never far from the camera’s lens, and while onscreen events fail to reprise the full pomp of Greenaway’s yore, Nightwatching certainly proves an edifying spectacle in the current atmosphere of Avatars and Wolfmen.

The film’s beating heart is Rembrandt himself, a painter as technically brilliant as he is historically elusive. For all the acclaim this famed Dutch Master continues to receive in art schools, little is known about his life. Of the three women he took during his lifetime, for example, where the second two came from is anybody’s guess. And then there’s his finances. Rembrandt famously died destitute having once lived handsomely, though just where all the money went remains a mystery.

Nightwatching tries to playfully plug these holes by spinning off from the many strange events detailed in ‘The Night Watch’, one of Rembrandt’s most famous, enigmatic, and downright peculiar pieces of work. Classically stunning yet brimming with caricature, Greenaway postulates that the painting accuses its own characters of murder. His conclusion? The men sent up on canvas got their revenge in real life by socially crippling Rembrandt, and then taking his sight. So Nightwatching is a kind of CSI for the Renaissance.

Martin Freeman (Tim from The Office – these brackets will plague his career) is the slightly odd choice to play the painter. You sense someone in a suit was behind his casting, but they got it wrong. For the first hour – the hour that matters to people in suits – it’s almost impossible to give Freeman credence in the role. A small man who jumps around a lot, Freeman comes across as a perennially frustrated Jack Russell; you’re always half expecting his Rembrandt to either turn to the camera and decry everything as “a bit gay” or hump a nearby pillow. Yet as the film passes into its second hour, an unexpected dignity attaches itself to the portrayal, not least because Freeman unflinchingly plays his Dutch Master more fetid than fêted. (And frequently without any clothes on, too.)

That second hour turns out to be far more captivating than the first. To begin with, Nightwatching is disappointingly stolid. There are simply too many characters to grapple with here, and Rembrandt is shown as too ferocious a negotiator, for it to be otherwise. Sure, Greenaway’s artfully composed, slow-moving frames are enough to hook your attention for a while, but the airy poise that made The Draughtsman’s Contract so enjoyable is palpably lacking. That all changes once the master painter is seen to actually pick up a brush in anger – though it must be said the men in suits have long left the cinema by the time he does.

Nightwatching is, ultimately, an extended lecture on the ontology of art dressed up in the plumes and ruffles of a Renaissance narrative. Like all good lectures, it flirts with tedium while loyally covering its ground before providing the payoff in terms of answers: pure, simple and unexpected. Stick with Nightwatching to the end and you get to enjoy both an imaginative retelling of one of the most important paintings in art history and a repositioning of the art of painting itself. Way back in the 17th Century, you see, Rembrandt was not just painting a picture; he was using all the tricks he knew to realistically present a moment of captured life, watermarked with meaning. The master painter with brush in hand, was, in effect, predating theatre and the cinema as he worked.

An interesting thought, given the giant blue smurfs currently assailing our screens.

Click here to read JB Cooper’s review of The Eugenia in Bangkok, Thailand, for TravelIntelligence.com.

Click here to read JB Cooper’s ‘5 Minute Guide to Kolkata’ for the Travel Intelligence blog.

Click here to read JB Cooper’s review of LUXX in Bangkok for TravelIntelligence.com.

For a few years now, the Goethe Institut has been awarding a sponsored prize at the Duisburg Film Week, a festival in Germany for ‘homegrown’ documentaries. Last week, the Max Muller Bhavan held a three-day program that collated recent winners of the prize. The result? A fascinating if hit and miss collage of current German documentary making in which one film stood head and shoulders above the rest.

The Halfmoon Files opens with a conversation between the film’s director, Philip Scheffner, and a representative of the Indian Consulate in Germany. Scheffner is asking for permission to film in India – he’s trying to trace the life of Mall Singh, an Indian Sikh who was detained in a German Prisoner of War camp during the First World War. The consulate representative doesn’t yet know this, but he does want to find out: “So what is your film about?” he asks, looking slightly bewildered. Then his eyes brighten. “Temples?”

The insinuation is clear: India is pigeonholed and straightjacketed as a land of religious wonder. Why else other than to film temples would a foreigner seek permission to come here? But Scheffner’s film is far from just another dead-weight ball in the re-colonizing canon. The only temple he is interested in is a library of voice recordings to be found in his native land. This is not a film about religious wonder. It is, as Scheffner dryly intones, “a ghost story”.

Mall Singh is the principle ghost in this story, but his spectre only leaves the faintest of traces – a recording, from 1916, of Singh saying the following words in Punjabi: “There once was a man / This man came into the European war. / Germany captured this man. / He wishes to return to India. / If God has mercy, he will make peace soon. / This man will go away from here.” The recording was conducted as part of a project to record the vernacular of all the inmates in The Halfmoon POW Camp, which makes it interesting enough in itself (the project recorded over 7,000 different voices, laying claim at the time to being the biggest sound recording library in the world). But what really piques Scheffner’s interest is Singh’s third-person account of his position: “Perhaps the war had distanced him from himself?” the director asks tentatively. Mall Singh is ghostly in more ways than one.

The Halfmoon Files is one of those rare documentaries that shows as much care in thought as in action. As Scheffner tries to find out about Mall Singh, he becomes quietly yet crushingly aware of the information gaps that surround him. He can only access Mall Singh through the recording; he can discover nothing of his life in India. What’s more, the era of history The Halfmoon Files looks at cannot, by its very nature, be rationally understood (at one point in the film Scheffner becomes fixated on the process behind the recording, showing how the camp operators stuck to a regimented process that stripped the voice from the subject and turned it into a soulless mechanical recording). This is a film about ways of knowing, then, and Scheffner asks just how we should react to the postmodern vacuum of history mechanical war has produced.

The Halfmoon Files doesn’t have a definitive answer to this question (Mall Singh remains untraceable; the filming permission never does come through). Instead, through the use of textured visuals and sound recordings – both of which rarely correspond to the voiceover– it creates a space in which the viewer can ruminate on their own accord. Scheffner may struggle for oxygen as he tries to find a way of truly knowing his subject, but he’s able to take his viewer to the moon and back in the search for a standpoint – for something concrete. Beautiful and enigmatic, this is a journey I could sit through time and again.

Article reproduced courtesy of The Statesman. Originally published 14/10/09.