Film Review

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The Bling Ring Sofia Coppola (USA
2013) Katie Chang; Israel Broussard; Emma Watson,

Viewed Tyneside Cinema: 9 July 2013
Ticket: £8

The prefatory announcement at the start
of a film that it is “based on a true story” or “inspired by
actual events” engenders within me a certain sense of foreboding.
It’s true there have been some wonderful films so based, such as
William Wyler’s ‘ Ace in the Hole.’ But often film makers, when
trying to exploit a true story, are overburdened by too many facts,
overwhelmed by a need for authenticity, and are often unable to take
full possession of the narrative develop it as their own story.

So I wondered what Sofia Coppola would
make of the 2009 LA celebrity burglaries, planned and carried out by
teenage girls? What might she offer up to the Gods of film by way of
a spin on what it means to be young female and American?

In ‘Spring Breaks’ Harmony Korine
offered up a voluptuous transgressive take on the American female
psyche, and with all guns blazing the girls came out on top. In
Bling Ring likewise, it’s girls on top; but whereas Korine
understands the significance of his protagonists, Sofia Coppola’s
plot gets lost in translation, and is unable to come to terms with
the forces at work in the situation.

As I watched Bling Ring I found myself
starting to have ‘Wizard of Oz’ moments. Rebecca, the main
character, started to insinuate herself as a sort of re-incarnate
Dorothy. She is swept away not by a Kansas twister, but by the LA
whirlwind of celebrity worship. Perhaps celebrity fetishism is more
accurate descriptive label of her condition. All those teenage
hormones, Rebeca’s sexuality is displaced away from the insecurity of
the adolescent body and transferred onto comparative safety of
celebrity designer wear. Rebecca meets up with Marc, a sort of
composite Tin Man/ Lion/Scarecrow but in fact an honorary girl, and
she leads him and the other protagonists, the Munchkins, as they
follow a make over Yellow Brick Road to the Wizard’s castle, in this
case the Los Angeles A list celebrity homes and a series of fetish
driven burglaries.

The form of Bling Ring resembles a
fairy tale. But not the darker sort of tale as told by the Brothers
Grimm or Hans Christian Anderson, but rather a redacted Disney Story.
A sort amalgam of Oz and Ali Baba that takes place in LA,
re-imagined as a Never Never land of palaces and princesses. The
treasure troves that are buried deep in the heart of the fairy
mountain are replicated in Bling Ring, as being buried within the
inner crypts of the female celebrities. The houses of these female
celebrities resemble biomorphic stand-ins for their own bodies,
replicating in visual detail both the externalities of face and skin,
and the carnality of the secret vaginal passages that lead to the
womb. Within the inner womb sanctum’s of the female celebrities the
girls get the pay off – the stuff. Amidst rows of shoes dresses
perfume jewellery bags the girls achieve a proxy orgasm, sexual
energisation cathected onto the designed clothes and possessions of
the objects of desire. The actual taking and possessing of the stuff
is of secondary order to the primal connection with the Fetish in the
form of the possessions of the celebrity goddesses.

If you visit the British Museum will
find something similar but more dignified in the cargo cult fetishes
of the tribes of New Guinea.

The problem with Bling Ring is that
although all these powerful forces are set at work, Coppola seems
barely able to cope with them. The fairy tale, the fetishism the
biomorphic resonance of the architecture are all present, but under
her direction remain possibilities rather than realisations. In
relation to Bling Ring being a dystopian fairy tale, Coppola sketches
the outlines, but then abandons the idea, retreating to the safety of
a mechanical playing out of the facts.

The music in Bling Ring is interesting
and even suggestive. It is mostly rap and hip hop in style but
without angst or anger. When you castrate this sort of music, it
starts to sound like nursery rhythms which is what I heard. This
made me feel that the Bling Ring would probably have worked better
imitating the form of the Wizard of Oz and been devised as a musical.
A dysfunctional musical driven by rap bursary rhythms might have
provided Bling Ring with a rich suggestive architecture of illicit
desire intention and motive.

The structure of the film further
weakens the impact of its symbolic cues. Coppola’s scenario employs
the tired old formula of the flashback. It presents the various
scenes as perspectives from police and psychiatric interviews with
the protagonists after they have been caught. This device slows the
film, destroys what little tension there is in Copolla’s script and
breaks up the psychic integrity of the action.

Sofia Coppola’s film comes across more
as more an endorsement of celebrity life style than any sort of
attempt to probe the strangeness of its distorted realities. She
prefers to gloss over the soft wiring of her material, treating it as
a narrative rather than an opportunity to unwind the psychic
disturbances at the core of the displaced energy of mainstream
America.

Sofia Coppola had a strong subject
with great potential but overloaded by a need to be authentic she
falls victim to the curse of basing her movie on ‘true events’.

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Like someone in love Abbas
Kiarostami (Fr Japan 2012) Tadashi
Okuno, Rin
Takanashi, Ryo
Kase

Viewed: BFI London Ticket price £7.50
(c)
Adrin Neatrour writes: Like having an
idea such as smashing the glass
Like someone in love is the third film
that Abbas Kairostami has made outside Iran as a self exiled film
maker. Kairostami decided to make his films outside Iran because the
political religious regime had made it almost impossible for him to
work inside the country. Kairostami’s films have always attracted
the hostility and censorship of the Iranian authorities who even
destroyed the master 35mm negative of his 1978 marital drama, the
Report. Had he persisted in film making there he would certainly
have found himself under house arrest or even imprisoned, a fate that
has befallen other Iranian film makers.

But what’s an exiled film maker gonna
to make films about? Kairostami has always made his films in Iran
and his subject matter has always been set in an Iranian context. Can
you take the fish out of water and expect it to breath and to make
films?

His films may have been set in Iran but
at the heart of his films lies Kairostami’s intelligence. His films
are not mechanical products; each is the outcome of a process of
thinking – thinking about images.

One of the concepts at the root of his
thinking is the idea of oppositions, oppositions that you can see in
people. Oppositions such as in – relationships – man and woman;
age – old people young people; life and death, knowledge and
ignorance, individual and family. And of course the context of
Iranian society with politico religious forces shaping the social
matrix, provided Kairostami’s films with a wide range of fault lines
to examine and probe.

So what’s he doing in Japan? Like
someone in love…what a strange title for his film. It’s the name of
a song, an old jazz standard. What does it mean, what does it point
to?

I think that in this film Kairostami
has created a new take on the old Japanese idea of the Floating
World. Famously represented in series of nineteenth wood cuts, the
Floating World was the name given to the transient world of pleasure
created by geishas prositutes and clients in nineteenth Tokyo. A
world of impermanence. In Like someone in love, Kairostami
revisualises the floating world as a series of multiple planes of
light that drift across the screen, the reflections and refractions
of modern Tokyo that float over the images of his characters,
obscuring them but at the same time placing them in context of night
and pleasure.

Tokyo is realised by Kairostami as a
series of surfaces. The bars the streets and clubs present a dazzling
beguiling field of vision for the eye. Japan’s culture is overlaid
with Western technological forms that it has made its own. It looks
like the West but it isn’t; and Akiko, Kairostami’s girl protagonist,
always looks like someone who she isn’t.

Kairostami sees that a whole range of
social relations have been absorbed into a new floating world of
impermanence; he also sees that he is an outsider peering into this
culture, through a glass darkly, trying to distinguish image from
reflection and reflection from image. And once the reality of the
glass is admitted then it too becomes part of picture, and also
there will come moments swhen the glass itself will crack

This is a mirror crystal world, and
within it Kairostami projects a love story – of sorts of the sort
that might reveal some of the critical stresses at work in this
society.

Kairostami loves cars as settings in
his films. Many of his films use scenes inside automobiles. He
revels in the contradiction that amidst the frenzy of life, it is
often inside a car, the symbol of movement, that his characters find
the stillness and space.

In Like someone in love, there is a
typical Kurostami moment of interaction in which like a brain surgeon
he penetrates through the hard surface presented the skull into the
deeper soft tissues of the brain. During the taxi ride taken by Akiko
to her new client, Kairostami inserts a scene which is brilliantly
conceived as a series of verbal phone messages picked up by Akiko
from her grandmother. The grandmother’s unsentimental prosaic words
project in full relief not only the growing void separating young and
old but the characteristic emptiness of mobile communications which
increasingly serve the dysfunction of not communicating.

It is the economy that Kairostami
brings to his understanding of Japan that lights up the movie. Using
only simple settings the interior of a car, the interior of an
apartment, the interior of a club he coaxes the surfaces of this
floating world to separate a little and to see the forces at work
that maintain the tension in the glass images: relations between men
and women, old and young, the new and the old, between the imported
culture and the older traditions.

It might sound complex but it is all
done very simply almost without us realising it, until we start to
pay attention. As in the scene where Akiko lies asleep in bed and
her very elderly client, selects a record from his album collection,
plays Ella Fitzgerald singing Like someone in love. The camera pans
off him to the dining table, set for dinner for two, plates knives
and forks and two long stemmed empty wine glasses, and Ella sings:

Everytime I look at you I’m as limp as
a glove, feeling like someone in love…”

For Kairostami, it’s time to break the
glass.

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

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Man of Steel Zak Snyder (USA 2013)
Henry Cavill; Amy Adams;

Viewed 16 June 2013; Empire Cinema
Newcastle; Ticket £7.75
With underpants outside trousers I
remember as young kid playing Superman with my best friend Sid Green.
There were bouncy twin beds in the room he shared with his brother,
and placing these beds a strategic distance apart, we could leap
from one to the other, simulating the amazing feeling of flying
through the air. Obviously this apprenticeship qualifies me to speak
with some authority about Superman.
Needless to say Superman in the Man of
Steel has moved on from the naff device of wearing his knickers
outside his tights; he now wears a nifty set of combinations and is
part of the huge armada of franchised superheroes who kitted out with
full Visual FX move across planet earth scooping up buckets of money
for the studios.
I’ve seen a few superhero movies this
year. Each of scenarios has given to their protagonist a USP (Mad
talk for Unique Selling Proposition). A USP which defines in a fuzzy
way, something of the nature of the character. Batman, plagued by
self doubt, was about self redemption; Iron Man 3 was a Scientology
techie parable; And Man of Steel? Superman embraces the Messiah
myth. It’s not so much Jesus saves. It’s Superman saves.
The writers of Man of Steel have
appropriated the Jesus story. Like the ice cream pedalled in the
multiplex foyer, it’s a little soft; but both in script and in
iconic imagery this re-incarnation of Superman represents him as
Jesus, beard and all who waits for his thirty third birthday before
coming out and revealing his true identity. Like Jesus,
Superman/Clark Kent has a dual nature, half human and half Krypton,
and listen to this, Clark Kent says: “ “I know what I came for,
my father sent me.”
But why has the father sent his son?
Because Superman has something to say to us Earthlings. He is come
to guide us. Take a breath dudes!
Underpinning Man of Steel’s script
there is some heavy duty philosophy: the idea of free will. Free
will is the very basis of Christian theology; no free will no Christ,
because without choice, personal salvation makes no sense. And this
is why Superman is sent to us: to affirm our belief in free will.
Krypton was destroyed as the Kryptonites turned themselves into
programmed biomorphic machines. Only Clark Kent born outside the
Kryptonite approved birthing programme has free will, and he is sent
to help us choose good not evil. Awesome! One hopes he has a
better crack at it than Google.
Jesus as an idea is not only cued in
the Man of Steel script, he is also represented potently in the
movie’s imagery.
As the Man of Steel goes about duffing
up evil, his form he is captured in the glory of all those iconic
classic poses associated with Christ and beloved of Classical
painters. We see Superman in the Crucifixion pose,
Transfiguration, Descent into Hell and the Ascension, to name but a
few. The gorgeous hunk is not Superman but Saviour, and that letter
on his cozzie that looks like an S, is in fact an ancient Kryptonite
symbol meaning Hope.
Somewhere in the idea of Superman our
Redeemer, there is the germ of an interesting idea. I wonder if a
early draft of the script might have featured an imitatio Christi,
but instead of Jesus throwing the money lenders out of the Temple,
we would see Clark Kent join the occupy Wall Street movement, and and
take on the evils of Gonzo drug fed Capitalism and Globalisation.
No surprise the final draft of the Man of Steel script takes a more
conservative approach, Jesus’ philosophy honoured more in breech
than practice, and the shooting scenario more a device for
maximising the flash bang wallop of visual FX combat battle and
destruction.

It is the Visual FX that draw the
punters. I saw them in 2D and I am sure seen in 3D they are
wondrously realised. But I have to say that I found the Man of
Steel FX relentlessly overlong and repetitive. If I see another
petrol tanker picked up and thrown again with malice aforethought
I’ll go mad. It happens again and again. And when two combatants
equally matched with special powers fight each each other, the scenes
stretch out into endless tedium. The only winner is boredom and the
losers are the creative failure of the VFX people to find fresh
creative inspiration, beyond that of repeating the same moves against
different backgrounds.
I sometimes think that these big budget
movies with their end of the world scenarios are witness simply to a
general philosophy of fear that governs our collective psyche. A
philosophy initiated by the Nuclear bomb which revealed the extrinsic
power of science to destroy us all. A fear since fed by climate
chaos, pandemics, economic crashes, food scares terrorism etc. At
this point fear is a respectable and justifiable state of mind; as
if we need to live in a constant state of fear in order to survive.

Conversely Man of Steel also reminded
me of those psychological programmes which are used to help people
overcome phobias, such as aversion to spiders. They are gradually
desensitised so that in the end they are comfortable when placed in a
room full of arachnoids. As I sat in the full cinema, gazing at the
now familiar site of a razed Manhattan I felt I was in such a
desensitisation chamber. Man of Steel felt as if it were part of a
desensitisation programme designed to inure me with a complete
indifference to violence death and destruction. Was this a CIA
programme? As I biked home I wondered how Man of Steel would play in
down town Damascus.
As we played at Superman, Sid and I at
first had no thought for philosophy or fear. But one day a double
landing on a bed caused the frame to snap, and we received a short
sharp lesson in proto Nietschian aversion therapy from Mrs Sidney’s
accurate right hand. I understood at once the link between
philosophy and Superman.

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

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Behind the Chandelabra Steven
Soderbergh (USA 2013) Matt Damon; Michael Douglas

Viewed: 11 June 13 Gate Cinema
Newcastle upon Tyne: ticket £3.75

I looked behind the candelabra and
there was nothing there.

Adrin Neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

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P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; } Pierrot le Fou J-L Godard ( Fr 1965) Anna Karina, Jean Paul Belmondo Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 6 June 13; ticket £5 Pierrot le Fou (PF) in which Godard potently reconstituting himself as Pierrot le Fou, takes the road movie into the new era. Setting out the stall In an early sequence in the movie, at a typical high tone bourgeios party, Pierrot (aka Ferdinand – Belmondo) meets Sam Fuller the American film director. Pierrot asks him what movies are. Fuller replies that movies are like war, battles, money, people. Fuller ends by concluding that: in short films are emotions. Godard in PF lays out his cinema stall in a manner that is both in accord with and in contradistinction to Mr Fuller. For Godard (G) cinema is PASSION; passion in the making of films. That’s where the emotion is: not so much in sentiments expressed on screen, but rather emotion as registered in the intensity with which the ideas and multivariant signage are folded into the material. Godard’s films are wars, but fought with ideas, ideas expressed as only cinema expresses them: in a riot of image text sound and graphics. Godard’s films are passionate about thinking; what it is possible to think; and how film, with its collision of inputs, makes possible different types of thinking. G’s protagonist Pierrot is a fusion of clown and gangster. Pierrot as a type, the disillusioned romantic, points to the idea of clown. But Pierrot le Fou was also the soubriquet of a ruthless French gangster of the 1940’s, a true mean bastard. It seems to me that of the two fused personas, the clown is the basis of the character; it is the gangster who points to the way out, on the run, to the road. My feeling is that it is G himself who is this fused hoodlum–clown. The role is played wondrously by Belmondo, but the creation is the projection of Godard’s schizo nature; part gangster a restless transgressive figure who hates the Bourgoisie, and is alienated and distanced from their world.: and clown. As Pierrot his search for escape is doomed by his hopeless romantic love for Columbine ( Karina), whom he can never win and who will always drop him in the shit. The poetic fate of both clown and gangster is death. Godard’s genius was to create this cultural avatar of hoodlum clown and depict him in film as a satirical response to the conditions characteristic of life in the AMERICAN century. Road movies existed before PF, but I think it is G who gave this the genre its definitive post modernist form. In PF G replaces the mechanics of plot with process. It is a working out. The road is a pure process, and PF, a psychofilm. The series of cameos on the run provoke dialogues between the characters and the world, using the multivariant nature of the possibities of encounters on the road to elicit social and political observations and statements. After the brilliantly inventive opening titles, which announce the movie as a magical circus, PF plunges into the bath with Belmondo, who is looking at a book about Valasquez. The book depicts Valasquez as the Court painter, but an outsider, who in old age saw through the empty shallowness of power, and perceived in the peripheral figures of the Court, the dwarves and clowns, a twisted manifestation of the emptiness of regal life. And so Pierrot is set up. Like Velasquez he is an outsider looking into the vacuity of a class of people, in this case the bourgeiosie, and the parody of Americanised cullture and society they have adopted. Further the montage of the paintings that accompanies the discussion of Valasquez, also serves to alert the viewer that PF will comprise a structure that engages states of mind rather than the mechanicality of narative linearity. The film’s structure with interpolated paintings and graphics images breaks up conditoned responses, challenges the primacy of reason and asks the viewer how they understand what they see. The Vietnam war runs as a leitmotif thorugh PF. G inserts into PF newspaper headlines magazines photos newsreel and most stunning of all a clown show, in which Madeleine (Karina) transforms herself into a Vietnamese Columbine as a piece of mime in which she is playfully and casually shot, at point blank range, by Pierrot. The power of the Vietnam material lies in its random eruption into the film. Without a logic other than that of necessity, Vietnam is spliced into the action. The rudely extruded imagery of course points up the contradiction of normalisation. The televising of the Vietnam war has led to it becoming just another passing image, that might attract our attention momentarily but then just go away. Godard understood that the effect of 24 hour war coverage was to desensitize us and to normalize killing, but also in a more complex way it allowed us in the West to feel that we knew about it, without knowing anything at all about it. It’s a long way from but also close to home. PF is a rolling parody of affects and sentiments, one highlight being the sequence on the dock where the man tries to sing his song to Pierrot. One constant satiric theme throughout the scenario is the manner in which G depicts a society that is colonised by the outlook manner and attitudes of desire and consumption. The advertising industry. The actual effect of advertising is not to persuade us to buy this or that product. Rather advertising changes the whole gamut of social relations that operate between people and between institutions. These relations become based on consumption: on a psychic atmosphere of desire. The cumulative power of advertising, in our culture extends beyond its evident material presence in magazines on billboards in cinema and tv, to become an internalised social reality. Advertising is the way we are. Advertising is the power of propaganda which immobilises and neutralises alternative thinking. The clown and the gangster point to the way out. Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; } Akiro Kurosawa Samurai
Season at the Star and Shadow

The Seven Samurai, Hidden Fortress,
Yojimbo, Sanjuro shown between 5 May13 and 26 May 13

Ticket price for each screening: £5

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Mostly we see films piecemeal, drip fed
to us by the cinema release system. Of course that’s the way the
industry works, everyone wants to see the latest movie. But some
directors make us catch our breath: we may have clocked Darren
Aronofski, Sofia Coppola, George Romero, Alfred Hitchcock and
realised that these guys make films we like to see.
And seeing a number of films close
togather by the same director can take appreciation to another level.
Buying the box set and spinning the discs is sometimes the only
way. But the small screen can fail to do justice to some films, so
the best way to see retrospectives is at the cinema.
Today this is a rare treat. In
Newcastle, however, we are lucky enough to have cinemas that do
programme retrospectives.

With director retros, the pleasure lies
not just in viewing some good films but also having the chance to
understand the concerns, obsessions and beliefs that drive particular
directors to make the films they do. What method might lie in the
madness of movie making?
For Instance! I am intrigued by the
way Hitchcock’s films constitute a discrete mapping of his psycho
sexual disturbamce. His beautifully sublimated scenarios probe his
own repressed feelings: his need to rage against his mummy, to
control and mentally torture woman, his castration and his
inferiority complex.

Akiro Kurosawa, the Japanese director recently had a retrospective
season of his Samurai films at the Star and Shadow Cinema, curated by
Chritian Barron.

I went to see: the Seven Samurai,
Hidden Fortress, Yojimbo and Sanjuro and I wondered if the claim for
Kurosawa being a great director might extend beyond histechnical
prowess. Was some ulterior deeper vision in his output?

I was not disappointed.

As I watched his movies I became aware of an underlying concern
worked into the grain of these films. These Samurai movies are epic
in scale and handsomely photographed, the scene on the prison camp
steps in Hidden Fortress is jaw dropping. But what struck me most was
the intrinsicly Japanese quality of Kurosawa’s material. These films
in their imagery represent the quintessential the spirit of Japan.
This is Japan!

First and foremost Kurosawa’s sets. The dwellings with their screens,
shutters, lattice work, eaves, and opened rooms, these constitute a
full depiction of the traditional spaces that lie at the very heart
of Japanese life and identity. Yojimbo is outstanding in this
respect, and these sets also provide Kurosawa’s camera with stunning
opportunities both to frame and to light his shots.

The costumes also have a symbolicly essential Japanese quality all
made using traditional Japanese designs. These patterns on the
shirts and shifts worn both by peasant and the samurai most notably
in Sanjuro, refer back to and affirm ancient Japanese ornamental
traditions. And the erotic style in which the men’s garments are
worn, tucked up to reveal the flesh, signifies a culture that is not
ashamed of the body. By the way first in the roll of honour here is
Toshima Mifune whose bared bottochs and thighs, particularly in
Hidden Fortress, provide a feast for the eyes.

Factor in the role played by rice, by rain of tropical intensity, by
fire and finally by the people. The people Kurosawa depicts are men
of short stature. At times the screen is filled almost to bursting
with small bald headed little men. But they run – at full speed! It’s
as if Kurosawa is saying: “Yes! We are: little people, but we have
the energy!”

These expressive visuals extrude in imagary the essential symbols of
Japan: its soil, its culture its people, a representation of
traditional Japan that Kurosawa then proceeds to subvert.

Kurosawa was the son of a samurai, but knew the traditional order of
Japan had to change. In the mid twentieth century, Japan an
industrialised nation was still ruled by a Mediaeval militarised
power structure. This lag in social change led to the disaster of
Hiroshima, American occupation and the forced adaptation of an alien
culture and democratic political system.

Kurosawa determined to use his position
and ability as a film maker to support these democratic political
changes, which he saw as being necessary.

I imagine Kurosawa having an Eurika moment as he watched John Ford
movies and realised that Samurai could be transformed into a kind of
cowboy! Korosawa’s genius was to recreate the Samurai as a cowboy,
appropriating the form of the Hollywood Western, as a means of
recasting Japan’s past as mythe.
Over his symbolic elequent images of
old Japan, Kurosawa castes the shadow of the Samurai. The Samurai
represents the new man, epitomising the new values needed to remake
Japan: individualism, lack of repect for authority, the refusal to
accept fate, and In short Kurosawa’s Samurai got attitude big time,
and Toshiro Mifune was to Kurosawa what John Wayne was, to John
Ford, without of course the exposed thighs and bottocks, to John
Ford.

And the music! Kurosawa uses
traditional Japanese music to good effect, but at the most dynamic
moments, particularly in the Seven Samurai he cuts to jazz, an
uncompromisingly modern sound created by black of slaves and released
into the world as everyone’s music. It’s the sound that liberates
the action from the past.

So that’s it. I think the four Samurai films were intended as a
project conceived to resolve the innate Japanese tensions between her
traditions and her need to develop democratic social relations. As
if Kurosawa was saying that Japan should always be grounded in her
traditions, but never in such a way that she be hostage to this past.

I think Kurosawa’s claim to be a great
film maker rests on one key insight: cinema creates mythes and in
making his Samurai movies he stays constant to this realisation.

Of course the ultimate fate of these films was to be reimported back
into the tradition of making Westerns, this time to Italy and Sergio
Leone and the man who has no name. But there again we never catch
sight of Clint Eastwoods naked buttocks or thighs.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

The Great Gatsby Baz Luhrmann (USA
2013) Leonado Di Caprio; Carry Mulligan; Tobey Maguire

Viewed Tyneside Cinema 20 May 13;
ticket price £10.25 (£1:75 3D supplement)
Drowning in the shallows

Before going to see Baz Luhrman’s
current Hollywood offering, The Great Gatsby, I did something a
little naughty, I reread the book. I wanted check it out again,
this after all, is one of the great American novels.

Of course few films actually deliver
the impact of their literary credentials (excepted in my view are the
David Lean adaptations of Dickens); most book / film transpositions
end up either as insubstantial homage or mis-shapen unhappy
compromises characterised by inept direction .
The Great Gatsby is a wonderfully
observed novel written, from the first person perspective by the
persona of Nick Carraway (a literary stand-in for Fitzgerald
himself). It is a tragedy that tells of the fall of House of Gatsby.
Essentially it’s a chamber piece for four players: Gatsby, Nick
himself and Tom and Daisy Buchanan. Its setting against the broad
canvas of the Jazz Age, gives relevance and poignancy to the human
relations. It has an almost Chekhovian level of intensity, as the
narrator strives to understand the forces of desire that are
channeled in and lived out through his characters,

So how would the Great Gatsby as film
stack up? Baz Luhrmann as director / script writer of Gatsby was
not a good omen. From the little I had seen of his work, Moulin
Rouge, he looked like a man best at home at the circus, filming the
wonders of the carnival: scantily dressed girls, trapeze artists and
clowns. And to boot, Gatsby was shot for 3D and I was going to see
the 3D version.

The answer is that in the best
American/Hollywood tradition, technology replaces ideas. Luhrmann’s
Gatsby a tech fix. He opts to film a roaring 20’s mega party, goes
for the wow factor; never mind human relations- sex up the image –
it’s a 3D fest.

This is a Gatsby defined by and
dedicated to spectacle and delivered in 3D if you want to wear the
glasses. It’s difficult to see how to justify delivering a chamber
piece like Gatsby in 3D unless you want it to look like an endless
parade of competing images. The problem is that Gatsby is so wrapped
up in the spectacle of itself that it struggles to unwrap its own
story. Instead of depth of character, personal motivation and the
vigour of relations, this Gatsby is filmed using shots that comprise
multi plane depth of field. My feelings were that 3D gives a
spurious depth to the Great Gatsby that not only fails to engage with
the theme but actually works against Fitzgerald’s ideas.
In the traditional method of filming
interaction between two characters, directors take the shot using a
shallow depth of field, so that backgrounds are blurred and offer
nothing to distract the eye’s attention from the characters. In 3D
the shots comprise a number of discrete visual planes, all in focus,
each of which makes a demand for our attention. Our eyes are
enchanted by multiple distractions, and the intensity of our
involvement with dialogue and interaction is thereby diluted and
diminished. And Gatsby suffers consequently in this respect from a
lack of engagement and involvement with its characters.
In the large set piece party sequences,
which dominate the first half of the film, Gatsby’s displays of
ostentation and conspicuous consumption exist simply for their own
sake. Seen in 3 D this emphasis on spectacle undermines and works
against the narrative, because the main characters are not part of
the spectacle. Gatsby is written in the first person; from the
point of view of Nick, the outsider. The point is that he observes.
He isn’t a full participant, he witnesses. But the way Gatsby’s
week-end parties are shot is intended to provide an immersive
experience for the audience, undercutting Nick’s point of view rather
than supporting it, alienating the audience from the tidal ebb of
his narrative. It looks sexy; its a riotous pop promo; but it
doesn’t work.

Even Baz Luhrman’s film structure is
tired: he uses the old hackneyed formulaic stand by of the
psychiatric interview to frame Nick’s telling of the story. And the
manner in which he introduces the flashbacks to Gatsby’s youth are
clumsy and crudely worked into the flow of the movie, with the effect
that they slow the film down making it feel overlong and tedious.
The actors, doomed to compete with technology, struggle to maintain
the tensions implicit in the plots psychic and social interweaving.
In the end poor souls, their fate is to become coat hangers; walking
talking wire frames draped with a pleasing succession of period
costumes.

The one element in this Gatsby that had
value was Luhrman’s development of Fitzgerald’s idea

that Gatsby was not just a victim of a
failed obsessional illusion but that he was running out of road. The
pursuit of Gatsby by the forces that are the source of his wealth is
suggested by Fitzgerald. There is deep inner corruption of Gatsby.
And this feeling of the encroachment of evil into the core of the
plot’s relations is something film can accomplish economically and
powerfully; but whilst Baz Luhrman develops this theme a little, he
left me with the feeling that more was possible, but mostly left
undone.

I left the cinema wondering why
Hollywood makes films like this. What did Baz Luhrman imagine he was
doing? Are such films a symptom of a film culture where there is
nothing really left to say, where the only goal is to attract a new
generation of audiences into the cinema with 3D and keep the industry
and its workers ticking over on borrowed time? Was it Godard who
said “Cinema has nothing left to do other than to reproduce
itself…”?
Anyway I was glad to have had a reason
to re-read the book.

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; } Iron Man 3 Shane Black (USA 2013) Robert Downey Gwynith Paltrow Viewed Empire Cinema Newcastle upon Tyne Ticket: £3.75 Spontanious Human Bullshit All I can remember about Iron Man One was that it was full of commercial product placements and as I didn’t use these sort of products, I didn’t go to see Iron Man 2, but I thought I’d check into Iron Man 3. As 3 D makes me feel sick this review is from 2 D land, so I didn’t get the full on CGI show; but I can report that in Iron Man 3, there wasn’t a pack shot in sight. The camera turns its lens away from commercial products like a vestal virgin averting her eyes from the naked statue of Heracles at Helicarnassus. So what did I see in Iron Man 3. The writers of Iron Man 3, Drew Pierce and Shane Black, seem to have been sensitised, perhaps at an early and impressionable stage in their writing careers to the creative possibilities of Spontaneous Human Combustion. Spontaneous Human Combustion (or SHC) is the idea that human beings without warning, can spontaniously burst into flames, catch fire inside themselves and burn themselves out from within like a candle ,before being reduced to small sad pile of ashes. The heat produced in cases of SHC is intense enough to consume all flesh and bone of the unfortunate deceased. Dickens used SHC in Bleak House to dispose of one of his characters, interstingly an alcoholic. The writers of Iron man of course take the idea put a few nobs on it and give it the mad scientist treatment in the character of Aldrich. An experiment by Aldrich – the ‘Bad Guy’ – to induce extreme internal heat to cure drug addicts and alcoholics (?) goes badly wrong. The unfortunate subjects of the experiment burn out and blow everyone up. However in this disaster Aldrich sees – opportunity – as he says: Failure is the fog through which success is glimpsed. So he develops his heat treatment, not to give people a nice tanned look, but to turn people into his personal army of red hot soldiers – litterally. To the casual gaze these hot rods look just like you and me, but at the command of Aldrich they use their internal heat to unleash fire brimstone and death upon his enemies. It’s an idea that didn’t occur to the more prosaic Dickens, but this take on SHC by the scriptwriters provides the movie with an army of formidable enemies for Iron Man to biff and Iron Man likes nothing better than biffing a few bad guys. And they are well met: Iron Man spends a lot of time bolted into his metal exoskeleton, and Aldrich’s hot rod soldiers do their best to make things hot for him inside the suit. The plot if you can call it that, its not so much a plot, more a couple of sets of book ends that serve to keep the unruly meandering set pieces in some sort of time line. After an opening cod philosophical quote of the kind that Terrence Malik has a lot to answer for (the film opens with the portentous voice of Iron Man intoning for our instruction and edification, the sentence: ‘We create our own demons.’) Indeed we do. Anyway after this first Terrence Malik moment, we are whisked off to a scientific convention: Berne 1999 It’s an opening sequence in which Iron Man gives Aldrich – the bad guy – the cold shoulder. He stands him up, forgetting to meet him on the roof on the convention hotel. You see Iron man has the hots for a fruity lady scientist and more interesting things to do than keep an assignation with a geeky young inventor. Now some people might think forgetting an appointment was just one of those things that happen. Shit happens. But not your man Aldrich. No! This event dominates his life and he takes out a vow of revenge on the whole world, the whole cosmos for Iron Man’s unforgivable slight. In the nineteenth century Aldrich would have sent his seconds round to ask Iron Man for satisfaction. In the twenty first century that’s not enough: he has to destroy the world and every one in it to get his own back. That’s it really ! In a way the movie is a computer game scenario based on the ‘Quest’ idea. Stark aka as Iron Man has to find and nullify Aldrich before he ends the world as we know it and the American way of life become history. The script exploits a number of well know game characters: the wise child, the warrior woman, the buddie, the fool, the bad guy, to cue a series of CGI set pieces of graphic intensity. You know the kind of thing: an army of CGI technicians, thousands of them, lackies chained to computers, produce a series of extrordianry images and effects even seen in 2D: explosions on land sea and air, everything you see blows up, there’s fire, the earth quakes people dieing horribly by the bucket load. And another CGI effect also impresses: whenever he needs to fight the good fight, Stark simply whistles up his exoskeleton and piece by piece, it hurtles through space and time and bolts itself onto him, transforming him into a Medieval looking warrior A knight in armour going forth to save damsels and do good. Stark is also fashionably scripted with anxiety attacks and doubt, but protected, in the script, not by the word of God, but by Terrence Malick type gnomic utterances. The other plot device of note is supplied by Ben Kingsley as the Mandarin. The scenario initially creates the impression that the mayhem and destruction abroad in the world is being orchestrated by a comic book Bin Laden look alike, called the Mandarin. The film in exploiting the physical similarities of the Mandarin and Bin Laden walks a tricky line from the point of view of setting up Jihad as plot driver. Undiscriminating audiences may take the suggestion implicit in the image of the Mandarin and connect it with Jihad. And they may not be sophisticated enough to uncouple Jihadists and mainstream Islam. For the film to connect Islam and the annihilation of the USA is to move into criminally culpable zone of incitement. But Iron Man 3 resolves the device of the Mandarin half way through the movie. It is revealed that the Mandarin is a spoof. He is in fact only an actor called Trevor. The Mandarin, the Bin Laden look alike is simply a hapless frontman for the real evil presence, the dread Aldrich, the clean white boy who was slighted all those years ago by Iron Man and is now exacting his terrible revenge. The problem with revelation that the Mandarin is in fact only a stooge is that this leaves an implausible gap in the film’s motivational mechanism. Is revenge for being stood up by Iron Man a sufficiently strong reason to explain why the world has tobe destroyed? Is there perhaps some homerotic undertone at work? Is all this terrible destruction a simple psychic statement, Aldrich’s way of telling Iron Man that he really loves him? This is possible. But might there be some other purpose lurking within the film’s concoction? Why have all these CGI compositors and artists been put to work to make this film? Was it only to indulge the audience’s need to gaze on the detailed mechanics of the annihilation of the world? Or is there something else at work in the script? I thought about this and it occurred to me that perhaps the whole film was an allegory? I wondered if it was an allegory connected to scientology? I mean Hollywood is full of scientologists these days….. OK I agree the world can do without another conspiracy theory… …but the more I think about it….Iron Man somehow epitomises the idea of the superior being evolving out of the limitations of the human species. This proximates to the Scientology myth that homo sapiens is not the fully evolved article; he needs to be further developed by technology. With his exoskeleton Iron Man is the fusion of technology and flesh that is the promise of Scientology which belives we were once superior life forms called Thetans who have since degenerated. So The Scientology proposition is that we have to evolve and reclaim out Thetan identity; or we, as a race, will perish because of our evil our pusillanimity and weakness. Iron Man is a prototype operating Thetan, an advanced technological type who like Ron Hobbard opens the doors to others who are ready: the child the woman the man, enabling them to realise their true techie identity. In so doing Iron Man defeats evil and helps those who can to develop their Thetan identities. Far fetched perhaps. If you looking for high tech effects that roll down over you off the screen and flatten you, then go see Iron Man 3. If you crave meaning from Iron Man then it’ll have to be a do-it-yourself job. Thetans or bust. Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

A Taste of Cherry Abbas Kiarostami (Iran 1997) Homayoun
Ershadi

Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema Newcastle
4 April 2013 Ticket: £5

retrocrit: all is revealed (perhaps)

In his direction of A Taste of Cherry,
Abbas Kiarostami (AK) is like one of those magicians who put on a
great show of revealing to an audience the method by which they
accomplish their tricks, and then undermine the explanation by
pulling off the trick in contradiction to principles of the
explanation. A switch in framing that deepens the appreciation of
the audience.

In AK’s Taste of Cherry there are also
two frames at work. They mark out the two different perspectives that
AK has incorporated into the movie. In a Taste of Cherry the subject
matter, suicide, is presented within two contrasting frames of
reference which point to the different formal issues brought into
play. There is the conventional film frame which in itself sustains
the narrative with its convention of the privileged camera; and there
is the meta framing device that shows the camera and the crew,
revealing the film as a certain kind of product. The one frame
develops the fiction of the narrative whilst the ensuing frame strips
away this artifice and focuses attention on the construct.

The frame of filmmaking is revealed in
the final sequence of the film when we are shown the film crew at
work collecting the last pieces of material needed to finish TC.
This final framing points to the fact that TC was not intended to be
taken for anything ‘real’ in itself; it was never conceived as a pure
replication. The issues embedded in the story are real issues, the
way in which they are presented is real, but the narrational
presentation of them was always intended to be understood as a
construct. Perhaps in much the same way that a Platonic dialogue is
a construct; a transparently artificial device intended as a vehicle
for ideas, acted out by a set of characters, who follow a preordained
script.

As Plato set up his dramatis personae
in such a way that we understand that what is happening is a benign
fabrication for our entertainment and instruction, so AK exploits the
potential of film to first mask the perspective of the camera, in
order in the end, to dramatically reveal its meta presence. So that
we understand that what we have have been viewing and absorbing, as
‘real’, or rather a product designed to replicate the expressive
indicators of ‘real’, is in fact a simple mechanical product of
intentionality. Virtual not real. Most narrative film is of course
simply an expressive function of intentionality: a means of giving
form to mental representations. It takes an AK or a Godard to
exploit the possibilities of this truism, and reveal it in an
entertaining enlightening manner whilst remaining true to film as a
state of mind rather than as a didactic lesson.

In TC, the final shots comprise a
philosophical coup de film, a moment of pure re-evaluation. The
exposure of the film crew at work compels the viewer to drop from
their eyes the scales of any emotional purchase on the story, to drop
any illusion that there can be a real outcome or playing out of the
vectors of the narrative, and to understand the material and the
issues therein, as pure proposition. Like the magicians final act,
it is a joke, but a good one, that jolts us into consciousness.

The issues which provoked AK’s script
revolve about the idea of suicide and the sorts of claims this manner
of death makes upon intimacy. The idea of intimacy, fear of
intimacy, lies at the heart of the film. In the opening sequence we
see Mr Badii, (B) drive around looking for a man to help him . B
drives the car as if he were some predatory beast. B looks for his
man with the kind of intense desperation that characterises a man
looking for sex. B has that mixture of concealed desire and anxiety
that perhaps AK has observed in homosexual men cruising for sex, a
dangerous undertaking in a country where some 4000 homosexuals have
been executed since the revolution. B, furtive and anxious is not
looking for sex. He is looking for a man to partner him in a more
intimate entanglement: to help B to die.

Reflection: AK will certainly know the
phrase, le petit mort, often used to describe post coital sadness.
It is possible that consideration of the analogous intimacy of sex to
death, underlies TC. Overall I think that it would be doing scant
justice to AK as a thinker and filmmaker to reduce TC to such narrow
band of meaning. The filmic use of the car, B’s proposition of
suicide and the responses of the others engaged in the discourses
all point to a imperative in the film to use its devices to say
something about the human condition. The fact that suicide
illustrates both loneliness and need for intimacy.

And at the crux of the human condition
lies death through suicide. Perhaps in the human domaine it is the
last repository of meaningful dialogue. Sex, education, work have
all become subjects of mechanical discourses, often determined by the
shibboleths of social political or ideological beliefs. Suicide,
eludes the semantic clutches of the times and the easy passage of
formulaic responses. It remains a proposition for humans about which
there is a moral dilemma. At the heart of the proposition of
suicide lies the question as to why we should continue to live when
we feel overwhelmed; when life has become intolerable. What is
life? AK in his poetic realism sets the mulberry tree against the
cherry tree. The sweet opposes the bitter.

In its narrative opposition AK employs
the voice of one who has overcome the impulse to kill himself against
the voice of one on the cusp of fateful decision. The taxidermist
has come through a self destructive state of mind consequent to
personal disaster, and survived with a deeper insight not only into
life as a decision, but into death as a decision. This individual
although in his being opposing the stated intention of B to kill
himself in the hole by the cherry tree, understands his need for some
one with whom to share an intimacy and accepts B’s invitation to play
a part in his death. The dialogue between the two men itself wavers
between life and death, the spirit and body. Poised on the delicate
balance of frail human judgement the outcome is perhaps
philosophically irresolvable and so resolved in the structure of the
film itself. But it is the intimacy of the dialogue that compels,
revealing an essential loneliness in human experience. It was this
equation of suicide and intimacy that frightened and warned off the
other men whom B approached in the first sequences of TC. In our
modernity the pretext of self destruction can open us up. Like B we
spend all our time going through the motions of being alive, the big
car the expensive tastes and clothes, only for all this to be a
pretext for our decision to die.

The way in which C is shot from first
to last is to use the actual filming as a layer of meaning built into
the film. AK transposes in the filming of TC his concerns and their
conceptualisation into the style and form of the shooting script.

AK loves cars. There can be no doubt.
And part of his love of cars expresses itself in the way for which
they have come to represent us and to define our way of life.
Incessant movement and agitation. The transversing of space the
contraction of time: and suicide is the ultimate contraction of time.
And nearly all the film is shot on the move. The opening shots of TC
are all tracking shots from the car. The haunted peering of B out of
the window; always moving on; and despite his searching, barely able
to stop, because stopping is not in the nature of the car. As if
when you stop you are dead; when you stop moving you cease to exist.
When B stops there is only the grave under the cherry tree.
Filmmaking crafted out of the enduring and powerful states of mind
associated with car culture. In TC, AK builds this car culture of
infinite unlimited movement into the idea of the search for the
assured stillness that is death.

Movement and stillness. as if death
were the only way out for us. The long shots of B driving his car
down the myriad meandering roads that lead about the countryside and
hills outside the city provoke thoughts of the nature of life itself
as a twisting road. And again the only manner in which the car is
stopped is the lure of intimacy or the lure of death, which in TC
have been subsumed within each other: a transcendence finally
revealed by the film crew which marks the end of the film.

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; }TD P { margin-bottom: 0cm; }

At five in the afternoon Samira
Makmalbaf (2003 Iran.Fr) Agheleh Rezaie; Abdolgani Yousefrazi

Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 4 April
2013 Ticket price: £5

shoes seen in a mirror

The phrase,
At five in the afternoon (5AN), the recitation of which, spoken over
a desolate and empty landscape, opens the film, is taken from the
Lorca poem with the same title. The Lorca poem is a lament for the
goring to death in 1934 in the bull ring, of his friend, the matador
Ignacio Sánchez Mejías. Samira Makmalbaf’s (SM)
film is also a lament for the loss of something vital in the world,
the independent spirit of the female. Perhaps 5AM also has a
metaphorical
resonance, in that the harsh exposed public elements of Afghan
society have characteristics that make it similar to the bull ring.
Afghanistan as a place where those who expose themselves to the five
o’clock light of the public arena and its judgement, are gored to
death.

Enfolded into the 5AN is the
journey towards the lament. A lament for life suffocated and for the
type of death that awaits independent spirit, in particular but not
exclusively the female, in a society that has been twisted by brutal
external forces, and taken blind refuge in tradition. But although
5AN, has a pessimistic ending with the death of Laylomah’s child and
the deeper exile of Nograh into the Taliban heartlands, the film is
remarkable and sustained by its affirmation of spirit. I think SM
avoids the simplistic crass iteration of despair;
SM has produced a true lament that whilst marking the point of
death, affirms the forces that are life bestowing. The flesh may die;
spirit is a flame that can always be rekindled. The lament it seems
to me is always about humans as worlds, humans as a totality in
themselves of a world, that always has the possibility of reaching
out and interpenetrating and affecting contiguous beings. Body and
soul.

And this is the strength of
SM’s film. Though life may now, in 2013, for Afghan women and men be
lived out in the enveloping shadow of reactive fundamentalism, the
shibboleths of Mullahs: – God knows all
we do – women refrain from dancing. These dour
incantations cannot extinguish the actuality that the
expression of joy and the gift of personal voice are in themselves
the flame of life.

5AN establishes that it is,
the within, that nurtures spirit. Oppressors whether religious or
political have always attempted to suppress ‘within space’. In 5AM
the girls/ young women, sit with their veils off in the courtyard of
the girls school. Without veil they are alive and vital as they
discuss the Taliban and its repression of women, and then discuss the
idea of the possibility of a woman becoming the president of
Afghanistan. The vitality of this debate is electrifying and
captivating.

These young women, in a film
made in 2002 ( released 2003), the first year of the American (UN/
IFOR) invasion after 14 years of Taliban rule, have come to life like
seeds in the desert after rain. There is evidenced a collective
female courage that simply has lain low until conditions changed.
The debate is innocent and naive but passionate. It affirms
something precious in life that always endures. Even the later death
of one of the most outspoken young women in a suicide bombing, and
the foreseen deterioration of security, cannot lessen the intensity
of feeling expressed and the certainty that these feelings and
insights can never be totally crushed.

Today we see the
courage of Malala Yousafzai from
the tribal lands in Pakistan and we recognise in her the young women
in this film

In 5AN, SM finds a visual
complement to her script in way she uses images of women in
Afghanistan. These images of women in burqas destroy the cliches
that we normally accept as signifying women in Afghan culture. The
shots of the young women moving en masse in their blue burqas take on
a different meaning because we have seen this visual collective of
burqas represent themselves effectively as individuals: we have heard
their voices. We now know they have voice. The usual shots in both
photographs and in film of women in full burqa huddled in groups,
normally signify to the Western gaze a passivity of being, a lacking
of individual will. SM confronts and demolishes the cliche by giving
the viewer access to the simple fact that behind the image of a group
of women traditionally attired, there are as many individual voices.
Voices denied but nevertheless actual. This outer aspect of
uniformity is only an appearance behind which lies that which is to
be revealed.

The protagonist, Nograh gives
the film its psychic movement. It again seems that SM has not wanted
to produce a sort of Afghan Mouchette or Rosetta. In some senses
both these films close down their female protagonists and allow them
little inner or outer space to do other than to slide down into
death. Nograh has multiple dimensions
through which her being is defined. Nograh locked into an actual
world. creates worlds, other spaces for her existence outside of the
fundamentalist cage that her father has put her in. Nograh
externally complies with the strictures of her father; and in SM’s
scenario there is no implied criticism of the father. He is severe;
perhaps his freedom and groundedness consist in his strict
observance. He has no ability to see any other choice for his
daughter other than to impose on her his own beliefs. Outwardly
Nograh obeys, each act of obeisance closing down
her outer world. But within there is another story. The debate in
the school captures her imagination and transforms her internal
world. The idea of a woman becoming president of Afghanistan, like
Bhutto in Pakistan, infiltrates her consciousness feeding her
imagination. Her excitement communicates itself to the young poet
who is enchanted by her vision and encourages the expression of the
fantasy. The idea becomes part of her meaningful world of
possibilities.

The leitmotif running
through the film is the pair of white heeled shoes secreted by Nograh
(N). This is the second time in a couple of weeks where I have seen
women’s shoes have featured as a significant force in a movie.
Park’s Stoker uses the cathectic charge of heeled shoes as part of
his movie’s signage, as a symbol. In the case of Stoker the high heel
shoes act as a fetish for an erotically charged rite de passage from
adolescence to womanhood. In Stoker. The high heeled shoes are used
as a laboriously fostered symbolic cliche for sexual potency and
freedom, a movement from infantalised incest to sexual independence.
In 5AN I think it is otherwise. SM uses the modest pair of white
heeled shoes that Nograh has somehow acquired not as a symbol but
rather as a practical tool; a means by which N may pass from one
world through into another. The shoes have a fairy tale quality. The
shoes are secret shoes, secreted shoes, power shoes. Slipped onto her
feet they are in themselves the entry into another world.

N’s shoes, above all for
her are a form of practical magic. They transform reality. They are
not a statement. They are not a symbol. They enable her to move.

5Am was cogently and
powerfully shot amidst the ruins of Afghanistan. SM films a country
that has been smashed up and is overwhelmed by internal migration of
refugees. It is collapsing into chaos; perhaps the only order is
religion. But 5AM seeks out in its scenario the visual
possibilities of the ruins. N’s father fleeing from what he sees as
profane chaos, finds shelter in the ruins of a old colonnaded palace,
with huge high ceilinged rooms. A vastness and emptiness define this
structure in opposition to the density and fullness of the cities.
And, there is one shot of N, in her white heeled shoes as she walks
on the flagstones between the monumental colonnade, taking possession
of the space in her billowing blue burqa. It is a moment of magic.
As N walks she becomes a queen or the president of Afghanistan, alone
in this palace. The walk is an unforgettable act of personal power.
Her power; a woman’s power.

Although cruelly and
honestly pessimistic in its tone and in the final destination of N,
stranded in desolation and emptiness and death, with her father, 5AM
does not leave a psychic legacy of hopelessness. The characters are
not, as in so many movies, mere mechanical puppets attached to the
working out of script. 5AN is set and shot in a real world in the
rawness of Afghan society. A society molded by the terrible forces
released by invasion and war. But the characters have dignity of
their own worlds, both father and daughter and it is this inner
dignity that carries them and carries us through the movie without
despair.

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk