The Return (Vozvrashchenie) – Andrey Zvyagintsev – 2003

When reviewing examples of meditative cinema you often find yourself getting bound up in cliché. Not just in the terms you end up churning out (haunting/contemplative/ethereal et al) but in the reference points you turn to. Some people stand as such totemic examples of this brand of film in their national cinemas that you can’t help but consciously refer to them. Japan, you think Ozu. Sweden, you think Bergman. Iran, you think Kiarostami. Belgium, you think the Dardenne’s etc etc, and so it goes with Russian cinema, where the name Tarkovsky looms long over subsequent works.

Andrey Zvyagintsev’s debut feature The Return was as subject to this as any recent Russian feature in the wake of its Golden Lion win at 2003's Venice Festival. Critics chose to make Stalker (1979) the main frame of reference, and you can see where they were coming from. Like that picture, The Return employs a muted colour palate, where most images are drained of vibrancy to the point where every colour seems to be a variant on blue or grey, the emptied provincial towns, looking shut down in a perpetual loop of dull bank holidays, decaying warehouses creating a dystopian atmosphere echoing Stalker’s ‘The Zone’ early in the film, and of course both films are framed within a foreboding journey and discovery template. Equally valid arguments though could be made for comparing the film with other art house road trips such as Theo Angelopoulos’ Landscapes in the Mist (1988) and Michelangelo Antonioni’s stunning mist-strewn evocation of the Italian Po Delta in Il Grido (1957).

Like most films of this ilk, the outward narrative of The Return is stripped to a bare bones approach and is all the better for it. The film concerns two brothers Ivan (Ivan Dobronravov) a mummy’s boy on the cusp of adolescence and Andrey (Vladimir Garin) a few years older and determined to impress his peers. One summer day they return home to be informed that their father (Konstantin Lavronenko) unseen since they were toddlers, has returned and is intending to take them on a fishing trip to make up for lost time.

Rather than a heartfelt family reunion though, the father is met with immediate suspicion, especially by Ivan, who attempts to test his father’s patience from the off and questions his motives for returning. Not that his suspicions are completely unfounded as the father acts cold and brusque, toying emotionally with the brothers and lambasting them for perceived weaknesses in their characters.

The first half of the film takes place largely in the confines of the fathers 1980s Gaz Volga (imagine a Volvo made with Iron Curtain spit and gristle cost cutting economy rather than Swedish proficiency), and concentrates on the less ecstatic aspects of family road trips, the boredom of confinement, the monotony of unvarying landscapes and the resulting shortened tempers of those caught up in this scenario.

As the film progresses, a sense of menace and dread begins to take hold as we are invited to share in the brothers’ suspicion of the increasingly authoritarian actions of their father. By the time the trio arrive at their fishing destination on a secluded mid-lake island, this ominous atmosphere builds towards an almost inevitably crushing conclusion.

The film invites itself up as a emblematical template for varied analytical approaches, be that theological (with the father’s introduction to the film purposely framed to echo Andrea Mategna’s The Lamentation over the Dead Christ and the misty hooded crossing of a lake bringing to mind Charon ferrying souls across the River Styx), psychoanalytical (the whole parental relationship dichotomy being a field day for Freudian scholars) or allegorical (certainly native viewers may be drawn towards an analysis in which the old guard of the USSR has a traumatised relationship with contemporary Russia).

I found taking the film at face value perfectly rewarding though. The strained relationship creating a perfectly intriguing premise. I found it reminiscent of when you would visit friends whose father’s you found overly strict as a child, and you stand there witnessing these relationships wondering what their motive was, is their father a cruel man? Does he detest the responsibility of having children? Or is he simply trying to teach important lessons in a slightly misguided way? Making sure the child has the necessary attributes of a ‘man’ so that the world can’t take advantage? This is the kind of scenario played out here. The film provides a steady stream of intimations that the father has an ulterior motive for the trip (an eventual mcguffin), and gives very subtle hints as to the reasons for him being missing for 12 years, allowing the viewer to piece together their own backstory of sorts.

This was a stunningly rewarding film to view a second time. With hindsight, character motivations appear clearer and in the case of the father, more forgiving than our initial viewing of him as a stern beast of a man with the resulting actions having all the more devastating an impact as a consequence. A large part of this can be put down to Konstantin Lavronenko’s performance which is commendably nuanced behind a poker faced façade.

Unfortunately having knowledge of the film's production provides an extra sense of melancholy to its proceedings as Vladimar Garin suffered a bitterly ironic death in a drowning accident not long after completion of the film. The fact casting an inevitable weight and long shadow over the picture.

Predictably we return to Tarkovsky. His own debut Ivan’s Childhood (1962) ends up providing one of the most apt comparisons in the end. The innocence of youth cut short, the brutality of responsibility being forced onto unready young shoulders. If the responsibility of being a 21^st century Tarkovsky is to be pushed upon Zvyagintsev’s own shoulders, then with this and his subsequent work so far, he’s doing a creditable job.

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Dead Snow - Tommy Wirkola - 2009

It may just be the self-righteous Guardian reader that exists within me, but is it not right that we call time on the hackneyed usage of Nazis as an irredeemable evil, free to be killed off as violently as possible and without remorse “cause the tenets of national socialism ‘n’ Hitler ‘n’ the final solution ‘n’ all that” makes it ok. This argument may hold little water but whilst many Nazis were of course rather unsavoury types to say the least, many were simply ordinary German soldiers conscripted to essentially defend their country, just like the Brits, just like the Russians etc. In years past with the horrors of the Second World War as still a fresh and haunting memory, the use of the Nazi’s as a voiceless evil unit of übermenschen to be wiped out was somewhat more understandable, a catharsis if you will. Therefore the sub-sub-sub genre that is the ‘Nazi-Zombie movie’ found its genesis in films such as Ken Wiederhorn’s Shock Waves (1977), a film worthwhile purely by merit of it including both Hammer hero Peter Cushing and the king of Poverty Row John Carradine slumming it for quick bucks, and Zombie Lake (1981) a film by Jean Rollin at his ‘poor man’s Jess Franco’ worst. Well I say poor man’s Franco but then the Spanish soft focus merchant made the equally poor Nazi brain muncher Oasis of the Zombies in the same year.

In this age of supposed enlightenment though, several generations removed from those who fought in the battlefields of Europe, Africa and Asia. Do contemporary German viewers of cinema really deserve the indignity of being told that their grandfathers made up a nation of purely malevolent beings just ripe for beyond the grave butchery?

Bah, whatever you fucking hippy Lee etc. Anyway, whilst such shenanigans have continued to mine a rich vein in computer games such as the Castle Wolfenstein series and the recent Call of Duty 5. It has taken Norwegian horror buff Tommy Wirkola to resurrect this dubious tradition for the cinema screen with Dead Snow.

After opening with a typical pre-credits first victim gets felled with a cheap scare scenario, the film has us following a group of young medical students on a doomed skiing vacation in the mountainous landscapes of northern Norway. As the film presents the opening half hour of exposition we are made aware that this is a post-Scream generation of disposable teens, very much hip to the tenets of slasher cinema. In the case of one of the gang, the filmmaker’s inspiration is quite literally worn on his sleeve as he parades around in a t-shirt bearing a poster for Peter Jackson’s comic grue tour de force Braindead (1992).

The film proceeds to lay on the self-aware slasher film clichés as thick as possible. With tongue wedged firmly in cheek, we witness a creepy wizened stranger arrive at their cabin to spout local histories not generally provided by lonely planet guides, as we find that the area was during WWII a shipping channel for the allies which the Nazi’s attempted to unsuccessfully blockade. We then witness members of the group foolishly split up to search for missing friends, false scares chalked up and a promiscuous pair sign up as the first victims by choosing to copulate in a freezing outhouse. After half an hour of this post-modernist pastiche though, tedium does begin to set in as the whole enterprise threatens to slip into banality.

Thankfully we soon see the proper arrival of the zombies, as the film’s uneasy balance of seriousness and comic homage gives way to pure ‘splatstick’ and thus proceeds to go batshit insane for the final 40 minutes. All previous attempts at developing character arcs and creeping dread are thrown off the mountainside in favour of Raimi/Jacksonesqe farcical carnage as creative dismemberment becomes the order of the day, and cliff side zombie fistfights, snowmobile massacres and wilderness survival techniques that would turn Ray Mears a whiter shade of pale take precedence. All set in the sort of scenery that would usually be reserved for the grandeur of a Bond ski-chase set piece rather than zombie intestine wrestling.

It also becomes evident that the usage of Nazis as the enemy here does admittedly work rather well. The eternally sharp uniforms of the Wehrmacht make for a wonderful contrast against the snowy backdrops, and for once the concept of athletic and savvy zombies works in the films favour, as they really do proceed to work with military precision, frequently outflanking and outthinking our young protagonists.

Whilst never destined to join the ranks of classic zombie cinema. Dead Snow overcomes it’s stiffly directed slavish adherence to cliché in the opening half and does enough to make you enthusiastically recall the copious claret and freeform butchery of the latter half in recommendations to friends. Worthy popcorn fodder for the gorehound, and returning to my original point, I just saw Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds (2009) since I wrote the opening paragraph, and excitedly revelled in 2 ½ hours of the wildest Nazi bloodlust. Colour me hypocritical scumbag!

Los Angeles Plays Itself - Thom Anderson - 2003

The image of the cityscape in cinema has long been a personal obsession of mine, from classics such as Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927) and Dziga Vertov’s preeminent montage document Man with a Movie Camera (1929), through to recent exponents of the cinematic city, such as Michael Mann, who never lets a films plot get in the way of presenting his ultra-modernist visions of sleek and cold-hearted corporate glass dome cityscapes, or to reference a very recent and particularly wondrous example, we can consider Terence Davis’ feisty homage to his home town of Liverpool with Of Time and the City (2008). Davis uses historical council documentarian footage to aid in building a picture of his youth as a sepia-toned poem. With Los Angeles Plays Itself, Thom Anderson has no need to visit local councils for such footage in order to present the city he once knew, instead the city he knew can still be found documented in hundreds of thousands of homes around the world.

As “the world’s most photographed city” Los Angeles is a place whose history seems to have been created through the lens of the filmmakers who chose to decamp there. As a resident Angelino, Anderson looks to dispel many of the myths that seem to have become part of the regular vernacular when considering the city, and searches for an image of the city lived in by the “39 out of every 40 residents of Los Angeles who aren’t part of the movie industry”.

Therefore rather than a personalised poetic elegy like that presented by Davis, Anderson (usually a tutor at CalArts) presents a heavily politicised audio/visual dissertation that considers the ramifications of living in a city whose double identity has helped in the deformation and reconstruction of large swathes of it, helping create the misshapen segregated beast that the “City of Angels” can be seen as today.

Like a cinematic equivalent of Grandmaster Flash and 2ManyDJ’s, Anderson builds his documentary through the (un-commissioned) employment of hundreds of film clips remixed together to paint a picture of a city whose cinematic representation has distorted it’s geography, history and even its name (though Anderson’s complaints about the abbreviation of the city’s title to L.A. does come across as overly fastidious). Voiceover commentary is provided by Encke King, whose relaxed and muted tone always threatens to veer towards dull though somehow contains just enough bite to keep you attentive for the near three hours duration.

The range of clips employed by Anderson is expansive and to be honest quite superlative. From the obvious and much revered documents of the city seen in the likes of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) and Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (1993) via unexpected delights such as Michelangelo Antonioni’s chimerical Zabriskie Point (1970), Peter Bogdanovich’s debut Targets (1968) and Hal Halicki’s car destruction orgy Gone in 60 Seconds (1974), through to even referencing trash that would be otherwise consigned to an unloved eternity at the bottom of supermarket sale bins such as Virtuosity (1995), Death Wish 4 (1987) and Sly Stallone’s self penned ego massage Cobra (1986).

Anderson gradually layers depth into his essay, beginning with the shallow surface examination the use of Los Angeles’ famous art-deco architecture within films. Before really hitting its stride with a fascinating dissection of the history of downtown’s Bunker Hill district. Anderson finally bares his teeth in the second half with an angry deconstruction of the false histories created for the city.

Even with a running time that makes the documentary seem as sprawling and over-bearing as the city itself, Los Angeles Plays Itself inevitably contains omissions. The most obvious cinematic omission would seem to be Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994) a film that like Tarantino’s other early work, happily charts a Los Angeles that lives lights years away from the Hollywood Hills crowd. Though it’s representation of the city as one of small time crooks, bric-a-brac store dwelling rapists and pop-culture hitmen will probably still make Anderson’s blood boil.

As the film draws to a close one also begins to feel there is a large hole in the documentary with its lack of in-depth reference to the multi-ethnic make-up of the city outside of brief reference’s to the Watts riots and the Rodney King beating. This is made up for though with a fantastic closing segment that rather than taking the obvious route of examining what Anderson feels to be the exploitative and unfair representations of south-central Los Angeles as urban guerrilla warfare zones as seen in Boyz in the Hood (1991), and the post ’92 riot crowd such as Menace II Society (1993). He instead pays loving tribute to the black independent cinema movements of the 1970’s, covering such films as Charles Burnett’s much admired Killer of Sheep (1977).

Far from attempting to appeal to the masses Anderson has created a document by a film fanatic and very much for film fanatics. If the subject matter may occasionally appear daunting, a dry as Death Valley humour helps the film along, from comparing the punctilious production of hardcore right-wing cop show Dragnet to the methods employed by Art-House deities Bresson and Ozu, to even admitting the documentary’s title is lifted from an early seventies gay porn flick. Anderson has created a work that any self-respecting film student really should hunt out*.

*and hunt out you will have to do, as due to the abundance of unlicensed film clips this is unlikely to ever see a DVD release. Of course searching the darker more legally dubious corners of the internet may help in yielding positive results, not that I could ever promote such ideas.....

Escape From Hong Kong Island (Mak Dau Sin Sang) - Simon Lui - 2004

A little known satirical comedy from China, Escape From Hong Kong Island follows a ruinous day in the life of Hong Kong stock market trader Raymond Mak (Jordan Chan), a despicably cruel hearted yuppie who arrives at work to find that he has been fired as his colleagues can no longer bear to work with him. He arranges another job with a rival firm that is his as long as he makes it to their offices for 5pm that day to sign the contract. This rival company’s office happens to be across the bay in Kowloon. What should be a simple trip across the harbour turns into a catalogue of disasters as he is mugged of his cash and identity and struggles to acquire the money he needs to make it across. Will he make it in time? And more importantly, will he learn a valuable life lesson along the way? (I can’t believe I just wrote that...)

Most of the humour in the film derives from the fact that our character has such a simple task that he cannot complete, all he needs is a few dollars to make it across yet his crippling character fallacies prove to cause him countless problems in even acquiring this minute amount of cash. Jordan Chan succeeds in making Raymond a seemingly irredeemably cold hearted bastard. This is a man who upon finding out that his mother (whom he hasn’t seen in years) is virtually a vegetable after suffering debilitating Alzheimer’s disease, is only concerned as to whether she left any change lying around for him to steal.

The film also succeeds in its broad satirical stabs at post colonial Hong Kong life, we are presented with a hyper modern westernised city suffering the worst excesses of dog eat dog capitalism, where vacuous materialism is the key to social acceptability and friendships are based purely on what can be financially gained from such acquaintances. The film makes clear the ever widening gap between the Island’s Dom Perignon quaffing, $200 lunch eating elite and the underclass of 6 to a room squalor. Raymond also sees himself constantly held up by the frustrating petty bureaucracies of state officialdom and the absurd red tape and rule systems of corporate holdings.

Unfortunately the look of the film sometimes comes across as rather cheap, as director Simon Lui chose the make the film on low quality DV, and pays for it with that classic washed out look leaving all white background images to suffer from retina scaring flashes of blinding light.

Also as the film proceeds you get the uncomfortable feeling that the film will eventually give in to saccharine melodrama, and the last ten minutes does indeed allow the worst excesses of Hollywoodised ‘life lessons’ and A Christmas Carol esq moral redemption to come into play. Also its representation of the neon swirl of the contemporary Hong Kong metropolis pales when placed next to something like Christopher Doyle’s stunning work on Wong-Kar Wai’s Chungking Express (1994).

Still though for the first 80 odd minutes this makes for an entertaining slice of classic shadenfreude, and is well worth an evening’s entertainment.

INLAND EMPIRE - David Lynch - 2006

Whilst one of the most critically regarded of the post ‘New Hollywood’ generation of American Auteurs, the work of David Lynch has always divided audiences. This is a man whose films carry such a distinctly subverted sense of scenario and logic that they have their own stylistic term (‘Lynchian’ now being pretty much a blanket term for any film considered “dark and weird”). Wading through his oeuvre, you get the increasing sense that only studio forced commercial imperatives have stopped Lynch from jettisoning such archaic forms as ‘narrative’ and ‘structure’ in favour of just completely discharging the cruel, grotesque and aberrant worlds that clearly inhabit his mind onto film.

Now freed from these fetters of studio imposition, and armed solely with a Sony PD150 (I’m no expert but understand this is only one notch above a standard commercial digital video camera), this is Lynch the painter and sculptor set free. INLAND EMPIRE presents us with Mr. David Lynch uncensored, unabashed and unbridled, the purest ‘Lynchian’ universe yet, mainlined uncut straight into our retinas. An experience that is by turns confusing, surreal, maddening, frightening, disturbing and hilarious.

Trying to define the film in terms of a brief synopsis is an unenviable task, but essentially the film concerns one Nikki Grace (Laura Dern), a Hollywood actress who receives her dream role in a film titled On High in Blue Tomorrows. This turns out to be a remake of a Polish production never finished due to the mysterious deaths of its two main stars. For the first 45 minutes or so this makes up the plot that we manage to loosely grasp on to. Beyond this point though we appear to enter the subjective world of Nikki’s apparent mental breakdown, as the film breaks off into strands way too numerous and sinuous to mention here as we delve deeper and deeper into planet Lynch for the next two hours (the finished product falling some eight minutes short of three hours).

Whether intentional or not, Lynch has created a provocative piece of work with INLAND EMPIRE. When cinema usually attempts to break free from the burdens of its status as the bastard child of literature, we find it confined to the margins of art installations. Lynch’s film attempts to defy such rules, the world he has created here does not have any obvious precedents in literature (an argument could be made for the great provocateur Joyce, but let’s not bother). This swirling sense of dream logic leaves the viewer with questions as to the nature of cinematic purity. Is INLAND EMPIRE in its staunch refusal of traditional storytelling devices, a final realisation of the language of cinema?

This unwillingness to compromise his vision unfortunately leaves the viewer having to do so at the cost of their own enjoyment. For example, our struggle to comprehend the events unfolding leaves us unable to fully appreciate the nuances of Laura Dern’s finest moment so far. In an unforgiving performance, Dern is forced to embody many difference characterisations and does so brilliantly. A bewildered film starlet, downtrodden housewife and destitute streetwalker, Dern embodies all the characters convincingly and with an empathy that lends a definite emotional resonance to a film that could otherwise appear too incorporeal to accommodate any sense of gravitas.

The new future world of digital Lynch also leads to a series of compromises. The freedom such small scale shooting has granted him comes at the cost of the lush cinematography we usually associate with Lynch. The PD150 gives the film the occasional look of a film student dissertation project, yet Lynch somehow largely works this to his advantage. The camera seems to spend 90% of its time in unflatteringly obtrusive medium close-ups with lighting rigged up with all the subtlety of fluorescent tubing in a late night takeaway. Lending the film a cold, paranoid, voyeuristic and increasingly claustrophobic look, it’s perfectly 21st century.

Continuing this theme, rather than the noirish Los Angeles pictured in Mulholland Drive (2001), here Lynch gives his adopted home town short shrift, there appears to be no middle ground between the opulent plasticity of the Beverly Hills highlife and the ragged boulevards of broken dreams around Hollywood and Vine. This makes for another fine addition to the ‘city of angels’ many unflattering portraits.

One area which undeniably remains strong is the soundtrack, despite the lack of compositions from regular collaborator Angelo Badalamenti, the music still carries the evocative ambiance we associate with Lynch, here appearing in the form of Eno like ambient passages and haunting chanteuse numbers (ala Julee Cruise). Lynch’s tendency to subvert pop standards remains solidly in place as well, this time “The Locomotion” being the track forevermore tainted with a certain seediness.

And so to finally return to my initial point, if Lynch as a director divides cinemagoers, then INLAND EMPIRE is the film that divides Lynch fans, while some will decree its unsettling fevered breakdown nightmare as his finest and truest work to date, an equal amount will no doubt see it as an overlong step too far into surrealism at the cost of structured enjoyment.

Personally I found the best method is to adjust to the film’s inner rhythm, start to get bored regardless, then find yourself drawn back in by a moment of pure audaciousness, repeating every few minutes for three hours.