Trilogy: Lucas Belvaux

Each of these three films can be seen individually without any problem as each tells a different variation of overlapping events. Set in Grenoble, the first film. 'Cavale', tells the story of Bruno, a left-wing revolutionary who has escaped from prison and is looking to revenge himself on the one who betrayed him. He is only briefly in the second film. 'Un couple epatant', the couple played by Ornella Muti and Francois Morel, both of whom are in all three films. The third film 'Apres La Vie' which is about the efforts of Pascal, played by Gilbert Melki, to deal with his wife's drug habit. Agnes, the wife, played by Dominique Blanc, also appears in all three films as does Catherine Frot playing Jeanne. The settings are much the same and, occasionally, shots from the other films are seen, sometimes from a different angle, but the three stories are separate, though the first and third particularly overlap. In 'Cavale', Belvaux, as Bruno, comes across as a bitter, unyielding revolutionary holding firmly to the views that lef to his imprisonment 14 years ago. His actions then and during the film create an unsympathetic picture of a man driven by hatred. Catherine Frot as his former lover, now happily married, is effective in a difficult role in which she agrees to help him in order to see the back of him and Gilbert Melki as the corrupt cop, Pascal, gives a realistic performance of a man who has bent the system to his own ends but still has a conscience. The ending in which Bruno leaves Grenoble is a brilliant coup de cinema, almost worth the rest of the film.
'Un couple epatant' is completely different with Ornella Muti as Cecile, seen briefly in the first film as tghe owner of the chalet in which Bruno hides, becoming suspicious of her husband, Alain, played by Francois Morel who turns up late for a surprise birthday party with an unsatisfactory explanation for his delay. While he is trying to have a minor operation without bothering her, she suspects infidelity and has Pascal, the policeman from the first film, investigate him privately. This he does as both his wife, Agnes, and Jeanne, Catherine Frot, are teacher colleagues of Muti. He devlops an infatuation for Muti (still desirable though 48 years old at the time) but she rejects him. After a series of incidents involving the husband, his adult daughter, his secretary and doctor in which he is convinced his wife is trying to have him killed, all turns out happily. Not lightly enough acted to be a frothy comedy and not sharp enough to work as a farce despite the farcical situations - in part this is down to the cast but also to the director in the weakest, though most enjoyable of the three films.
'Apres La Vie' places Agnes, Dominique Blanc, in the centre of the action as the morphine addicted wife of Pascal who feeds her habit by 'protecting a local villain; he is the one Bruno is after in 'Cavale' and much of the third film deals with the action of the first from a different angle though it starts with the birthday party from the second film using the same set ups from different angles. Having had his supply cut off until he has killed or had Bruno killed, Pascal tries to get Agnes to go five days without anything but she cannot do this and goes out to find her own drugs. While being beatn by a dealer, she is saved by Bruno who takes her home and looks after her. For this act of kindness she helps him saying she does not know what he had done before and that only his present behavious matters. Acting on a tip, Pascal and Jacquillat, the crook, check out his home and Pascal sees Bruno and his wife together without their seeing him and he leaves saying she is there alone. The next day, Pascal tells Agnes that he cannot get morphine until he had killed Bruno which he will not do; subsequently, he is told by Jeanne, who had refused to say a word when taken in for questioning, that Bruno is hiding in a parking garage which information he gives Jacquillat in exchange for morphine. He gives this to Agnes and leaves but she tthinks this means Bruno is dead and throws it away. After the off-screen climx seen in the first film, Pascal reutns home to be told by Agnes that she no longer needs drugs. Despairing, he leavs and climbs up through the old town to kill himself but she has followed him and the film ends up with thei embracing. Mekli and, especially Blanc, give excellent performances and it is interesting to see the use of scenes from the previous two films worked logically in to the action. This was the best acted of the three films in what is an unusual experiment;
I have seen it called a 'Rashomon' but it is not as the overlaps are really building a more complete picture of a few days events involving the same people. This is not a telling of the same incident from different viewpoints but something rather more complex and I am not too certain that it worked. I saw 'Cavale' about a month ago though the other two both this week so the overall balance has been somewhat disturbed as seeing all three close together might produce a different conclusion.

The White Ribbon (Der Weisse Band: Michael Haneke

A disturbing film set in the months between the middle of 1913 and the start of World War One the following year, Haneke tells of events in a small German village starting with the local doctor's fall when his horse is deliberately tripped by a hidden wire. This is followed by the death of a tenant farmer's wife while working for the local baron, the taking and abusing of his
son, the burning of the grain barn and the suicide of the tenant farmer, a further incident with the baron's son and, finally, the severe abusing of the local midwife's Down's syndrome son. The setting provides an unsettling undertone with the local
pastor demonstrating excessive strictness to his older children in particular, the children of the village going round together and turning up unexpectly almost as a band of Furies, resentment of the baron's treatment of his tenants and, near the denouement of the film, a very nasty dismissal by the doctor of his midwife mistress, Add to this, his sexual use of his daughter (this is underplayed) and the basic poverty of the area (there is one bicycle owned by the estate, for instance) and one is left with an overall impression that is anything but pleasant. The camerawork is brilliant and the acting solid without being outstanding. It is easy to see the seeds of Nazism in the film with the feudal nature of the village at a time of improving education and conditions in the towns but I felt that the pastor's treatment of his older children and the generally repressive nature of his teachings allowed the daughter especially to lead the others doing the unpleasant things they did.
A little overlong, this is probably Haneke's best film; I certainly rate it above both 'Funny Games' and 'Hidden'.

Georges Clouzot's Inferno: Serge Bromberg.

Arising from a chance meeting in a broken lift with Clouzot's widow, Bromberg was allowed use of 185 cans of film from the incompleted film Clouzot wrote in the 60s with Romay Schneider and Serge Reggiani as the couple whose marriage is detroyed by his jealousy. A mix of soundless clips from the intended film and of cast and crew with actors reading extracts from the script, the documentary shows how Clouzot's search for perfection became a destructive obsession which led to the project falling well behind schedule and well over budget. Clouzot seemed to be besotted almost with Schneider who was then the most wanted star of European cinema and his treatment of Reggiani could possibly have reflected this: Reggiani did walk from the film in the end which was another reason for its non-completion. With the footage there is, even with no soundtrack, one wonders if some version might not be possible - a comparison with the Beart 'L'Enfer', the same story, would be interesting. Clouzot had moved from the spare directness of 'La Corbeau' and ' Le Salaire de Peur' by experimenting with deliberate distortions which did not seem to have any great relevance. While there is obviously an audience for 'The Making of...' features as is evidenced by their appearance on DVDs, it is the human interaction that is really of interest. Even though there were interviews with a number of the lesser participants, the Clouzot, Schneider, Reggiani triangle which reflects the triangle in the fictional film was not really explored so the film was less interesting. However, one is grateful that anything was made about this great director's 'lost' intended masterpiece.

Broken Embraces (Los Abrazos Rotos): Pedro Almoidavar

The story of a love affair opens in the present with a blind scriptwriter, Harry Caine, talking to and then having sex with a young blonde which is interrupted by his female agent and her adult son. She tells him of an offer to write a script with a
mysterious young man which he at first refuses but then accepts to discover that the young man is the son of a rich tycoon who has just died. There is a past history of the two which forms the bulk of the film in flashback. Penelope Cruz plays the tycoon's secretary from whom she seeks help to ease her father's dying days. He gives this and makes her his mistress which she enjoys and when he backs a film she says she wants to be in it. The director is none other than the scriptwriter whose real name is Mateo Blanco and, at this time, sighted. He and Cruz fall in love and have a passionate affair which the tycoon discovers and he has had his son camcord the making of the film and uses a lipreader to tell him what is being said.
His jealousy breaks into violence, firstly pushing Cruz downstairs and breaking her leg, and also cancelling the film but she says she will stay with him if he allows it to be finished. this happens but he then throws her almost naked out of the house so she and Mateo run away to Lanzarote for an idyllic interlude. They find that the film has been released and is a flop so
cruz says she will return to Madrid to find out what has happened but on the way to the airport, the car is braodsided and
she dies and he is blinded. Returning to the present, Harry Caine has become Mateo again, learns that his agent was involved in the cutting of the film that was shown though the tycoon deliberately selected the worst possible takes as a way of revenge but also that she still has the complete footage. The tycoon's son had found them in Lanzarote and filmed what happened which was not a deliberate act but a true accident. The film ends with them recutting the film. Solidly acted and well up to Almodavar's usual levels, the balance between the present and the past and the overall pacing did not quite work as it might have. Cruz is as enticing as ever and amply demonstrates that natural beauty is better than surgically enhanced
efforts are. The strangeness of the Lanzarote landscape emphasises the separation of the lovers from the everyday world, brief though their time there may be. An excellent near miss.

Vidocq: Pitof

Departieu is a retired policeman, now a private detective used by the French Government, searching for a brutal serial killer but, apparently, killed in a fight with him early in the film. The central part of the film is the story of the journalist, played by Guillaume Canet, who claims to be Vidocq's biographer so one has a series of flashbacks as he tries to find out what happened. Beautifully photographed and staged - I especially liked the look of the early morning sky over the city in more than one scene, this is a fast-moving fantasy thriller unless you accept, for instance, that you can kill someone with lightning.
The plot revolves around a search for perfection by three corrupt officials and, when the story returns to the time of the opening fight Vidocq is actually alive and ready to unmask the villain in a startling closing sequence. Fortunately, this film is considerably better than the director's later, second attempt - the Halle Berry 'Catwoman'. Thoroughly enjoyable and well acted with a special mention to Jean-Pierre Gos who plays Vidocq's official successor.

Suter, Martin: A Deal with the Devil

Sonia Freay is the divorced wife of a man who tried to kill her who is presently in a secure clinic awaiting trial. Although she does not need the money she takes a job as a masseuse at a remote hotel which has just re-opened. The young woman who owns the establishment seems rather unconcerned at the paucity of guests and also relatively undisturbed by a series of unexplained events in the hotel. Sonia has read the local legend of Devil of Milan and sees a correlation between what is happening and that legend though nobody else seems to agree - at first. She is in a somewhat disturbed state of mind which does not help matters. As events unfold she becomes increasingly scared for her own safety, especially when her ex-husband's mother turns up asking her again to drop he charges against him. The writing is straightfoward and economical and portrays both the atmosphere of the hotel and surroundings but also Sonia's reactions admirably. The climax when it comes is unexpected but consistent with what has taken place. A well-plotted novel by this excellent Swiss writer.

Morgan, Richard: Market Forces

This powerful novel postulates a newar future in which corporations vie with each other to run countries economically for the returns this brings with promotion and the winning of contracts being settled by duels to the death using cars. The protagonist is married and his wife is the one who keeps his car in the best condition possible. With a possibly fading reputation, he has joined a new firm at the start of the book. A series of scenes show his progress from a near liberal state of mind in which he is considering joining a branch of the UN which tries to limit excesses to being completely in tune with the system, losing his wife in the process and finally killing his best friend in the final trial. An England with safe, highly-desirable secure areas on the one hand is contrasted with the run-down slums controlled by gangs with little regard for life.
Well-written and believable, Morgan has taken a number of current trends in society and pushed them to somewhat extreme conclusions to present yet another dystopia for those not well up the ladder of success.

London Film Festival 2009: Summary

Films selected for Festivals are chosen because of the director in some instances, actors in some instances and subject matter in others - animation, fantasy, silents and Far Eastern historicals. This year was no different with the two animated features, the three silents, the Depardieu, Coen Brothers, Jeunet and Breillat etc. There were a number of disappointments with the two documentaries being particularly poor and some of the others no more than average but there were some definite delights. 'Fantastic Mr Fox' and 'Metropia', 'Bellamy'and 'Kamui' were well above average. The three best films were ' A Serious Man', 'Laila' and 'J'accuse' which are sufficiently different that it would be invidious to choose between them. I think that future programmes may require a more careful reading and some supplementary checking to limit the mistakes.

Laila: George Schneevoigt

One of the glories of Scandinavian silent cinema, setting it apart from the rest of fledgling European production, was its use of natural landscape settings - some of the most spectacular in the world - which, coupled with a literary tradition based on the Nordic sagas, lent itself to epic filmmaking of the purest kind. Norwegian cinema more or less bowed out of the silent period in 1929 with 'Laila', a splendidly sprawling adventure of the frozen Far North, replete with reindeer, wolves, Lapps and ice-melting passions. Ranged across several generations, the story begins with a wealthy merchant, Lind, and his wife travelling in the coldest depths of winter to christen their baby daughter. Attacked by wolves, they lose the baby, which is founf by the lapp Jaampa (a deminating performance by Tryggve Larssen) and subsequently raised by a rich reindeer herder, Aslag Laagie. Thus the saga begings...George Schneevoigt, a noted Danish-German cinematographer who had shot four of Carl Dreyer's films, was hired to direct his own script, on the strength of his camerawork a year earlier on Ragnar Westfelt's
'Viddenes folk (People of the Tundra), a similar tale. A successful director of talkies, he hemled a sound remake of 'Laila' on 1937. The re-emergence of the silent 'Laila', for decades treated risibly through being shown at the wrong speed, is the result of expert restoration work by the Norwegian Film Institute at the Norwegian NationalLibrary, producing a speed-adjusted print to give the film a long and flexible new life.

MGP: A delight. Not only was the frequent use of location shots of the north of Norway interesting, it certainly added to the effectiveness of the film which had a relatively straightforward story. A baby girl is lost, rescued from wolves by a Lapp and raised by the senior member of the tribe until he discovers when the child is a year old that her parents are alive. Returned to them, she is then orphaned when the settlement is stricken with the plague and agin save by the Lapps where she is raised to become a lovely tomboyish girl of marriageable age. On a trip to sell furs with her 'father', she meets the son of the trader and his sister who take her under their wing though she does not know that they are actually her cousins. She falls in love and agrees to run away with him but on the eve of their elopement his father dies and she is left thinking he has changed his mind. She agrees to marry her 'father's son but at the very last minute, ik.e. midway through the wedding, her lover turns up and all ends happily. Well acted and excellently filmed with several interesting shots, e.g. the galloping hooves of the reindeer pulling the sledge when they are fleeing from wolves and the tiver rescue; allowing for its being 10 years younger than 'J'accuse' so having the benefit of imrpoved equipment this was the most satisfying of the three silents.

A Serious Man: Joel and Ethan Coen

In quick succession the Coens have given us a multiple award-winning literary adaptation and a scrwball parody thriller, and with no sign of slacking are back with what feels like a more personal but no less playful new feature. After a gloriously lugubrious prequel, we enter the late 1960s and the resoundingly normal world of Larry Gopnik. Larry is a good husband and father, and a conscientious professor at a quiet Midwestern university. He always tries to do the fair and just thing in the face of life's temptations and trials. but one day, everything starts to go wrong. His wife leaves him for reasons she cannot explain, and her intolerably pompous new lover muscles in on the family and their home, convincing the already cash-strapped Larry to move into a motel. His career is put in jeopardy by a series of anonymous letters falsely accusing him of unspecified misdemeanours, and his unemployable brother is becoming more and more of a burden. Larry's attempts to find some equilibrium and be a righteous man in the face of all these vexations is the source of a great deal of droll humour, particularly acute in Larry's attempts to seek guidance from a succession of uninspiring or unavailable rabbis. Michael Stuhlbarg is unshowily excellent as Larry, and this wonderfully rounded and satisfying character study is classic Coens at their best.

MGP: The anecdotal pre-credit sequence was delightfully droll and established the right mood for what followed. Though set in the midwest of the USA, the emphasis was decidedly Jewish with the combination of wry resignation and humour that seems to be the stock-in-trade of Jewish comedians. The air of bewilderment which Michael Stuhlberg has throughout is the face of growing adversity and problems adds to the humour of the film. The smarmy, touchy-feely adulterer is truly vomit-worthy and the fact that he has done this only three years after his own wife died seems to be a matter of surprise. The vague vacillations of the rabbis and the ease with which they answer questions with either questions or non-sequitors adds to the increasing perplexity of the 'serious man'. The ending with the impending storm may or may not be allegorical.

What Do You Know About Me (Di me cosa ne sai): Valerio Jalongo

LFF: A provocative, idosyncratic and very entertaining documentary. Taking as its subject Italian cinema, past and present, it gives a particular and fascinating perspective on the political and industrial decisions which influenced Italian cinema in the postwar era, and features a range of remarkable archive footage, newsreel, clips from film masterpieces and great interviews with directors such as Fellini, that to most non-Italians will be completely unfamiliar. Yet this is far more than another version of, say, Martin Scorsese's 'Voyage to Italy' because the director is truly interested in why Italian cinema is what it is now. To this end, he looks at the multiplex boom, developing technology, changing political regimes and film funding; and interviews with just about every major Italian filmmaker currently working, including Francesca Comencini, Marco Bellochio, Giuseppe Piccioni and Paolo Sorrentino. For anyone remotely interested in Italian cinema, this is a genuinely must-see experience, as it puts the whole Italian film industry in a new from of reference, and even if you don't necessarfily agree with all of itsd ideas and suggestion, it is a remarkably clever and instructive experience.

MGP: I was expecting a revisionist view of Italian cinema cutting across the more traditional history which Scorses has so excellently portrayed but what did I find - a tedious, left wing polemic by filmmakers who could not get their films made or distributed because of the claimed dominance of the American companies. Even Ken Loach added a few remarks. What came across was not a reasoned argument though the dominance of Berlusconi's companies in the media was a point that probably needed emphasising. The collected view came across as if those involved were owed a living but this was a given for European cinema as a whole in the Paul Joyce documentary made in the early 90s with more coherence. Whatever the merits of the case against the spread of U.S. culture, this film was too unbalanced and diffuse to convince.

J'accuse: Abel Gance

LFF: Abel Gance's epic anti-war statement, 'J'accuse', was the first great pacifist film, to put alongside such classics as 'The Big Parade' and 'All Quiet on the Western Front'. It was also the first major statement in artistic terms condemning the insanity of WW1, and it remains a potently angry indictment of mindless military ambition and aggression. Gance himself, who had experienced the loss of many friends in the War and witnessed its futility at first hand, called it a 'modern tragedy...a human cry against the bellocise din of armies'. Like Gance's other masterpieces, 'La Roue' and 'Napoleon', it was boldly experimental and innovative, and was a huge box-office success, in Britain and North America as well as in France. This new, colour-tinted restoration by the Netherlands Film Museum, in collaboration with Lobster Films, is therefore both timeley (when would it not be?) and welcome, drawing upon six different print sources from archives around the world. The story concerns a pacifist poet, Jean, in love with Edith, who is married to Francois. Both man join the army. Edith is captured and raped by German soldiers, deported and has a child. Francois is killed, while Jean, shell-shocked and driven insane, evokes the ghosts of the war dead in a climactic sequence of unique visual impact, heightened by the appalling irony that 80% of the soldier-extras enlisted lost their lives days later at Verdun. A film of lasting power and relevance.

MGP: What a difference! A single pianist who doubled on the flute and made direct use of the interior of the instrument for effect gave a brilliant example of how a silent film should accomapnied - with relevance and feeling. Of course, the film in question is far superior to the afforts of Anthony Asquith nine years leter. Starting as a tale of unrequited love immediately before World War 1, the gradual change in attitude between Jean and Francois is a skilled demonstration of the way that the
stresses of front-line warfare can produce comradeship that can outweigh previous enmity. The fictional scenes of battle are interwoven with newsreel footage to good effect but the great strength lies in the episode after Jean has returned home to berate those in his village - 'J'accuse' - for accepting the war and its slaughter with his calling of the dead from the battelfield to support him. This scene alone raises the film well above the ordinary and makes up for the less successful use of animated skeletons of death overlying some scenes. A great film.

Underground (1928): Anthony Asquith

LFF: Passions run deeper than the Northern Line in Anthony Asquith's tale of love, jealousy, treachery and murder on the London Underground. Eighty years later, your average tube ride might not be quite as eventful, but anyone who has exploited the city's public transport system to romantic advanrage will find much to recognise. Restored by the BFI National Archive and presented with a live performance of Neil Brand's new score by the Ptima Vista Social Club, Asquith's working class love story is one of the great British silen feature films. It is also one of the great films about the capital - a journey through the Underground (many of the scenes were filmed at Waterloo) via old London boozers and open-topped buses to a climactic chase through Lots Road power station that magnificently reveals the smoking roofscape of the coal-fuelled city. In the late 1920s Asquith, along with Hitchcock, was one of the most audacious talents working in British film. At the age of only 26 he demonstrates and assured and spare style with some remarkably cinematic flourishes clearly inspired by contemporary German and Russian filmmakers. For many years restoration of 'Underground' presented insurmountable difficulties. With recent developments in digital technology available to the BFIO's film restoration team we have now been able to make a significant improvement to the surviving film elements.

MGP: Let me get the gripes out of the way first. A pair of boring, self-congratulary speeches are possibly par for gala performances but added nothing except annoyance at the delay. The Prima Vista Social Club (how banal) did nothing to help the film - quite the contrary; they played between forte and fortissimo almost the entire time. The scenes in the store and the picnic scene would have been better off with hardly any music at all rather than the overpowering noise there was. This left me feeling less generous towards the film than I might have been. The story is trite and melodramatic, the acting wooden and the camerawork nothing out of the ordinary though I am prepared to accept that some of the angles may have been innovative in Englsh filmmaking. The location shots did add something, particularly at Lots Road, though I could not work out the link between that location and the final shots on the Underground as the nearest line is some distance away. I suppose having an 80 year old film is watchable condition is something to be praised but it is no masterpiece.

Kamui (Kamui Gaiden): Yoichi Sai

LFF: There hasn't been a decent ninja movie for decades, but Yoichi Sai's adaptation of a story from Sanpei Shirato's legendary multi-volume manga 'Kamui' bestrides the entire gtenre: this is probably the best ninja movie ever made. Ninja are all about secret servitude, quasi-magical martial arts skills and issues of loyalty, betrayal and vengeance. 'Kamui' delivers all of the above minus the history lessons that are too often part of the deal. The Korean-Japanese director (current chair of the Directors' Guild of Japan) treats the story as a folk-tale, complete with the grizzled voice of Tsutomu Yamakazi as narrator. It's a kind of parable: Kamui, ( played by new star Kenichi Matsuyama, also in 'Bare Essence of Life') has escaped rural poverty and family ties by becoming a ninja, but now wants a kind of freedom not permitted in feudal Japan, the freedom to live his own life. The plot finds him in an area controlled by the corrupt and effete Lord Gumbei, allying himself with the fisherman Hanbei and his family and then all but press-ganged into a band of shark hunters. treachery and triple-bluffs on all sides and Kamui himself is often the prey.

MGP: A great action movie with exotic backgrounds and a solid story - once a ninja, always a ninja...or dead. The life of Kamui from childhood enrolment as a ninja through breaking away for independence to his efforts to stay alive is spiritedly portrayed with some interesting twists along the way. One or two episodes seemed puzzling though not unduly so and the downbeat ending leaves the way open for a sequel as it is obviously meant to do.

Who's Afraid of the Wolf (Kdopak by se vlka bal): Maria Prochazkova

LFF: Every night, Terezka's mother reads her the story of Little Red Riding Hood. Although it gives her bad dreams, it is her favourite story. But a crisis begins to develop in her apparently stable family life. A triangle drama develops as her mother, a promising singer who gave up her career to get married, is encouraged by her mother to re-establish relations with her former boyfriend, a successful musician. Simon, a friend from nursery school, suggests to Terezka that her mother may be an alien. As the domestic drama enacts itself in the 'real' world, Terezka's interpretation merges it with the world of fairy tales and imagination. Writer-director Maria Prochazkova ('Shark in the Head') is also an animator, and here treads a delicate path on the border of fantasy, supplementing her story with drawings and animation. Beautifully handled, it is a film of considerable charm,considerably enhanced by its lush visuals and Jan P Muchow's impressive score. It is not a children's film, notes its director, but one for adults to watch with children.

MGP: The fairy tale element is not overly relevant except as an indication of the daughter's reactions to the adult conflicts around her. The conflict is not so much that the wife wants to resume her singing career but rather that her mother is encouraging her to do so with the biological father of her daughter. She does this as far as agreeing to go to Japan with him, this being where he has his base, getting as far as the airport before events make her realise that home is not only best but what she really wants. A pleasant little melodrama but no more.

Metropia: Tarik Saleh

LFF: Set in the not-so-distant future, 'Metropia' shows a familiar but menacing dystopian Europe. A continent where English is spoken throughout, surveillance cameras dominate the landscape and a web of underground lines link key cities, creating an immense network beneath its surface. Roger, a young man from the suburbs of Stockholm, is wary of the increasingly coropration-dominated world and the scary TV game shows dealing in life and death, whilst traveling (sic) on the underground makes him feel uneasy. His paranoia is further aroused when he begins to hear strange voices in his head: is someone trying to control him, and if so, why? using innovative animation techniques, director Tarik Saleh creates a deadbeat, toned out and sparse vision of the future. With shades of '1984' and 'Blade Runner' and a voice cast drawing on the talents of Vincent Gallo, Stellan Skarsgaard, Juliette Lewis and Alexander Skarsgaard, the downbeat animated sci-fi noir is consistently innovative and intriguing.

An interesting approach to a dysfunctional future - I wonder how long it would take to produce an undeerground rail network of the size that appears here - probably centuries! The story was confusing and possibly needs more than one viewing to be fully understood though this is something that will be worth the effort. The unusual animation certainly adds to the feel of the film and, for once, the stellar vocal talents were irrelevant as I recognized none of them. The film reminded me of 'La Antena' which may be reflection of the tones used in the animation - greys and blacks.

Barbe Bleu (Bluebeard): Catherine Breillat

LFF: Despite its unusually muted, indeed implicit, sexual content, Catherine Breillat's low-budget fairy tale bears the unmistakable stamp of French cinema's leading provocatrice. Set in a bygone France, this elegant Freudian fable begins with two girls, Marie-Catherine (Lola Creton) and reportedly 'bad seed' younger sister Anne (Daphne Baiwir), being sent home from convent school when their father dies. With their family facing poverty, defiant Anne marries a much feared local seigneur, the hefty hirsute Bluebeard (Dominique Thomas) and proves an unflappable match for him. In a present-day parallel strand, the Charles Perrault tale of Bluebeard is read by another pair of siblings, Marie-Anne and Catherine, who give the story their own comic gloss. Using a lively and much younger female cast than usual, Breillat offers a pointed commentary on girlhood, its dreams and rebellious impulses. Mounted with a stylised spareness recalling French medieval dramas by the likes of Jacques Rivette and Walerian Borowczyk, 'Bluebeard' is a sly somewhat bunuelian essay that will appeal not just to Breillat devotees but also to lovers of the dark side of fairy tale - and, incidentally, to readers of Angela Carter who made the Bluebeard story her own in the collection 'The Bloody Chamber'.

MGP: What I noticed most about this film was the beautiful photography and loving attention to detail in a France that appeared to be medieval though the convent school seemed to be intruded from much later. The counterpoint with the two young present-day children was charming and very true with the protective older sister and the younger, more rebellious one.
Rather slow-moving , the climax, when it comes, seems hurried and the modern parallel more than a little shocking. While the sibling relatgionship is a regular Breillat feature, the film was considerably different in tone from her earlier work

Bellamy: Claude Chabrol

LFF: Gerard Depardieu has been on a roll since his 2006 triumph in Xavier Giannoli's 'The Singer'. He's on equally ggod form in the latest from Claude Chabrol. This mischievous and laid-back thriller is the veteran director's double tribute to two men called Georges - writer Simenon and much-loved songsmith Brassens. Depardieu plays Paul Bellamy, an eminent policeman taking a holiday with his wife (Marie Brunel) but unable to turn off his detective instinct. His curiosity is piqued by the murky case of a mysterious fugitive (Jacques Gamblin) and a local femme fatale (Vahina Giocante) - and complicated further when Bellamy's troublesome brother (Clovis Cornillac) turns up unannounced. Remarkably, this is the first ever collaboration between Chabrol and Depardieu, and the two veterans take to each other like a treat. The film finds them both in affable, relaxed mode - but that makes this entertaining divertissement no less taut and devious, while terrific performances from Bunel and Cornillac highlight the psychological tensions of the Bellamy household. Depardieu willing, the Maigret-esque Bellamy could provide Chabrol with his first continuing character since his Inspector Lavardin (Cop au Vin) of the 80s.

MGP: This played out partly as a psychological drama and partly as a near policier which had some puzzling moments. At first it appeared that the story was one of a holidaying detective, Departieum taking an unofficial interest in a local murder but the arrival of his dissolute brother changed the tenor of the film. There were moments when one wondered if the brother was somehow involved in the crime and others when it seemed that he and Departieu's wife were cuckolding him, especially since the wife had been much friendlier towards the brother's staying. Whether the latter was true of not, it did not detract from the way in which Departieu teased out the answer to the crime. A quiet, almost bucolic, thriller which was well made and acted by the main leads.

MICMACS: Jean-Pierre Jeunet

LFF: Is it better to live with a bullet lodged in your brain even if it means you might drop dead at any time? Oe would you rather have the bullet taken out and live the rest of your life as a vegetable? Are zebras white with black stripes or black with white stripes? Is scrap metal worth more than landmines? Can you get drunk by eating waffles? Can a woman fit inside a refrigerator? What's the human cannonball record? All these questions and more are answered in 'MICMACS', the latest dazzlingly conematic outing from Jean-Pierre Jeunet, a satire on the arms trade which grounds this director's cinema of fantasy firmly in reality. Dany Boon leads a terrific cast including Andre Dussolier, Dominique Pinon and the matchless Yolande Moreau in a thrilling comedy about one man's plan to destroy two big weapons manufacturers, with a little help from his friends. Few directors are more imaginative and inventive in creating their own distinctive on-screen worlds ('Delicatessen', 'Amelie') and the aesthetic sensibility at play in 'MICMACS' is breathtaking. Better yet, it works in tandem with pacy edge-of-the-seat storytelling and no end of visual gags and witty wordplay.

MGP: Beautifully photographed and rapidly paced, the film is, for the most part, a series of visual gags as the hero sets out to
get revenge on the manufacturer of the landmine that killed his father and the manufacturer of the bullet lodged in his brain.
That their offices and factories face each other proved a little confusing at first but this did not really matter as the hero and his new-found friends take their revenge. The various scenes fit together well and the several set pieces are not telegraphed but fall naturally into the narrative to the extent that it would be invidious to single out any one for more praise than the others; similarly, the cast as a whole provide a well-tuned and effective ensemble.

Too Many Husbands: Wesley Ruggles

LFF:The systematic exploration in recent years of the Columbia Studio's archives by Grover Crisp and his team of expert restorers has thrown up many forgotten Hollywood gems, most valuably from Columbia's beginnings in the late silent era and the pre-Code talkies, when Frank Capra and others were cutting their teeth. This hidden surprise comes from a decade later and seems to have been playing truant from the school of screwball comedy. More likely, it fell in the shadow of RKO's similarly-themes hit , 'My Favorite Wife', released the same year. Directed by veteran Wesley Ruggles, from a play by W. Somerset Maughan, the plot turns triangularly on a woman (Jean Arthur) finding herself with two husbands (Fred MacMurray and Malvyn Douglas) when the first turns ip a year after reportedly drowning on a boat cruise. To her increasing delight, they vie desperately for her affections. Kept light and pacey by Ruggles, the comedy sails surprisingly close to the censorship wind with Arthur's coquettish performance and a strong suggestion of her not being averse to a menage a trois. With hindsight, there is a pre-echo, too, of the more serious actuality of soldiers returningn home from WW2 to find their wives and girlfriends otherwise engaged. The casting is high-class, with Arthur a particular joy to watch as she appears in a succession of haute couture hats and expensive animal furs, and both Lionel Banks' art direction and Joseph Walker's black-and-white photography are impeccable. A welcome rediscovery from Sony-Columbia.

MGP: what the above omits is that MacMurray and Douglas were best friends running a publishing house together with the latter somewhat neglecting Arthur for his work. A pleasant film with fine performances from both men and a better one than I was expecting from Jean Arthur whose voice has always put me off. The premise is nonsense as surely six months is not enough time to have someone declared officially dead when there is no body but the trio carry the situation off well. The film has been available on DVD for some time, probably not in the restored version and its restoration is perhaps a surprise since it is far from being a masterpiece - and the nonsense contained in the sentence above about WW2 is just that, a nonsense.

Double Take: Johan Grimonprez

LFF: An ingenious hybrid, 'Double Take' is part mock-documentary, part conceptual provocation, and altogether a thought-provoking, hugely entertaining piece that does for Alfred Hitchcock what Orson Wells did for himself in his myth-making 'F for Fake'. Using a zippy assemblage of TV and newsreel material artist/filmmaker Johan Grimonprez muses if Hitcock's persona and humour, reading his films of the late 50s and early 60s against the climate of Bomb-era political anxiety. The film especially mulls on Hitchcock's preoccupation with doubles, a theme that recurs not just in his films but in the portly auteur's jokey intros to the vintage TV series 'Alfred Hitchcock Presents'; the theme is further expanded on in an apocryphal story about the maestro meeting his own future self. Interwoven with all this is a mass of newsreel material, dealing largely with US-USSR Cold War relations and focusing on America's relationship with that other famous Hitchcock look-alike Nikita Krushchev. Grimonprez leaves viewers to draw their own conclusions about identity, filmmaking, power and paranois, but the films' love of Hitchcock - artist, public face, TV clown - is unmistakeable and very infectious.

MGP: The above was the reason this film was selected, alas. It turns out to be an incoherent, badly conceived and even worse edited load of rubbish. Perhaps I should have taken more heed of the ridiculous notion that Hitchcock and Krushchev are look-alikes; even the professional Hitchcock impersonator was only vaguely the same. Next thing will be Sarkozy being compared with Charles Aznavour.

Fantastic Mr Fox: Wes Anderson

The first of this year's London Film Festival and I shall give the official programme note for the films seen as well as any comments of my own. LFF: In his first animated feature, Wes Anderson proves the perfect filmmaker to bring Road Dahl's much-loved story to life. Mr and mrs Fox live an idyllic home life with their son Ash and visiting your nephew Kristofferson.
But, after 12 years, the bucolic existence proves too much for Mr Fox's wild animal instincts. Soon he slips back into his old ways as a sneaky chicken thief, and in doing so endangers not only his own belowed family, but the whole animal community.
Trapped underground with not enough food to go round, the animals band together to fight against the evil farmers Boggis, Bruce and Bean, who are determined to capture the audacious, fantastic Mr Fox at any cost. Anderson and co-writer Noah Baumbach have stuck closely to the spirit and events of the original, but have opened it out, adding new scenes and giving depth to a range of hugely engaging and heavily anthropomorphised characters, replete with foibles good and bad. The voice cast are exemplary, with a host of Anderson regulars including Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman and Owen Wilson featuring alongside British actors such as Michael Gambon and Brian Cox and some Anderson family and friends, Jarvis Cocker amonst them. Leading the pack of course and George Clooney and Meryl Streep as Mr and Mrs Fox, he roguish and debonair, her (sic) beautiful, wise and funny. Creating alternative universes is something this director has always excelled at, and his attention to detail finds great espression here. Using classic stop-motion animation gives the story a delightful home-made feel, and the autumnal palette adds a particular warmth. Anderson's stylistic choices are recognisable from his
earlier films, resulting in an animated film that feels uniquely entertaining and enjoyable. It succeeds in retaining the essance of Dahl's writing, which has enchanted audiences for over 40 years, but filtered through a very distinct and visionary sensibility.

MGP: Having never knowingly read any Roald Dahl, I have no idea which parts of the film are his and which are additions though this does not matter. Praise must be given to the studio in London which worked for some two years in making the film even though the feel of the film is naturally Anderson's. The early sequence sets the mood for the later stages though, as with most animated films, there is a strong element of farce in some scenes. There were a few scenes which seemed to be
'normal' animation, e.g. the cross-section scene under the three farms, which jarred a little. While the use of known actors to voice animations is commonplace, I wonder what this adds - Gambon, Cox and Murray were distinctly recognisable but the other leads less so. Is one expected to visualise George Clooner, for instance, in the leading role or do the filmmakers hope that the audience will subconsciously think this? Whether in the original or not, the theme of family loyalty which is strong in other Anderson films is definitely seen here though this is necessary to bring about a happy ending.