Reviewed by Brannavan Gnanalingam

TODD HAYNES seems to be in a constant quest to not be pinned down to a particular style. He can move from the icily brilliant Safe, to the overheated Sirkian melodrama (the masterpiece Far From Heaven) with absolute ease. However, I’m Not There is quite something, the ultimate post-modern exercise chock-full of pastiche, myths, parodies. The film is a parade of chameleon identities, of musical and visual samples, a freewheelin’ farrago through time and space. The film works because of the sheer chutzpah of Haynes’ vision, even if it’s a vision that will infuriate many Dylan fans and non-fans alike.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: German devastation.

THE REAL-LIFE story of Anneliese Michel has inspired people from Hollywood’s The Exorcism of Emily Rose to Public Image Ltd., but Hans-Christian Schmid’s take on the events is austere and ultimately, extremely unnerving. The ghost of Fassbinder has haunted the German fiction films of the Film Society this year, and Requiem is no different – the drab surroundings, the intensity of the mise-en-scène, the ruthless view of institutions and bourgeois sensibilities were some of the great German director’s key concerns. Admittedly Requiem is much more sympathetic to its characters than Fassbinder was to his, but the film succeeds by showing the ‘extraordinary’ events through a gruelling realism. This isn’t a horror film, but a descent into madness. Of course, this approach wouldn’t have worked nearly so well without the astonishing acting performance of Sandra Hüller as the afflicted girl.

GAUTAMAN BHASKARAN previews the 61st Festival de Cannes, beginning this week.

IN A WAY, Cannes has managed to pull a rabbit out of the hat, and the selection of films is as good as it was in 2002. That year, we saw City of God, About Schmidt and The Pianist, and the edition that will open May 14 has some of modern cinema’s best helmers, such Clint Eastwood, Steven Spielberg, Woody Allen and Atom Egoyan.

At the Human Rights Film Festival, the trials of Ethiopian women who give birth. By BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.

CHILDBIRTH sounds painful enough, without having to worry about giving birth without any medical or institutional help. That’s precisely what happens to millions of women around the world, and the documentary A Walk to Beautiful looks at a particular consequence of this lack of care. Mary Olive Smith’s documentary examines the medical condition of fistula, which leaves many women in the world incontinent, leaking urine and faeces uncontrollably. The resulting societal discomfort at these women’s conditions leads to them being ostracised. And the sad thing is, it’s not too hard to fix, but countless women are forced to endure the discomfort and the shame.

Out of India, GAUTAMAN BHASKARAN considers the current Indian and Bollywood Cinema.

THE CANNES International Film Festival is undoubtedly the Queen of it all. Anybody who is somebody in the world of cinema loves to be there. To unspool on May 14, the Festival has had no Indian movie in Competition since 1994, the year Malayalam director Shaji N. Karun’s Swaham (My Own) was included. What is worse, there has been no Indian entry in A Certain Regard since Murali Nair’s Arimpara (The Mole) screened in 2003.

At the Human Rights Film Festival, Mexico’s objects of labour. By HELEN SIMS.

Maquilapolis refers to the huge industrial district in Tijuana, just past the border between Mexico and the USA. The factories of large, mostly US, corporations dominate the landscape. They attract internal migrants from all over Mexico seeing work. They function on the basis of mass production by cheap labour and substantial tax breaks granted by the government. Under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) raw products come into Mexico, are turned into items like televisions and pantyhose and then the finished items are sent back for distribution in the US. Although this system results in jobs for Mexicans, the “maquiladoras” who work in these factories, they see more detriment than benefit to themselves as a result of the workings of free trade.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: girls on film.

THE TIMING of screening this film probably couldn’t have better. In a week when the world’s media got in a tempest over fifteen-year-old Miley Cyrus’ photo shoot for Vanity Fair because she had the temerity to show her bare back (suggesting she wasn’t wearing a bra). The media got into a lather over the fact that Annie Liebowitz decided to photograph a sexualised fifteen year, drawing in puritanical and art-for-art’s-sake arguments from both sides. If Bettina Blümner’s documentary on three fifteen-year-olds, Pool of Princesses, is anything to go by, the media’s response to Cyrus is far too simplistic and superficial (not to mention sexist). Blümner captures that liminal space between childhood and adulthood in the documentary, the time when people are all too grown-up and self-aware, but still all too naïve and innocent.

At the Human Rights Film Festival, colonialism still rules. By BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.

LAST DECEMBER, I ended up in, of all the places in the world, Western Sahara. Its landscape is a remarkable visage, the ocean creeping up to a desert so vast that a whisper and a shout would be the same thing. But even here, the torrid, cruel landscape provoked such strong feelings of belonging for its inhabitants, that I couldn’t help but share the joy that the wonderful Sahrawis I was travelling with felt about their earth. And they told me about the tragedy unfolding in the impassive wilderness, of a people dispossessed since colonial times, and forgotten by the Western world. It is within this backdrop that Fecci and Bloeman’s documentary, Western Sahara: Africa’s Last Colony is made.

GREGOR CAMERON reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: enchantment.

WHAT A TREAT these Demy films have been! Peau d’Ane is Jacques Demy’s ode to the fairy tale and its place in the art of storytelling. Not for him is the sugar coated Disney pleasure factory and while his heroine is pretty (Catherine Deneuve), she is far from an innocent bystander in this adaptation of Charles Perrault’s original Donkey Skin – a variation of the Cinderella type of fairy tale. Demy never allows us to forget that, in this world of fabulous costumes and castles, we are in fact only following a story being used to illustrate some wider point. With its engagement with possible incest between father and daughter and that daughter’s choice to take charge of her fate there is a clear indication that Demy may be suggesting, through Perrault’s story, that becoming a victim can sometimes be a choice and perhaps those exposed to this story should take the point that we are all somehow culpable for our own fates. Clearly there are similarities in the way Demy intends this story to comment on the present age that Perrault’s Bluebeard story has been used in film – most notably in local times during the shadow puppets segment in Campion’s The Piano (1993).

A roundup/recap of the current best and rest in film and DVD. In this installment: Lars and the Real Girl, Gone Baby Gone, Four Minutes (Film); The Sopranos: Season Six/The Final Episodes, I Think I Love My Wife, Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten (DVD).

At the World Cinema Showcase, three’s a crowd. By DAVID LEVINSON.

The Squid and the Whale – Noah Baumbach’s semi-autobiographical account of his parents’ divorce – was a rarity: High-witted and heartfelt, it dabbled in warm brownstone nostalgia, all the while remaining heedful of its chosen milieu (puffy Brooklyn intellectuals). Wrenched free, however, from the prism of nostalgia that colored that film, Baumbach’s latest feature, Margot at the Wedding, is a much more acerbic affair: Like Solondz-by-way-of-Bergman, it squeezes shlock relevations and conversational grit (masturbation; pedophilia) out of the cabin-fever scenario of a hyper-controlling writer, Margot (Nicole Kidman), returning home for the sake of her sister’s wedding. As the movie’s axis-of-evil, Kidman is an iceberg of sculpted malaise – coolly panning all those around her. Yet, for all the trauma of her social flubs (declaring a child to be “retarded”; outing her sister’s hidden pregnancy), there’s almost no vicarious pleasure to be reaped as a viewer: Never witty or charistmatic, Margot painfully exploits the way our sense of selfhood tends to become lodged in others – most obviously in her emasculation of her sensitive young son, Claude (Zane Paris). All of which should really count for something in a landscape at the mercy of alluring ciphers waving pneumatic bolt-guns. But unlike her male forerunner – Jeff Daniel’s pompous misogynist in The Squid and the Whale –, Margot neither deflects easily into caricature, nor is gifted enough context to become penetrable; as such, she hangs in dead air – just another piece in Baumbach’s stilted jigsaw of middle-age.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: on the town.

IT’S HARD to imagine a film that achieves such orgasmic pleasure as The Young Girls of Rochefort. People don’t walk, they dance. The characters can’t contain their excitement with life that they break into song. They don’t need to talk. Musical instruments are blown or strummed like toys. The centre of Rochefort appears as if Cupid had thrown a cluster bomb into it. And you can feel Demy’s pleasure in making this film (and Varda’s in re-touching it). This is one of the most enjoyable filmic experiences around, infused with the love of film and life. It’d be easy to pass this off as frivolous, lightweight, but it’s a rarity in cinema, a film that’s so wondrously overburdened with pleasure that you marvel at how it was sustained for so long.

At the World Cinema Showcase, Julian Schnabel’s liberating eye. By DARREN BEVAN.

THERE’s no doubt the effort which went into writing Le Scaphandre et le Papillon, but an adaptation of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (to give it its English title) was always going to have its work cut out for it. It’s the tale of French Elle editor Jean Dominique Bauby (Matthieu Amalric), aka Jean-do. Aged just 43 years old, he suffered a massive unexpected stroke which left him completely paralysed – and only the ability to blink his left eye. To complicate matters he’s diagnosed with a very rare condition, known as ‘Locked-in Syndrome’ which hitherto, has never been treated before. So to try and facilitate a return to some semblance of health and civilisation, therapists such as speech therapist Henriette (played by Marie Josee Croze) are employed to work with him. His ultimate method of communication is an alphabet verbally read out by therapists and a blink used to choose a letter – a painful way to communicate and one which ultimately, despite the pain of being deprived of speech, frees Jean-Do from the diving bell of his locked in life.

At the World Cinema Showcase, Alejandro Jodorowsky turns shit to gold. By JOE SHEPPARD.

ONCE UPON a time we all had to be satisfied with the Humanoids Press graphic novels (the Incal or the Metabarons) or else risk trawling through the mustiest shelves of the local video shop for the middling Santa Sangre if we wanted to indulge in the epic madness of cult polymath Alejandro Jodorowsky. Some thirty years after they achieved notoriety as midnight movies, his mystical manifestos El Topo and The Holy Mountain are now available on DVD, but the sumptuous visuals of the restored prints really scream out for proper big-screen viewing.

TIM WONG reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: scenes from a marriage.

IF MICHAEL HANEKE ever makes a film about love (save for the psychosexual transgressions of The Piano Teacher), chances are he’ll reach for Veleska Grisebach’s Longing (Sehnsucht) as a point of reference. An intensely framed disintegration of marriage and intimacy, at its simplest a parable of infidelity and fate, it sparsely, yet acutely contemplates the ramifications of an affair between a metalworker and waitress (Andreas Müller, Anett Dornbusch), whose initial one night stand is enclosed within a magnificent jump cut preceded by the pop-lustiness of Robbie Williams’ ‘Feel’. Meeting at a volunteer firefighter’s convention, the pair liase several times more; meanwhile back home, the metalworker’s baby fawn wife (Ilka Welz) longs unbearably for her husband’s touch.

At the World Cinema Showcase, Asia Argento rips her into bodice. By DAVID LEVINSON.

THERE’s enough t&a in Catherine Breillat’s An Old Mistress to tide over the most seasoned devotee of softcore royal intrigue, though for the most the part the Frenchwoman plays it safe (which is to say, level-headed): Deprived here of a contemporary setting, she sublimates accordingly – turning the militant love strategies of the French aristocracy into a survey of gender (and generational) power-plays.

Reviewed by Brannavan Gnanalingam

TAKING this film seriously is as futile as a non-descript Asian-citizen taking on John Rambo in this, Sylvester Stallone’s latest 80s revivalist project. But I will anyway. And for the multitudes who will see this and applaud the outrageously enjoyably fascistic violence, of course it’s just a movie. No-one would have expected otherwise. But Rambo 4 (aka simply Rambo) with the curious working subtitle, To Hell and Back might as well be a recruitment poster for the American army.

Taika Waititi/NZ/2007; R4
Icon/Warner Bros, $39.95 | Reviewed by Tim Wong

HAVE Kiwis embraced Eagle vs Shark? At the Aro St Video Shop in February – the now-legendary venue of one ‘secret’ Flight of the Conchords DVD signing and gig – Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement catered for several hundred rabid autograph hunters and one trembling, desperately committed fan: a motley teenager sporting bright red suspenders and a mouthful of braces, who, upon hearing of the quietly publicised event, ejaculated from his classroom mid-lesson, ran home to retrieve his Conchords paraphernalia, talked his way into the closed session, convinced staff members to trade a $50 record store voucher for a Conchords DVD, before working his way from the back of the queue to accost Bret and Jemaine in person (postscript: detention awaited him upon return). Throughout this circus, Clement’s Eagle vs Shark co-star, the positively radiant Loren Horsley, observed from the sidelines, occasionally stepping forward to offer a signature or pose for a photograph, but otherwise played second fiddle to the Conchords’ justifiable, rather alarming New Zealand cult.

Out of India, GAUTAMAN BHASKARAN considers the current Indian and Bollywood Cinema.

RENOWNED Indian auteur-director Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s latest film, Naalu Pennungal (Four Women), has been short listed among 20 movies to compete for the prestigious L’Age d’Or (Golden Age) Award at the Belgian Film Archives. The movies would be archived.

Heidi Ewing, Rachel Grady/USA/2006; R4
Madman, $29.95 | Reviewed by Alexander Bisley

“IT’S MASSIVE warfare everyday. Let the battle begin,” Ted Haggard fulminates, bringing a mega-church of evangelicals to prayer for President George W Bush and his then Supreme Court nominee, now Justice Samuel Alito. Haggard is (at the time Jesus Camp was made) President of the National Association of Evangelicals, which has more than thirty million of America’s claimed seventy-five million evangelicals. He meets weekly with Bush and his advisors. “We don’t have to debate what we think about homosexual activity, it’s written in The Bible,” homophobic Haggard – subsequently busted for using both crystal meth and gay prostitutes – sermonises. Haggard bullies directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, leering into the camera: “If you use any of this I’ll sue you”. Later, he rubbishes 11-year-old aspirant preacher Levi, a passionate orator.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: German disquiet.

IT’S HARD not to escape the taste of allegory in the film. Maybe it’s academic training that forces me to believe that every post-unification German tale carries the weight of history behind it, but there have been a number of German films recently that have tried to confront the past, isolation, and abandonment. And Ghosts (Gespenter) has it all – a strongly delineated East/West divide, the couple are from France/speak French while the two teenagers are strongly German. There’s a class divide, one side is clearly poor, one side is clear rich, cultured, elitist. There’s the sense of abandonment that’s sieved through the film, the characters are forced to deal with the isolation, the pain that the abandonment causes (both in the past and in the present). But putting aside my allegory readings, the film is a disquieting, understated melodrama. Its characters are people searching for answers, questions, not quite sure of what happened in the past. And audience don’t really know either, the ambiguous ending leaves open multiple interpretations – no-one I’ve talked to after the film had the same view on the events.

Michael Moore/USA/2007; R4
Reel/Roadshow, NZ$19.95 | Reviewed by Alexander Bisley

MICHAEL MOORE is simplistic and one-eyed and perhaps the best force to hit documentary. In addition to opening the gates for a formidable array of documentary, his work is compelling and amusing. In Sicko Dr Moore diagnoses America’s health system. The results aren’t favourable. It’s not just the 50 million Americans without health insurance that are in the proverbial. Considerable amount of covered Americans aren't getting the care they deserve. Moore takes a scalpel to America’s health insurance industry, America’s Health Maintenance Organisations (HMOs). He socks it to the fat cats who put their greed ahead of the people’s right to health.

At the World Cinema Showcase, the end is nigh for Richard Kelly. By MATT PICKERING.

WE ALL knew Donnie Darko would be a tough act to follow. With Southland Tales, director Richard Kelly expands on the ideas of time travel and suburban science fiction that captivated us in his first film. It seemed only a natural progression for Kelly to turn his attention directly to the apocalypse, but such bracing subject matter is a double-edged sword. It may just have been too much to handle. The film initially showed at Cannes in 2006 to horrid reviews, but nevertheless still found a backer. Kelly subsequently cut the film back by 25 minutes and added another million dollars worth of computer effects, but the storytelling is where this film wins and loses.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: discovering Demy.

I WONDER if the Film Society found it difficult to know exactly when to schedule Jacquot de Nantes, a tribute to Jacques Demy. Should it have beeen after all the Demy films so the viewers can pick up on the references and little in-jokes, and have a clearer understanding of Demy’s worldview? Or should it be before the movies, giving an insight into the man, and therefore changing the way a viewer subsequently sees his work. After all, after watching Jacquot de Nantes, it’s easy to see where Demy’s fascination with the everyday, where his love of music or his hard-edged view on romance come from. However, this genre-bending piece does benefit from a little foreknowledge, and viewers with little background in Demy’s films or French New Wave cinema in general, may find it banal or trite. Those who do know a bit of Demy may find it intimate, rich, touching, inspiring and sad.

Reviewed by David Levinson

AS A TRAGIC survey of the tolls of the American Dream (God, sweat, oil ‘n’ all), There Will Be Blood locates its essence in Daniel Plainview – a self-made “oil man,” ripped from the pages of Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel, Oil!. More than a tacky imprint of the rural huckster though, Plainview enters the West askew: As both a family man – seeking out the promises of modern living –, as well as the victim of a more sinister drive – one that clots his ambition with episodes of abject hatred.

At the World Cinema Showcase, Robert Mapplethorpe through a different lens. By CALEB STARRENBURG.

Black, White + Gray is a snapshot of enigmatic art curator Sam Wagstaff and his relationship of mutual exploitation with renowned photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. The documentary, by first time director James Crump, is primarily focused on the lesser-known Wagstaff. A privileged and handsome Manhattanite, Wagstaff worked for a time in advertising, which he hated, before his prolific career as an art curator and collector.

At the World Cinema Showcase, a revenge film of forgiveness. By CALEB STARRENBURG.

A THOUGHT-provoking parable of forgiveness and reconciliation, Dry Season (Daratt) examines the aftermath of Chad’s decades long civil war. As the film opens, a radio broadcast announces an amnesty for war criminals. The grandfather of 16-year-old Atim (Ali Bacha Barkaï) responds to the news by ordering Atim to avenge his father’s murder. Arriving in Chad’s capital with a handgun, Atim soon discovers his father’s killer Nassara (Youssouf Djaoro) is a sickly bakery owner with a young wife. Inexplicably accepting a job with Nassara, the young Atim realises he is drawn to the man, even as he continues to plan his revenge. Filmed on dusty streets of Chad, the third feature by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s (Bye Bye Africa, Abouna), Dry Season is notable for its visual and storytelling simplicity. Essentially a two-character drama, subtle and searing performances by Barkaï and Djaoro ensure the ethical sand between the two constantly shifts. Right up until its sudden and unexpected conclusion, Dry Season offers no simple answers to its complex moral questions – asking us instead to consider the cost of justice.

At the World Cinema Showcase, America’s War on Terror conspires to destroy one man. By BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.

IF THERE’s one documentary that will cause you to furrow your brow and shake your head at the supposed “War on Terror”, Strange Culture will probably be the one. However, it’s not an Iraq-doco; instead, it looks at exactly how the Patriot Act, and the racial and political paranoia in post September 11, 2001 United States, have all conspired to basically ruin one man, Steve Kurtz’s life. When Kurtz’s wife dies of heart failure, he calls 911 for assistance, and thereby sets in motion a Kafka-esque assault on freedom of speech and his civil liberties. And he’s still to face trial at the time of writing.

At the World Cinema Showcase, a typeface makes a star turn. By TIM WONG.

IN EXPOSING the inferior (but to the untrained eye, indistinguishable) typeface Arial for what it really is – an inbred phony – Helvetica champions and despises its own ubiquity. The most entertaining documentary of the New Zealand International Film Festivals last year, it makes a welcome comeback by virtue of its point of difference, paving the way for likeminded design documentaries interrogative of visual communication. Neutrally presented, yet fastidiously profiled, Gary Hustwit plays biographer in giving life and personality to the film’s eponymous lead character, before turning him/her over (the font is rather androgynous, so it’s hard to say) to a gallery of outspoken opponents and fervent supporters. In typographic speak, Hustwit’s talking heads – a fascinating array of practitioners, whose celebrated names are usually relegated to the pages of glossy design publications, but find a voice as part of the documentary’s enlightening and expert commentary – draw their lines in either positive or negative space. The only middle ground to be found is in the unconscious desktop publisher, an indifferent slave to the expediency of 12pt Helvetica beneath a letterhead, or throughout a lackadaisical résumé. For students of graphic design especially, lending an ear to such keynote speakers as Erik Spiekermann, Neville Brody and Stefan Sagmeister is invaluable: all engage with humour, cogency and great wit, although Raygun creator David Carson comes off as a hasbeen, while the inept Michael C. Place proves little more than a purveyor of shallow, inconsequential visual noise. Neither for nor against the Everyfont, Helvetica does have a purpose: to ensure its viewers think twice about the form, function – and perhaps even consequences – of the typeface they choose to use next.

At the World Cinema Showcase, a distant conflict. By CALEB STARRENBURG.

MAD HOT BALLROOM relocated to a Ugandan refugee camp, War/Dance represents two documentaries at conflict with each other. The first is a compelling human drama of children battling to regain normalcy in their lives amidst the tragedy of war; the second is an attempt to make suffering palatable to foreign audiences, in this case a crowd-pleasing tale of underdogs taking on Uganda’s best in a nation-wide music competition. In this respect the film is well intentioned, but at times unsettling.