New directors and old mavericks collide at the New Zealand International Film Festivals. By TIM WONG.

IN La France, a left-of-field war musical harmonised by twee interludes, the wonderfully unorthodox Sylvie Testud bends her gender for not the first time in her career – La Vie en Rose her last androgynous outing as Edith Piaf’s long-time cohort Simone Berteaut. Playing Camille, the forlorn wife of a WWI soldier, Testud masquerades as a man in order to join a company of inglorious French troops headed vaguely in the direction of her MIA husband. Within lean, pragmatic surroundings – a squad-based parable not unlike Fixed Bayonets or The Big Red One – director Serge Bozon circumvents the anticipation and cheap thrill of battle gore with the spectre of combat, and for all the film’s soft spoken whimsy and twilight surrealism – its willowy night-time sequences some of the most entrancing ever lit – there’s something disquieting, even faintly post-apocalyptic about its march towards a conflict which never presents itself. All in all, a strange delicacy among war movies, disengaged from both the cruel primitivism of Bruno Dumont (who would’ve turned the scene where Camille’s sex is revealed into a pack rape), and the showmanship of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s hyper-romances (A Very Long Engagement a bloated, pre-existing version of this film). Finally subversive, Bozon even emasculates the genre’s machismo by directing his grubby male cast to sing their musical numbers in the key of James Blunt.

Also appearing in Eat, for This My Body – the dark side of Heading South, pitched somewhere between anthropology and a Matthew Barney film – Testud is less actress than conceptual prop. Contextually murky, and protracted across a series of stagy, self-contained installations, Michelange Quay’s waking dream occasionally gives rise to the sublime, making the most of its scorched Haitian topography: a landscape claimed by swollen shantytowns and restless human wildlife. Interspersed throughout Quay’s native insights, several strikingly rendered episodes – a ceremonial cake fight, an industrial lactose fetish, and one memorable jam session between three elderly turntablists – emerge as anachronisms within the film’s primordial milieu, raising it momentarily towards the white man imperialism of Alex Cox’s Walker. For the most part though, its politics are neither coherent nor illuminating – a French post-colonial pretender to Claire Denis’ Chocolat.


With seven years between features, Béla Tarr’s formalism in The Man From London has thankfully remained intact; his camera manoeuvred with the same calmness, caution and intense interest of Werckmeister Harmonies, surely a watershed for any festival-goer fortunate to have seen the masterpiece at scale in 2001. Given the scarcity and non-distribution of the Hungarian’s films, this latest, rarest of outings is therefore essential cinema; it’s almost certain not to return. Poised with less certainty are Tarr’s noirish ambitions, and though an ideal match for his deep contrast photography and dead-end malaise, the film’s initiating plot device – an appropriated suitcase of money, and the Englishman hot on its trail – is a minority among the opaque images, prowling tracking shots, and eventful scene cuts. Tilda Swinton, whose Ziggy Stardust cowlick and fashion-conscious androgyny has evidently met its match in Sylvie Testud – La France and Eat, for This My Body reminders of the kind of films she used to make, long before the Oscars and Walden Media came calling – joins the cast as a token, avant-garde throwback to her Derek Jarman crusades. Dubbed in frenzied Hungarian, Swinton’s participation here is comic and entirely incongruous, while her preened facial features are something of an eyesore alongside the historical brow lines and heart aching wrinkles of Tarr’s East European troupe, regularly paused upon in close-up with graphic, dramatic force.

Unwelcome still, Swinton contributes sorrow and concern to biography Derek, in which she recites passages from her Jarman memorial ‘Letter to an Angel’ while strolling London’s reclaimed inner-city: all “clingfilm”, modernist alienation, as pictured in the documentary. Heartfelt, yet sanctimonious, Swinton’s broadsides on cultural recession and film industry complacency are food for thought only in the never-ending discourse between art and commerce. Of greater interest are Jarman’s own insights and confessions in a candid 1991 interview, extracts fused with clips from the iconoclastic director’s 8mm archive and feature film oeuvre. Overlooking Swinton’s indulgent narration, Isaac Julien’s synthesis of the Jarman legacy benefits from clarity, dignity, and quiet worship. Also, a timely refresher given the re-emergence of Todd Haynes; the gay filmmaker’s breakthrough Poison very much Jarman-esque, and debt owning.