Life is Beautiful

1997 Director Roberto Benigni

This Italian heart-warmer is on course to become the most commercially successful foreign-language film of all time. It won three Oscars, including Best Foreign-Language Film and Actor. It will be adored by millions, and just as heartily loathed by others. Why? mainly because it is an attempt to find humour in the Holocaust.

In the first half of the picture, set in 1939 Tuscany, an impulsive romantic and would-be bookseller (played by the director, co-writer and Italy's favourite comedian, Roberto Benigni) learns to become a waiter in a grand hotel. He also woos Dora (played by Benigni's real-life wife, Nicoletta Braschi), who's the beautiful schoolteacher fiancee of a local fascist. Although the background is of rising Italian nationalism, the atmosphere is sunny, carefree and about as realistic as an open-air production of The Marriage of Figaro.

Benigni's physical clowning recalls the heyday of Jacques Tati and verges on brilliance in such scenes as the one when he absent-mindedly carries a poodle on a tiny tray. He also has a verbal dexterity reminiscent of Danny Kaye, improvising his way out of emergencies with speeches of mounting outrageousness.
Unfortunately, his view of the ideal woman is reminiscent of Chaplin at his worst. Dora is a bland, bovine creation, whose role seems simply to gaze adoringly at Benigni and laugh at his jokes. The first half is likeable but very corny, ultra-romantic comedy, as Benigni strives to portray the Thirties as a cute, pastoral idyll.

Then the tone darkens. We are reminded that the waiter, now married to Dora and the owner of a bookshop, is Jewish. He tries to explain to his son (Giorgio Cantarini) who looks five or six, why Jews and dogs are not allowed in a local shop. It's a game, he says, in which shopkeepers arbitrarily exclude one sort of person or another. They must remember to put up a sign in their bookshop, saying No Visigoths And Spiders.

Is the father patronizing his son by telling him lies, or preserving his innocence? Either way, this is a foretaste of nastier things to come. Our hero is transported to a concentration camp with his son. The gentile mother bravely follows to another part of the camp, out of love for her family.

In the camp, the father continues his policy of preserving his son's faith in humanity at the same time as trying to save his life. Our hero learns that old men and children are the first to be taken to the gas chambers, so he teaches his son to hide and be stoical in the face of hunger and hardship. He pretends they are part of a game, the object of which is to earn enough points to become the winner of a tank.
Even in this darker second half, there are hilarious set-pieces, notably one where Benigni acts as interpreter to a German guard and explains the rules of his invented game to his son and a bewildered audience of fellow-inmates.

Some of the best moments that follow are echoes of The Great Dictator, in which Chaplin ridiculed fascism. Unfortunately, the worst moments reminded me of a justly forgotten Jerry Lewis comedy from 1972, The Day the Clown Cried, about a clown whose job was to entertain Jewish children on their way to the gas chambers.

I can well understand why anyone might be offended by Benigni's portrait of a concentration camp. The brutality, racism and hopelessness are all underplayed. The prisoners don't even look very underfed.

But it's all part of Benigni's grand design. He has to soften the realities of the concentration camp slightly, or there could be no laughter. Sophisticated audiences will realize that Benigni - like his hero - is playing an elaborate game with us. He is asking us to go along with him, and suspend our disbelief.

After all, it is incredible that Benigni's character could enlist his suffering colleagues into preserving the illusions of his small son. Equally far-fetched is the moment when Benigni nips into an empty office and serenades his wife through the camp's loudspeaker. It is meant to charm, but it's just plain silly. He may be an impulsive romantic, but would he endanger his own life and that of his son, to make such a grand but futile gesture? And why does his action have no repercussions?
Life Is Beautiful never sets out to be a realistic representation. As the voice-over makes clear from the outset, this is a fable. Yet the reality and the horror lurk all the time in the background, as when Benigni rounds a wall in the camp and comes across a pile of corpses.
The reason for the film's huge success is that it works marvellously as a romantic, comic allegory about the resilience of the human spirit, about how people use humour to save them from going mad in the face of horror.

Most of all, it is a moving portrayal of fatherly affection. It reminds us of a time when parents worked harder than they do today to preserve their children's innocence.
Benigni may take the idea of preserving that innocence to ludicrous extremes, but he does so with a purpose. He shows us an idealised portrait of parental selflessness. In doing so, he shows us something of value that has gone largely missing from our society.
Parts of Life Is Beautiful made me cringe, and some of its sentimental over-simplifications struck me as wilfully dishonest. Yet it is often funny, and - love it or hate it (I felt both emotions) - it is an extraordinary, if slightly barmy, achievement.

La Jetee

1962 Director Chris Marker

This film is one of those rare landmark films who's influence will recur for decades. It was the inspiration for Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys and draws quite heavily from the influence of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. The claustrophobic atmosphere brings to mind Orson Well's The Trial. A haunting score by Trevor Duncan completes this little gem.

Simply shot using black and white stills it weaves an hypnotic and disturbing tale of cause and effect in just 28 minutes. Set in a post apocalyptic Paris, its focus is on a man haunted by a childhood memory of a man being shot on the viewing platform at Orly airport. Because of the strong memory scientists use this to project him back in time where he befriends a woman. He is then projected into the future to obtain a power source that will be used to rebuild Paris. Upon return he works out that this knowledge will lead to his execution. Given the option of escape to the future he chooses the past to rejoin the woman with tragic consequences.

The whole film is narrated leaving little for interpretation. However, there is a small tell worth watching for. The whispered conversations between the scientists is in German and adds greatly to the underlying menace of the film. Sadly they are not subtitled. So if you understand German you will enjoy this more. This is a real gem and one that gets better with multiple viewings.

The Edge of Heaven

2007 Director Faith Akin

This film is about the tension between Germany and Turkey, to whom postwar West Germany opened its doors for "guest-worker" labourers, thereby getting an economic boost but creating for itself an unacknowledged quasi-imperial legacy of guilt and cultural division. And it is about the gulf between the first- and second-generation Turkish-Germans, conflicted about their identity and their relation with the old country, itself conflicted as it prepares to join the European Union.

At the movie's centre is Nejat , a second-generation Turk who has attained what might be the greatest distinction Germany has to offer: he is a university professor, lecturing on Goethe. His rascally old father, Ali, also in Germany, has offered cohabitation rights to the Turkish prostitute Yeter for whom he is a regular, and who is only too eager to escape the bullying Muslim activists who patrol the red-light district - but doesn't see Ali's yet unrevealed darker side.

Having established this fraught, tense family relationship, Akin spins the narrative thread off sideways to investigate the situation of Yeter's fugitive daughter  and her relationship with an idealist young German who between them are reviving the spirit of Baader-Meinhof for a new generation.

It is a glitteringly confident narrative pattern, gesturing at the globalised, historical forces that govern individual lives; in some ways it is like a very, very much better version of Alejandro González Iñárritu's mediocre film Babel - there is some similar business with a handgun - but not as schematic and superficial. The web of happenstance and dramatic reversals of fortune may teeter on the brink of unbelievability, but it is a measure of Akin's confidence as a storyteller that his world so plausibly enfolds us.

Room and a Half

2009 Director Andrei Khrzhanovsky

This touching and amusing movie is a biography, both imaginative and imaginary, of Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996), the self-taught poet, critic and translator, raised in Leningrad, the son of a Soviet naval photographer, and persecuted by the state for his independence of mind.

In 1972 he was driven into American exile where he achieved intellectual eminence, and he received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1987.

Brodsky never returned to Russia and apparently once said that "such a journey could only take place anonymously". Khrzhanovsky takes Brodsky on a journey back to Leningrad, dreaming about his youth, upbringing and early life as he takes the ferry from Helsinki to Leningrad before being reunited with his elderly parents.

The director uses animated sequences to elegant effect, and his affectionate, nostalgic movie brings to mind the autobiographical works of those other exiles, Vladimir Nabokov and Andrei Tarkovsky.

Three Monkeys

2008 Director Nuri Bilge Ceylan

At the beginning, Three Monkeys looks more like a slow-burning thriller than anything else. Servet  is a middle-aged politician who accidentally kills a pedestrian in his car, at night, on a remote country road. Panicking and fearing scandal with an election imminent, he flees the scene and later desperately persuades his long-standing driver to take the rap. Servet promises to keep paying his salary into his bank account while he endures the short spell in prison and to pay a lump sum in cash on release. Deeply troubled, but utterly dependent on his employer's goodwill, the driver agrees, and the swallowed humiliation of this shabby deal worsens the already troubled family environment he leaves behind. His wife is a beautiful woman, though hardened and careworn by money worries, and by a family tragedy yet to be disclosed to the audience; his son is a young man in his early 20s who is worrying his parents by flunking out at college and getting in with a rough crowd.

There are aspects of Three Monkeys that look very much like Ceylan's earlier films: he creates wonderful, painterly, yet unsentimental visions of the Istanbul waterfront, and the cinematography and colour-palette this time have a mannered, desaturated look. The passing of the summer and the imminent arrival of winter are important, and there are some domestic images that are something of a motif for this director: people sitting around watching television.

The humble family flat at the beginning of the film is to be the venue for a clever "reveal" from Ceylan, which I suspect other directors may wish to pinch: The wife is asleep on the couch late at night with the TV on; the son, who had promised to be home long before this, creeps in very quietly so as not to wake her and, in shadow, goes to his room. She awakes and is baffled by a drop of blood on the floor; she pulls open her son's bedroom door and she - and we - are shocked to learn that his secret is not merely that he is a dirty stopout; he has been very badly beaten up. It is only now that Ceylan shows us her face in closeup, and we see how beautiful, and how troubled, she is. It is a quietly stylish film-making coup.

The rigour and intensity of Three Monkeys is invigorating - it is nourishing in a way few other films are. And the moments of metaphysical revelation, the arrival of ghosts, are stunning. But I couldn't help feeling that Three Monkeys was an over-egged pudding, a film trying to be too many things in too many styles and moreover poised on the edge of implausibility: a certain murderous act, and subsequent cover-up, are left rather conveniently unexplained. Ceylan has certainly produced an ambitious movie. But this kind of intensely worked drama is a creative cul-de-sac.

The Sun in a Net

1962 Director Stefan Uher

Fuelled by a quirky jazz jive and recorder motif soundtrack, world class cinematography and a few interesting stylistic choices, 'The Sun in a Net' makes for intricate, sensual entertainment.

A film like no other, its soundtrack constantly overlaps narration, dialogue and (sometimes jarringly annoying) music while its camera seems distracted from them all. It's like when you're surrounded in a busy city but you can't remember where you're going; none of the numerous distractions actually guide you but they greatly inform the atmosphere.

In the same respect, the entire film blends two distinct styles into one - there's the 'Mean Streets' independent approach with all its actual cityscapes and cramped apartments housing its minimal worldview, but then there's also a level of arthouse aspirations as cameras pan up to empty skies, glide around mirrors and frame its cast with incredible awe.

There isn't much of a plot to speak of and reiterating the brief threads that hold the story together would miss the point - this is thematic. It's a film of ideas - loss, hope, yearning, sexuality, political challenges, dreams, family and more - and it hits its targets by mixing the ordinary and the extraordinary into something unique. 

'The Sun in a Net' is one of those rare films that is what you, the viewer, make it. If you're looking to sit down and be drip-fed entertainment and a story, you'll find its net to be empty. Other viewers may just catch the sun.

Boca do Lixo

2010 Director Flavio Frederico

Boca is a thrilling gangster film based on the real-life events depicted within the pages of the 1977 autobiography of the feared gangland overlord Hiroito Joanides de Moraes, freely adapted by Mariana Pamplona and director Flavio Frederico.

At the age of 21 Hiroito was accused of murdering his father, who was violently stabbed over 40 times with a razor. Hiroito was never charged, however two months after his father’s death, he bought two guns and moved to Boca do Lixo, becoming one of the regions most dangerous criminals.

The biggest problem with Boca is that it glosses over the surface of its storyline, failing to provide a proper insight into the man behind the madness. Hiroito spends the majority of the time on screen, and Oliveira’s performance suggests that he’s up to the task, but key sequences are rushed through, and Boca’s impact lessens with every fleeting glance. Hiroito’s story certainly has potential, and the filmmakers are keen to present him in a certain light, but the viewer is given very little insight into how he became the man he was. Key events take place at regular intervals but we’re just expected to go with it, there’s no rhyme or reason, just continuous forward motion.

Take the relationship he forms with Alaide (Hermila Guedes) as an example. In one scene he is encouraging the new girl on the block to work for him, and in the next he is asking for her hand in marriage. She smiles, job done. It’s hard to care about the characters without any kind of depth or emotional input. People come and go but none of them stick around long enough to make a lasting impression. Frederico spends too much time focusing on the action, whether it be regular sexual escapades or violent run-ins, and too little time developing the characters at the heart of the tale. It’s not like he doesn’t have time to delve deeper, but when a film comes in at just over ninety minutes, I find it hard to believe that anyone can do the full story justice.

Hands over the City

1963 Director Francesco Rosi

This was the beginning of a series of political dramas about crime, corruption and exploitation in Italy that occupied Rosi for a decade. Le mani sulla città (Hands over the City), took him back to his native Naples and a collaboration with an old friend, Raffaele La Capria.

Most films in this series (Salvatore Giuliano, The Mattei Affair, Lucky Luciano, Christ Stopped at Eboli) centre on real-life characters. Hands over the City has a harsh, documentary look, but involves the conflict between two representative figures, both fictitious: the ruthless property developer Edoardo Nottola (Rod Steiger, whom Rosi had admired in Richard Wilson's Al Capone) and the outspoken communist Neapolitan senator De Vita (played by Carlo Fermariello, a real-life local politician, whose vital presence had impressed Rosi while he was researching the picture). Both are excellent.

The two men go head to head during a fudged inquiry into the collapse of a building under construction and an election in which Nottola's role in municipal corruption is a key issue. Rosi's art lies in his ability to draw us into heated debates in the legislative chamber, committee meetings and devious backstage political confrontations and make us understand and care about the outcome without resorting either to melodrama or oversimplification.

Hands over the City (the title is both a metaphor for corruption and a realistic account of the dramatic role of body language) won the Golden Lion at Venice. Like Salvatore Giuliano it is stunningly photographed by one of the great black-and-white cinematographers, Gianni Di Venanzo.

Mado

1976 Director Claude Sautet

In a corrupt, ruthless, dog-eat-dog world, are the bonds of friendship and loyalty more important and reliable than the fleeting connections of passion and romantic/erotic love? That is the rhetorical question posed in Claude Sautet's Mado, a clear-eyed, sombre, yet surprisingly sweet drama masquerading as a sort of noirish thriller.

The film recounts the misfortunes of Simon Léotard and his unique relationship with Mado, a prostitute whose services he avails himself of, who also acts as his buddy, moral conscience, and advisor in difficult times. Simon is a real estate developer whose business partner has committed suicide after having irretrievably indebted them to Lépidon, a corrupt competitor who means to undermine their enterprise by any means necessary. A toughened, world-weary old hand at the vicious games of the business world, Simon finds himself in real need of Mado and her loose group of idealistic, unemployed or wage-slaving acquaintances who can offer him ideas, knowledge, and aid as he manoeuvres to save his business and turn the tables on Lépidon.

 

Sautet is remarkably successful at smoothly shifting our attention away from the obligatory material aspirations and dealings of his characters and toward their human feelings, the responsibility they feel for one another. He ends the film not with any resolution or reassurance that our dreams and ambitions can work out, but with a gentle, empathetic sense of half-hopeful resignation. The characters cannot even come close to doing all they would really like to, for themselves or each other; but despite that disappointment, they will do what they can, and there is some small, unspoken glory in that.

Le Pont du Nord

1981 Director Jacques Rivette

This nearly lost film captures the visions and moods of a nearly lost Paris and of a mode of thought that was also on its way out.

It starts as a whimsical urban riff on the theme of chance connections: Marie, a toughened woman of a certain age, heads to Paris after getting out of prison and is joined by Baptiste (her real-life daughter), a long-limbed and fiercely determined dark angel who travels by scooter. Marie reunites with her boyfriend, Julien, a pathological gambler whose mysterious briefcase entangles him in big trouble that Baptiste decides to unravel.

The women’s poetic excursions through the ruins of industrial sites and Impressionist landscapes morph into a spy-versus-spy caper involving left-wing terrorist plots and government infiltration. The labyrinthine city of recondite romanticism and the bloody ideals of revolutionary heroism appear fated to vanish together, even as the chill of rational order reveals another shimmery layer of ingrained authority.

All that said in deference to experimental cinema; this is a truly awful film especially in post production. The sound is unedited which is jarring when going from cut to cut. There are numerous continuity errors. The plot is needlessly convoluted. The acting is hammed and over the top and the characters appear to have no motivation whatsoever. Unsurprisingly the ending is predictable and inconclusive. Really one to avoid.

The Turin Horse

2011 Director Béla Tarr

This film, in some ways, is the most extreme of Tarr's films and yet the simplest. Co-written, once again, by novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkai, The Turin Horse is a minimalist distillation of Tarr's cinema: little more than a man, a woman, a horse, a house, some wretched weather, and very few words. The narrative content is so slender that it's barely even an anecdote, yet the film has the disturbing resonance of some ancient imponderable fable.

It all begins in darkness, as a narrator intones the apocryphal tale of how Nietzsche went mad – supposedly after seeing a horse beaten in Turin. After this incident, the German philosopher lapsed forever more into silence. The punchline: "No one knows what happened to the horse".
Thereafter, it's as if the film – indeed, the whole world – turns to near-silence. The story is told with few words but strong images, shot in long, sinuously executed takes.

This is a film of uncertainties – and because there's nothing solid to grasp in the narrative, what we cling to is the texture of the film itself. We become attentive to the ritualistic repetition of actions, to the prowling camera moves that map out the contours of this enclosed but oddly elastic universe, and to the eerie sound design – along with Mihaly Vig's creaky, dirge-like score, a ghastly three-note refrain has been mixed eerily into the sound of the wind itself, not just hauntingly but fit to drive you mad.

Shot in ascetically beautiful black and white by Fred Kelemen, this could almost be a documentary about 19th-century peasant life at its most challenging. But there's a mysterious metaphysical resonance about The Turin Horse that makes for the enigmatic numinousness of a Kafka parable. This is cinema so spare and silent it's on the verge of being Trappist cinema – and that is eloquence indeed.

Rebellion

2011 Director Mathieu Kassovitz

This film is something of a comeback for Mathieu Kassovitz, an intelligent political drama, part thriller, part war movie, and informed by something of the anger against established authority that fuelled La Haine.

Rebellion is based with some fidelity on a 1990 memoir by Philippe Legorjus, a captain in the GIGN (Groupe d'Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale), an elite unit of the armed forces charged with counterterrorism and hostage negotiation who took part in the brutal repression of an insurrection by inhabitants in the French overseas territory of New Caledonia. Legorjus, a man of probity torn between doing what is right and fulfilling his duty as a military man, is sensitively played by Kassovitz himself. Legorjus's book is called La morale et l'action, the film was released in France as L'ordre et la morale, and both titles are superior to the commonplace one under which it is being shown here.

At times Rebellion brings to mind Apocalypse Now (and, indeed, there are several references to Coppola's movie). It's an exciting, complex story about a government committed to realpolitik and convinced that national interest can justify any kind of sacrifice (including the truth) in order to retain influence. And it's about a man involved in a morally and politically complicated event that is ultimately beyond his control, but from which he doesn't believe he can escape. It's all the more interesting because the incident has been so rapidly forgotten, and indeed failed to become a cause celebre in its time.

Lemon Tree

2008 Director Eran Riklis

Based on a real story, "Lemon Tree" explores the painful human detail of life in a society warped from within and without by terrorism. It charts the plight of a Palestinian woman desperately trying to hang on to the lemon grove her family has tended for decades. As she tells us, she's suffered a lot in her life -- the loss of a husband, the absence of her children, the pain of loneliness and, as director Eran Riklis subtly suggests, the double disempowerment of being a Palestinian among Israelis, and a woman among Palestinians.

And now, with the Israeli defence minister moving in next door, she is about to lose her precious lemon grove, which thuggish security agents deem a potential hiding place for terrorists. Even the neglected wife of the minister, considers the order to chop down the trees arbitrary and unnecessary. But the two women live on opposite sides of the Green Line, in different worlds, and her sympathy from afar can do little to help.

Riklis has made a powerful film, but can a powerful film change anything about the fatalistic culture of powerlessness that is felt throughout Israel and the West Bank? Or does it merely clothe it in poetic garb, aestheticize it, render it as art, to be savoured as something deeply sad and tragic and beyond hope of repair? The irony of "Lemon Tree" is that what it achieves as film -- nuance, complexity, ambiguity -- only adds, in the end, to the sense that nothing can unravel this mess. That's a dangerous feeling to leave in your audience, when there are real lives and trees at stake.

The Apple

1998 Director Samira Makhmalbaf

Shot in 11 days, The Apple is everything a Hollywood film is not, and that’s a major compliment. This understated and poetic, yet refreshingly simple, exercise in filmmaking raises urgent and difficult questions, but refrains from giving us stereotypical and moralistic answers. Rather than making judgment calls, Samira Makhmalbaf challenges us to reflect on the contradictions emerging from the clash between traditional values and the ones propagated by a modern and civilized society.

In the near-iconic opening shot of Samira Makhmalbaf’s remarkable first feature, The Apple, a hand is reaching into the frame to water a dried-out plant. The futility of this simple act becomes evident as we see the life-bringing water miss the pot.  The hand performing this unavailing task belongs to Zahra, an 11 year-old girl who plays herself in this true-to-life film. The bars hindering Zahra from reaching the thirsty flower are the same ones that separate her from the outside world. For as long they can remember, she and her twin sister Massoumeh have been imprisoned in the family home by a righteous and protecting father.  In tying the fate of the flower to the condition of the twins, Samira Makhmalbaf manages to create a powerful and poetic metaphor for the condition of girls and women in an anachronistic Iranian society where archaic traditions can cause antagonism and modern-day tragedy.  In a central part of the film, the father is asked to justify his daughters’ captivity to a social worker. Defending his deed, the 65 year-old unemployed patriarch refers to a tattered copy of “Advice to Fathers.”  “My daughters are like flowers,” he says, “expose them to sun, and they will wither away.” Interpreting the “sun” to mean “boys”, the religious father, whose only ally is his blind wife, decides to isolate his beloved daughters in the name of dignity.  After learning about this real-life tragedy from Iranian television, the 17 year-old director Samira Makhmalbaf became interested in the fate and future of the twins. 

It is clear that the making of The Apple was a profound experience for both Zahra and Massoumeh -- a summary initiation into both the real and the reel world. As viewers, we are allowed to share in their joy of freedom and exploration, and in their enthusiastic appreciation of the small things in life. It is a rare gift to see something so authentic in such an artistic context.  I recently read that Samira’s younger sister has shot two short films. She is ten years old and will probably soon join the ranks of her sister and father. If Samira’s filmmaking is an indication of her sister’s talents, then the Iranian Film Revolution -- or is it Evolution? -- is set to continue.

Ikarie XB 1

1963 Director Jindrich Polák

This Czech film from 1963 – based on a book by Lem, and released in America in a dubbed and recut version as Voyage to the End of the Universe – is about a spacecraft, “a small cosmic town of 40 citizens”, setting forth to seek out life on the planets of the Alpha Centauri system 26,000 light years away. Boldly going where no man has been before – Soviet-style.

Which means taking the whole thing very seriously. There's little or no frivolity in Eastern Bloc SF. So instead of some nonsense about alien princesses, you get a thoughtful script that deals in a sophisticated way with the issues that would beset a crew in that situation. The trip will take 15 years, but because of time dilation it's only going to seem like about eighteen months for those on board. That's long enough though, and a large part of the film is given over to the boredom and petty annoyances of space flight. The dialogue is mostly the kind of ultra-civilised chitchat you would expect to hear at a science symposium, and the acting is of a quality that wouldn't be out of place in a classical drama. As for the trials which the crew face, don't expect any little green men in bubble helmets: the dangers come primarily from humanity's own past and from a bizarre new form of radiation which they encounter.

For anyone who has seen Tarkovsky's stately SF epics, all this is, in a way, only to be expected. What will come as a pleasant surprise, though, is how briskly director Jindrich Polak moves everything along. His elliptical approach to characterisation and use of brief, fragmented scenes is reminiscent of early Roman Polanski. The film is shot in immaculate widescreen black-and-white, and Polak takes advantage of spacious, well-finished sets to experiment with wide-angled lenses, handheld cameras and zooms. You can't help but suspect that the resulting look had a big influence on Kubrick, not just on 2001 but on the War Room scenes in Dr Strangelove.

Ikarie XB-1 is let down slightly by an episodic storyline and an abrupt ending, but otherwise it's an absolute treat, offering all the kitsch pleasures of vintage SF while still bearing up remarkably well to modern scrutiny. Anyone brave enough to check it out will be very glad they did.

The Wind will carry us

1999 Director Abbas Kiarostami

With a strange mission, a group of people from the city come to a small village in Iran. They are awaiting the death of a 100+ year old woman, while pretending to be communication engineers.

A subtle, deceptively simple and richly rewarding work of genius from Kiarostami, this film opens on a long shot of a car negotiating a dusty mountain road, with driver and passengers arguing about where they are. Once the car reaches the Kurdistan village of Siaf Dareh, the ambiguities and mysteries proliferate and interweave. Are the men in the village treasure-hunters, as they tell a boy, the telecom engineers as the villagers assume to be, or something more sinister? Why is their apparent leader curious about the boy's dying grandma? And why, when Tehran calls on his mobile and he needs to move to higher ground, does he always drive to the cemetery, where an invisible man sings from a hole in the ground?

This engrossing and beautiful film succeeds on many levels. As witty, almost absurdist comedy, it offers lovely visual and verbal gags. And as an ethnographic/philosophical study of the relationships between ancient and modern, rural and urban, devotion and directionlessness, it's intriguing and illuminating.

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

2011 Direcor Nuri Bilge Ceylan

Murder mysteries rarely run as deep as this long, dark night of the soul from Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan. He is a master of brooding stories defined by their wry questioning of human nature and often focused on men in crisis. He has an unflinching eye for the worst in all of us and for the black comedy and absurd banalities of everyday life.

For his sixth film, Ceylan has chosen his bleakest canvas yet: a murder investigation that begins in the dark wilds of the great Anatolian outdoors and ends in the cold light of an autopsy room. In tone, it’s Ceylan’s most epic and talky film yet. But don’t be fooled – it’s also his most mysterious and meditative.We meet a group of a dozen policemen, soldiers and others as they drive about on the steppes one night in search of a body with the two men suspected of burying it. It’s an ensemble piece, and for much of its 158-minute running time, the film itself feels like a painful, fruitless inquiry as it seeks themes, subjects and characters to latch on to. It’s a police procedural, yes, but you imagine that’s just an excuse to bring together a varied group of men in the face of a terrible event. It’s very far indeed from a traditional whodunnit and much more like a compelling, masterly journey.

The Arrival of Wang

2010 Director Antinio Manetti

This is a remarkable low budget Science fiction film from Italy, that is not exactly known for this genre. Set almost entirely in one room this could easily be a play.

An interpreter based in Rome, whose speciality is Mandarin Chinese gets a call about a very highly paid but mysterious job for a government agency. The money is too good to turn down, so within 20 minutes she is in a car wearing a blindfold being whisked away to a secret location. She is to work with an investigator translating his questions during the interrogation of a suspect. Such is the secrecy of the operation that the interrogation is to be conducted in darkness so Gaia cannot see the subject Senior Wang. She does not know what Wang is accused of, she does not know what agency Curti works for, and as the interview progresses she suddenly finds herself way out of her depth. Ultimately she is moved to seize an opportunity to take matters into her own hands leading to an ending which has a sting in the tail.

The Manetti Brothers’ The Arrival of Wang presents a challenge for a reviewer. The film has a central conceit that it is probably better not to know too much about. Francesca Cuttica is very good in the film as she has to carry the bulk of it, and does so admirably. Yes, the lack of budget shows and there are tacky moments, but as an overall experience I was both fascinated and surprised by the outcome.

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders

1970 Director Jaromil Jires

Take Ingmar Berman's Seventh Veil mix it with Fellini's Amacord and have Andy Warhol direct it and you get this curious Czechoslovakian time piece. Although it contains much that is surreal it is not a surrealist film. It contains much that is gothic yet it is not a horror film. It contains much that is allegorical yet is not an allegory.

It charts the early passage of a girl from pre-pubescence to womanhood from her first period through a series of dreams and visions and her interpretations of others. Since Valerie is in shot the whole time, the film is definitely purely subjective and this would account for characters having multiple roles and incarnations. The motivation is overtly sexual in nature without becoming explicit, while her reactions are almost ambivalent.

Bearing in mind that this was produced in the early days of a communist regime it is a bold and intriguing film. There is much that irritates; some very stilted if not stiff acting, some very obvious continuity breaks, some very poor choreography. Yet there is a certain naive charm and fascination that comes some days after watching it. I think it is a small lost gem. There has certainly never been anything like it since.

Uzak

2002 Director Nuri Bilge Ceylan

Set in a wintry Istanbul this film deals with the complexities of urban isolation.

A photographer's ordered life is thrown into turmoil with the arrival of his country cousin seeking employment in the city. Haunted by the feeling that the gap between his life and his ideals is growing, he grows increasingly irritated by his provincial young relative's encroachment into his colourless world.

This is a cinematic delight. Slow pans and long holds allow the viewer to absorb the atmosphere. The progression of the two characters is done through the medium of expression, because, with the exception of one long outburst by the Photographer, dialogue is sparse. The opening sequence is of particular note. Tarkovsky's influence abounds and Ceylan even managed to squeeze an extract of Stalker into the the frame. Seeing Istanbul covered in snow is such an unusual setting and one, I suspect, came about more by luck than planning. A director of fine talent that reminds me of the work produced by Andrei Zvyagintsev.