Reviewed today: 3 Seasons In Hell, Amigo, The Ballad Of Mott The Hoople, Ruhr.
1.00pm: Amigo [official blog]
Seeing a John Sayles film at a festival is such of a no-brainer, I'm surprised I haven't done it more often. Whether it's City Of Hope in 1991 or Honeydripper in 2008 (or, for that matter, Men With Guns in Edinburgh in 1998), you know what you're going to get: a solid piece of storytelling with a bleeding liberal heart visibly attached to its sleeve, in some cases more visibly than others.
It's fair to say that Amigo is one of the more visible ones. It tells the lost story of the Philippine-American wars at the beginning of the 20th century. With the Philippines on brink of civil war, American soldiers have moved in to restore order and democracy. We follow Lieutenant Compton (Garret Dillahunt) and his troops as they forcibly take over a small village from its leader Rafael (Joel Torres). Rafael's brother is on the run, leading a band of rebels: as tensions rise between the Americans and the villagers, made even worse by the double-dealing presence of the Church in the form of Padre Hidalgo (Yul Vazquez), it seems like only a matter of time before the rebels return and bring everything to a head.
This being a John Sayles film, the resulting clustershag becomes an analogue of every subsequent time when American troops have marched into a country that wasn't theirs and made it worse. The presence of Chinese coolies in the American party points up the references to Vietnam, while more recent history is brought to mind by a waterboarding interrogation towards the end. The Americans are almost oblivious to the damage they're causing to the small community, damage that will eventually drive members of the same family against each other.
This would be overly didactic stuff if it wasn't for Sayles' sure touch with a story. He sets up the historical context quickly (a short pre-credits caption does the job), populates the film with his usual well-drawn characters and smart humour, and gets a fair amount of tension out of the familial and political conflicts. Amigo is entertainment first and political commentary second, which is what makes Sayles' work always so welcome. Plus, he gives great Q&A too: he takes over the post-film discussion from BFI host Geoff Andrew and rattles through a large number of talking points in a splendidly fat-free ten minutes.
4.00pm: Ruhr [trailer]
The Belated Birthday Girl is assuming that as James Benning's previous film was RR in 2008, and his new film is called Ruhr, he's now only capable of making movies that sound like engines revving up. She's decided to give this one a miss today. However, long term Benning fan Suzanne Vega Fanclub is here, making his first appearance at this year's LFF. Former Film Unlimited regular Malcotraz is also here: he comes over to tell me how much he's enjoying the diaries, and charmingly refers to me as Uncle Spank Who Can Recall His Past LFFs. If he was looking to get himself quoted, he's succeeded.
You know how Benning works by now: long takes, static camera, training an unblinking eye on the natural or urban landscape and forcing you to think long and hard about what you're seeing and hearing. His new film, according to misinformation on the internet, is set in the area of Germany his parents came from - this isn't actually true, but he admits that there are parallels between the Ruhr district and the industrial part of Milwaukee he came from. In a series of long takes, he focusses on different areas of the region, mainly to do with the heavy industry that takes place there.
In his earlier films, the length of those takes was driven by outside factors - a pre-determined shot length, or the maximum capacity of a roll of film, or the time it took a train to cross the frame. Here, though, he's shooting in digital for the first time, so the individual shots are entirely of his own choosing. Hence the one big SPOILER that every review of Ruhr seems duty bound to tell you: it ends with a static shot of a coke plant's smoking chimney that lasts for a whole hour. It's safe to say that this won't be a film for everyone: if I had to put money on which single shot in all of this year's LFF films would cause the largest number of walkouts, I'd feel pretty confident in choosing that one.
For people who've seen Benning's work before, though, this is all pretty standard stuff. In both the final shot and the half dozen shorter ones that make up the film's first hour, there's always a sense of internal structure: some sort of recurring event that happens every few minutes and gives the scene a musical rhythm. It could be the repetition of rods being moved around in a steel works: or it could be the forest directly underneath the flight path into Dusseldorf Airport, where the impact of man on nature is depicted in a subtly beautiful way. Even when Benning composes a shot featuring people (during prayers at a mosque), he's more interested in the movement of them as a group, as they stand and kneel together every few minutes.
What I'm missing from Ruhr, which I've got from Benning's other films, is any real emotional response: the reaction to the landscapes that I got from Sogobi, or the psychedelic freakout that I had after looking at clouds for two hours in Ten Skies. You'd think that the billowing steam from the coke plant chimney in Ruhr's final scene would have a similar effect to the latter, but no: you end up thinking more about the act of watching it on screen than anything else. At one point (MASSIVE SPOILER FOLLOWS), after a period of around twenty minutes when the chimney had stayed completely smokeless, I caught myself thinking something like this: "if Benning cuts away from this before smoke comes out again, I'll have wasted the last twenty minutes of my life." When it suddenly belched a huge gout of orange steam after that, I nearly started whooping. Still, if that counts as a valid reaction to the film, I guess that means it worked.
9.00pm: The Ballad Of Mott The Hoople [official Myspace]
It's become a fine tradition over the last few LFFs, and I suspect it's all the work of Michael 'Low Fat Morrissey' Hayden: the Saturday Night Documentary-If-You-Will-Rockumentary Slot. He's programmed an excellent selection of music films over the years, and it's always fascinating to see how the makeup of a typical film buff audience for an LFF screening gets warped by the music fans for each of them. Rather like last year's Dr Feelgood film Oil City Confidential, the crowd for this one is primarily Rock Geezers, the sort of late-middle-aged guys Nick Hornby was talking about when he realised that one gig he was at was almost entirely populated by men who looked like him. Those geezers, delightfully, include several members of Mott The Hoople themselves. The arrival of Ian Hunter in his seat gets a round of applause from the audience, closely followed by yells of "what about me, then?" from a mock-aggrieved Ariel Bender.
The Ballad Of Mott The Hoople comes from Chris Hall and Mike Kerry, makers of the 2006 documentary Love Story: and like that one, it uses new interview footage and an almost continuous bed of background music to tell the story of one of their favourite bands. To the casual singles buyer like me, at the time it seemed like Mott emerged fully formed in 1972 with All The Young Dudes: but the real fans know that there was a lot of history behind that apparent overnight success. They also know that one of the main driving forces behind the band initially was Guy Stevens of Island Records, who took an existing Hereford beat combo, dumped their lead singer, hired the more charismatic Ian Hunter as frontman, and attempted to groom them for stardom. Four aimless albums followed, their low sales barely reflecting their huge success as a touring group. With Stevens becoming more and more erratic thanks to drug use, the band needed a boot up the jacksie to stop them completely falling apart: and thanks to the loan of a song from Bowie, they got it.
Ballad is a very entertaining watch: the band members are all wildly forthcoming with their anecdotes (with the interesting exception of Overend Watts, who presumably didn't want to get involved), and they tell them well. It can't quite be considered one of the great rock biopics, though, and I'm ashamed to say that's probably because of the lack of personal tragedy the band has suffered. The Stevens story quietly fades out with their departure from Island, and from then on it's all tales of wild nights on the road and minor personality clashes with new members. For all the occasional bouts of soul-searching, they never really suffer that much. Let's not forget, these are the people who recorded a band breakup song - possibly the greatest band breakup song - without apparently realising they were breaking up at the time.
Still, maybe for once we should celebrate a band who made it all work out for them in the end. Particularly one with a back catalogue as glorious at Mott's. The big finish comes with their 2009 reunion gigs in London, a nice climax to a film that has plenty of lovely old live footage to spare (apparently nearly all the work of a Super-8 fanatic in Philadelphia). Ian Hunter and Mick Ralphs join in with a chatty post-screening Q&A, and suggest there may be even more stories to be told if it wasn't for those pesky lawyers. Maybe you'll just have to hope they come along when you see the film, too.
Notes From Spank's Pals
3 Seasons In Hell [official site]
The Belated Birthday Girl - Set in post-war Prague, 3 Seasons in Hell chronicles the start of the Communist era through the lives of Ivan and Jana, a pair of young artists. Ivan is young and frankly somewhat brattish: quitting school and moving out from the comfortable home he shares with his father to be a poet and live in workers' lodgings, all self-centred teenage rebellion, spouting Marxism, existentialism and surrealism. Through an artist friend, he meets the older Jana, financially independent, full of talk of sexual liberty, and is soon completly absorbed in her. Their life seems full of intellectual and artistic gatherings and parties, completely exemplifying the word "Bohemian". But then the Czech Coup in 1948 changes everything.
For me, the star of 3 Seasons in Hell is Prague itself: still geographically and architecturally unchanged since that time, the filmmakers were able to evoke the era wonderfully, with beautiful photography, somehow hiding all modern traces. The main limitation of the film to me was that the central characters were not people I cared deeply about. Various of the peripheral characters were far more interesting and sympathetic. But that aside, this was a visually satisfying film about an interesting time and city.
Rhur: was tempted to go and see this film and am now utterly glad I did not. Glad you had to suffer its utter tediousness and not me. Perhaps to do it justice you could write a 13 page review. There you go.
Posted by: Old Lag | October 18, 2010 at 01:51 AM