Celluloid space-time

All the films I've seen recently have had a fraught or effortless relationship with space; space for events to occur in, space for characters to be in, space for events to flower in naturally, and not be cattle-prodded into motion by the demands of plot or 'action'.

I was thrilled to discover that the opening line to the beautiful Italian pop song "Rosetta e Cioccolado", from the soundtrack to 'Conseguenza dell'Amore' features a request for raspberry syrup.

It's a harsher, more gnarly film than I recalled from the cinema several years ago. Titta di Girolamo is more of a cipher, restlessly and fruitlessly twisting the strands that surround him. The scene in which he bluffs a Swiss bank into giving him £100,000 by simply sticking to his story that he had it when he came in, is gloriously offhand. Di Girolamo is sat in an upright chair, facing a nearly-drawn curtain, smoking languidly. A bank manager stares furiously at his clerks as the total they count up to falls a hundred grand short time and again. Titta smokes on, faking obliviousness.

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"The Double Life of Veronique" appeared to me to be one long dream sequence with the logic of a character study. The light, sudden unpredictable leaps of location, camera movement, focusing of peripheral characters in their rooms, are beautifully woozy and impenetrable, slightly threatening. It was the inverse or mirror image of the 'proper' movie, that might use dreamy techniques to tell the 'actual' story. Here the dream was the story, and the two Veroniques were broken up by the force of the fantasy she was living out.

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"Born Into Brothels" is a completely compelling documentary about the efforts of an American photographer who arrives in Bombay to make a photo essay about the women working in then sex industry there; once in situ, she realises that the children born to these women (and heart-rendingly, kept from school or college with the connivance or collusion of their mothers) are more urgent in terms of engaging subjects than her photo essay would have been. She gives them all disposable cameras, and teaches them to take pictures. The Bombay of the film is a seething, asymmetrical, Escheresque dimension. Several sequences take hand-held footage as

the camera rushes through alleys, rooms, cramped quarters, plunging the viewer into a space in which unimaginable sacrifices of motherhood and childhood are made without a blink.

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