Music for Films

I've had a mixed time of it with German films recently.

Yesterday I finally got around to seeing 'Run Lola Run', which seemed to have been incorporated into recent European film history as a sharp existential crime thriller.

What I saw looked more like a dance music video, with a plot as restless, repetitive, autistic and twitchy as a mid-90's commercial techno track. Characters are too busy keeping pace with the 110 beats per minute, and the frenetically paced circular in-jokes and moralising flash-forwards to come alive. Lola herself looks fabulous in a vest and industro-red fright-hair, though resorts to shrieking her head off at several points at which some decent dialogue or character acting would move the film forward.

All this reminded me of the tone and effect of The Edukators, which pressed the button marked "Indie-Grunge Emoting Soundtrack" far too frequently to establish anything close to a living character on the screen; and likewise tried to cash far too many cheques on the account of Smouldering Youthful Libido to establish motivation and history believably. It's theoretically-interesting theme of lost idealism was completely vapourised by a relentless focus on the political thrashings and jealousies of three self-regarding twenty-somethings who have not lost enough of anything to be worth the attention the film gives them.

Even more tragic was the case of "Goodbye Lenin", which spent a heart-rendingly huge amount of effort and attention to detail in recreating the design and appearance of immediately pre- and post- Berlin Wall falling Germany, and then only remembered where the emotional centre of this would be for one brief shot (the mother accidentally leaving the apartment block and discovering the 'new' world). Before and after this, a slapstick freneticism and fast-cut 1-second attention span style predominated.

The German movies I've seen recently that really grabbed me were about older, more compromised people: Downfall, and The Lives Of Others. But that's another story.

Bonne Vacances

This is a seaside-destination holiday film that has a beautifully judged scent of torpor, emptiness, drift, dog-day, and inconsequentiality.

A believable teenage girl (why do French actresses effortlessly do Teenage, while their Brit equivalents are struggling to be any more convincing than Byker Grove) visits a tatty seaside town with her paralysingly beach-ready and hopelessly self-regarding cousin, on the rebound from a brief failed marriage. Men notice them. There is flirting and posturing from the adults, already far too attached to their dramas.

The most wonderful element to this is the disregarded, unhip, virtually deserted town all the heaving sexual gamesmanship (and gameswomanship) plays itself out against. There's literally no audience worth the mention for the adults' arch, bored manipulation of eachother. Beautifully judged stuff.

Family Snapshot

"Tokyo Story" is a static and glacially paced film, with the camera consistently below the eyeline of a person sat on a mat on the floor. Slightly dowdy, dusty interiors, shot from the disregarded far sides of rooms, lit by diffused sunlight and un-shaded bulbs predominate.

I've never seem Kabuki theatre before, but assume that the quietly effective use of the almost unchanging expressions on the mother and father's faces, is what gives the power to their responses to the bumptiously, offhandedly graceless behaviour of their children, whom they've travelled a long distance to Tokyo to see.

There's genuine heartbreak in the moments when the preoccupation of in-laws and high-minded social probity mean that the elderly parents are essentially homeless for the night, and simply work out for themselves where they might best be housed.

It's a very simple moral universe, but a wonderfully restrainedly drawn one.

Kitchenette

It's a brilliantly titled play, as even the characters don't have surnames; they're identified only as 'Peter, grilled fish', 'Hans, fry', 'Gaston, grill'. The set is a cluttered dance-floor of a space, with some wonderful choreographed moments of stirring, whisking, spooning, and triumphant pouring and a celebratorily deranged act-ending danse-culinaire.

The pan-European staff lapse into French and German, East-End slang regularly, giving the dialogue a smorgasbord texture, and Tom Brooke as Peter, the German fish cook is noisily the best of the cast: aloof, arch, stagey and very fragile.

River's Edge

Wonderful stuff from Lesley Hill and Helen Paris, taking a group of Stratford-Upon-Avon locals' stories of their relationship with their locality, and weaving a hallucinatory Tourist River Trip around them.

On board the boat, our tour guide quickly began to unravel in terms of her relationship to our locality, seeming to see Venice and the Nile where the Avon Rowing Club and a slightly foxed riverside restaurant stood. People on the riverbank began to further tear open the fabric of the screen between the audience, the stories and the 'real world' we had quite definitely left behind.

Curious' productions always seem very graceful in achieving these quite shocking shifts away from the comforts of the quotidian world, and the comforts of the audience seat; we are spirited to a disturbing Elsewhere but always in very good humour and fine style.

The production achieved the unlikely feat of transforming a sleepy stretch of the Avon into a re-enactment of Odysseus' life-and-death sail between Scylla and Charybdis, and of the always-arresting moment when characters appear of whose 'reality' we are genuinely unsure.

Excellent cocktail-pouring technique too, which we don't see nearly often enough, especially on a river boat that's about to run aground.

Repetitive Acts

Definitely not to be filed under "shows" or "entertainment". Sean H and I hit the arches under the Elephant and Castle mainline station last week for Craig Clouse (of Shit'n'Shine) to tweak, prod and interfere with a table full of tone generators and FX boxes to very similar effect achieved by S'n'S. Ugly wrenched bricks of rhythm, tortured every few bars into a new(ish) posture, and a continuous reel of 70s/80s hardcore penetration porno flickering on a white sheet where I guessed the bands usually play. It wasn't any old random porno either; each sequence had a glassy inevitability to it that only the most industrially mass-produced stuff would have, and Clouse had selected only close-up penetration of the most mind-bombed Workmanlike facial expressions. There were a very small handful of woman in the audience, and strangely the atmosphere was slightly less nasty as a result.

Die Munch Maschine (I'm not certain whether that 's' is really supposed to be there. I'm likely superimposing it to make my memories of the music appear more attuned to the group's sense of itself) did well to even find cultural space for themselves after Clouse, but a bracing sequence of nicely-fluctuating distorted Hammond motorik attacks, propelled by some outrageously far-flung drumming did the trick.

Tourist Trap

Even harder, this one. Even though it's technically a documentary, it looks like a 90 minute MTV gangster rap video- endless posturing, threats, platitudes, empty promises set against a relentlessly bleak stage of the grinding poverty of a shanty town. There's no sense of hope or community at all here, which makes for a deadening, empty movie.

The interjections of political and news footage is oddly natural; the stagey, cliches of network news reporting from a comfily distant warzone, the evasive pronouncements of the corrupted politician sit completely naturally with the ethically bankrupted aid worker and slurred moralising of the heroes.

By the end of the film, it's possible to see the threads of manipulation and advantage-taking that hold each take together.