Review: The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq

A review for The Film Gods

The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq (dir. Guillaume Nicloux)                 

               

In 2011, France’s most controversial literary export since the Marquis de Sade went missing during a promotional tour of his latest book, The Map and the Territory. What ensued was a media frenzy that speculated widely on Houellebecq’s whereabouts; a baton that writer and director Guillaume Nicloux diligently picks up in his latest film.

For Nicloux’s money, Houellebecq’s disappearance three years ago was not on account of a liaison with al-Qaida, but instead the result of a brief, though enforced, stay at the country home of Luc and his sensitive skinhead brothers. The film begins with the diurnal experiences of the writer as he makes plans to redecorate his kitchen and traverses the streets of Paris - cigarettes and well-documented intolerance close at hand. In these moments of self-parody, Houellebecq comes across as remarkably engaging, with the writer proving that he is very aware, and more than willing to make light of, the unflattering picture that many people have of him.

Houellebecq is presented as calm if not a little complacent in his lifestyle, a picture which does not change when Luc and his brothers arrive with a perforated metal box to take him away. Rather than concerning itself with heightened emotion or melodrama, Nicloux’s film takes a decidedly down-played look at abduction, with the writer, chain-smoking and chained to a bed, remaining his idiosyncratic self throughout. Each member of the family with which Houellebecq is lodging comes to admire him for his deadpan manner and literary prowess. Some seek the author’s advice where others look to flaunt their abilities in wrestling, bodybuilding or vehicular maintenance. All the while, the atmosphere remains exceptionally cordial as wine continues to flow and the writer, after turning down the option to browse a selection of pornographic magazines, is granted a prostitute instead. In this exceptional kidnapping, each of the abducted’s whims are pandered to and, in fact, the writer’s only moment of frustration comes at Luc’s repeated refusal to return his cigarette lighter to him.

With the notion of an actor playing himself not being limited to the French author, Nicloux crafts a naturalistic, dry comedy that ultimately charms the viewer just as Houellebecq charms his captors. The cast is comprised of amateurs that play-off Houellebecq’s central performance, which is captivating from the start, to great effect. Provocative and offensive, The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq is not one of the most conventionally comedic films that will be released this year, but it is all the better, and more suitable to its subject, for it.

Review: Boyhood

Boyhood (dir. Richard Linklater)

Richard Linklater has described time as “the building block of cinema” – as indeed it is of all our lives. In his latest and most ambitious work Boyhood, the Austin-based auteur sets his camera to observe that idea, following his comprised cast of Ellar Coltrane, Ethan Hawke, Patricia Arquette and Lorelei Linklater over twelve years; and what a difference twelve years makes.

From the offset, Coltrane’s Mason Jr. establishes himself as a screen presence that claims introspection as a means of not only drawing into himself, but drawing audiences to him also. “You’re still staring out the window all day”, berates one of his teachers as, despite possessing an impressive amount of talent and intellect, Mason seems to have no desire to employ his gifts at the will of others. On the decision to cast Coltrane, Linklater explains that “Other kids were straighter…There were kids who would have grown up to be athletes, student council presidents, made their parents proud. Ellar was the kind who was going to be his own guy, he had not come out of a cookie cutter.” As the narrative of life unfolds around Mason, there are multiple attempts by overbearing (mostly drunken) stepfathers to force his voracious energy into a preordained structure, with one heart-wrenching scene involving the shaving of Mason’s long hair whilst being chastised for “looking like a girl.” When his biological father (Hawke) does turn up sporadically throughout the film, it is to fulfil the role of the ‘fun dad’, an avenue of escapism for Mason and his sister from the troubles of home life. With that said, Linklater’s characters are nuanced and intriguing enough to defy the stereotyped mothers, fathers, and stepfathers of conventional Hollywood. Hawke’s Mason Sr. provides an escape because he too is seeking a way out of dealing with his problems; namely that he is growing older whilst unable to curb his passion for the moment by forming any practical plans for the future. Whilst Mason’s pragmatic mother seeks a way out of her cruel circumstances through studying, his father looks to cling to his (short lived) carefree youth, embodied in the symbol of his classic American muscle car. When Mason reacts badly to his father’s selling of the car later in the movie, he can rest assured that he has inherited what the car comes to stand for: his father’s insatiable appetite for the present moment and for a good time.

As intimated, for a film about the force of time on our lives, the present moment is heralded as that which must be fought for (or thought of) at all cost. As Larkin realised: ‘though our element is time, / We’re not suited to the long perspectives’. Patricia Arquette’s breakdown as Mason readies himself for college upon seeing his first photograph serves as testament to this. Time is a cruel force that takes precious moments away from us until they’re ultimately forced to the role of fading memories. What Linklater’s film teaches us is that they should be captured nonetheless, pounced on despite their tendency to get away from us, just as life can. One revelation, brought on by the helpful hand of psilocybin, toward the end of the film strikes up issue with the whole carpe diem attitude: “it’s the other way around”, suggests Mason’s newly-found friend, “the moment seizes us.” Quite right, too, as in a darkened theatre this film certainly seized me, the three-hour running time expiring far too quickly. Luckily, these memories, thanks to Linklater’s perfectly placed camera, can be relived again and again (alas, they will be…again and again.)

Review: Calvary

Calvary (dir. John Michael McDonagh)

Anyone familiar with John McDonagh’s initial outing, The Guard, will be aware of the acerbic wit and caustic dialogue that so gloriously flourishes under the pen of both he and his brother, Martin McDonagh (In Bruges, Seven Psychopaths). Whilst that bitter tone isn’t missing from Calvary, a certain amount of the comic undercutting is, a deliberate composition that is encapsulated in the film’s opening line: “I first tasted semen when I was seven years old…”

The film opens with Brendan Gleeson’s priest sat in a confession box, the silence drags out, the camera unrelenting in its study of Gleeson’s face before this line shatters the silence. What follows is a sentence. Not a command of one ‘Our Father’ and several ‘Hail Mary’s’ from the priest but, rather, the ominous threat of death from a pained, and abused member of the rural Irish community. The stage is then set for County Sligo’s cast of jaded parishioners: Dylan Moran plays the town squire undergoing an existential crisis as a result of his illicit practices as a banker, Chris O’Dowd enters as the cuckolded butcher whose wife, it is revealed by her Ghana-born lover, has many boyfriends in a town that, apparently, is able to collect in one small building.

If one wishes, the opening gambit of the film allows for a whodunit of sorts to play out amidst this curtain call of melancholia. For Freud, the distinction between mourning and melancholia is such that ‘[i]n mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself'. McDonagh’s lens brilliantly captures the landscape of the Irish coast, asserting that the troubles here are within rather than without. Trauma is aplenty amidst this community, not least in the central figure of Gleeson’s priest as the arrival of his daughter (Kelly Reilly) proves. What is absurd about the trauma is the way in which it is dealt with. Whereas Father Lavelle’s daughter follows the Freudian tradition by turning guilt-ridden anger onto the self, making the vital error of cutting across and not down, the rest of this motley-crew seem determined to make the good priest suffer for their various pains. Whether it is through humiliation as Dylan Moran’s drunken banker pisses over a Holbein masterpiece, violence as he meets the force of a baseball bat, or the goading of the rest of the community, Gleeson acts as a Christ-like figure that bears witness to the sins of a humanity that may be beyond salvation.

Ultimately, the priest himself is unable to resist inflicting his own pains onto others, snapping at a fellow clergyman that he should be working in an insurance firm rather than the Church; an indictment that leads this “man-of-faith” to turn to Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. McDonagh makes it clear, Gleeson’s character is from the same world as the community he is part of, his reference points (from Robert Herrick to “felching”) are the same, he is as worldly a man as any we have seen in McDonagh’s films. What is different is his relentless desire to rid his parish of cynicism, marking, perhaps, a change in scope for this director. Calvary is altogether a more serious work, but one in which the McDonagh’s talent for cultivated wit can still be enjoyed. Making his entrance into acting late, just as his priest enters into the Church in his middle-years, Gleeson turns out his best performance yet, an assured effort that carries McDonagh’s vision meticulously.  

Book Review: The Cinema of Richard Linklater: walk, don't run

The Cinema of Richard Linklater: walk, don’t run. By Rob Stone. West Sussex: Columbia University Press, 2013. pp. 224 + vii.

Existing as part of the Wallflower Press’s Directors’ Cuts series, one that boasts titles on auteurs ranging from Takeshi Kitano to Terry Gilliam, Rob Stone’s nuanced study of Richard Linklater takes one remarkable step in making amends for the relatively little amount of work to be found on one of the most innovative of contemporary filmmakers. One of the objectives of this series of monographs is to illuminate the creative dynamics of World Cinema, a commitment to art that is embodied by Linklater himself, who made the decision to place himself in a world ‘that was just about your artistic desires’.[1]

This world, as addressed in Stone’s opening chapter ‘Locating Linklater’, is that of the Texas University campus and its surrounding areas. Somewhat convincingly, Stone outlines the importance of such a liberal, creative and bohemian landscape to the development of ‘a prime contradiction: the committed slacker, which remains the dominant theme in Linklater’s cinema.’[2] For Linklater and his band of slackers, then, Austin is transformed into a utopia of creative activity politicised in its opposition to the cut-throat world of Reaganomics being espoused by America at large. As the title-card in Slacker reads: ‘withdrawal in disgust is not the same as apathy’[3], a sentiment that Stone dexterously links to Robert Louis Stevenson’s An Apology for Idlers, a group ‘who refuse to enter in the great handicap race for sixpenny pieces’ and are ‘at once an insult and a disenchantment for those who do.’[4]

From locating Linklater geographically, Stone goes on to display the problems in placing the director amongst the taxonomies of film. Neither belonging to the studio-systems, nor being wholly independent, Linklater is shown to occupy an area of grey that has seen him produce blockbuster films such as School of Rock, adapt plays (SubUrbia, Tape), shoot digitally (Tape) and explore post-production rotoscoping as a means of enhancing the oneiric qualities of his contemplative cinema (A Scanner Darkly, Waking Life). The implications that Stone draws from this cast Linklater as a composite Modernist figure who employs ‘the techniques of associative thought favoured by the Surrealists, the dérive of the Situationist International and the experiments with film language of Godard.’[5]

The inclusions here of Guy Debord’s theory of the dérive, Gilles Deleuze’s notion of the ‘time-image’ and Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on the carnival are masterfully appropriated with the cinema of Linklater, the rewards being of valuable insight to the diligent reader. Rather neatly, Stone moves from an investigation of the spatial aspects of this cinema to the temporal, building an argument all the while that confirms Linklater, and his work, to embody the ethos of revolutionary withdrawal; of committed slacking.

 Ultimately, this book is invaluable to anyone with an interest in understanding the works of one of cinema’s most intelligent directors. It comes with just the one caveat: a work as well-researched and packed with ideas as this requires a pace not dissimilar to Linklater’s films; so, like the subtitle of this book, when approaching Stone’s writing: walk, don’t run.

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[1] Rob Stone, The Cinema of Richard Linklater: walk, don’t run (Columbia University Press, 2013) p. 16.

[2] Ibid., p. 1.

[3] Slacker, dir. by Richard Linklater (Detour Film Production, 1991)

[4] Robert Louis Stevenson cited in The Cinema of Richard Linklater: walk, don’t run (Columbia University Press, 2013) p. 108.

[5] Ibid., p. 99.

Book Review: Slacker (the Screenplay)

Slacker (Screenplay). By Richard Linklater. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. pp. 154 + vi.

The published screenplay of Richard Linklater’s seminal Slacker, a film that gave a sense of identity to a generation of anti-establishment, anti-mainstream twenty-somethings growing up in the 1990s, is not your average screenplay. In the opening pages Linklater is sure to acknowledge how ‘[l]ike Slacker the film, this book would not exist without the help of enthusiastic and talented collaborators.’[1] Indeed, that is what makes this book so unique: Linklater taking his synergetic filmmaking style and adopting it to a project that combines memoirs, Q & As, articles, profiles and photographs to form a collage of the creative process involved in the making of Slacker.

Douglas Coupland providing the foreword for this composite collection of materials is as suitable as it is entertaining. Credited with paving his own form of marginal identity apart from the late capitalist model of an ‘Eisenhower-based reality’[2], Coupland’s Generation X, released the same year as Linklater’s Slacker, shared a similar vision of a creative life free from the burden of work; a world of ‘dreamers out on the edge…characters out of key, in and out of love, drifting, slightly twisted, still willing to listen…’[3]

What is most remarkable about this book is just how personal it feels. Slacker itself being a labour of love for Linklater and his Austin-based collaborators, the inclusion of diary entries from the director’s notebook scattered sequentially throughout the screenplay allow one to ascertain a fuller, more intimate understanding of the process involved in getting a film that, one excerpt reveals, has ‘been in [his] head for over five years’[4] from the page to the screen. Moreover, nothing is left unturned in this scrupulous study of this creative process. Whether it be directorial notes to actors, a description of the casting method, notes from the crew or reports of early responses to the film – one highlight being the observation that “[t]hey don’t DO anything!”[5] as overheard by Linklater – no stone is left unturned; a thoroughness that avoids being onerous and is instead pleasantly revealing.

In the centre of this plethora of sources is the screenplay itself, one that paved the way for a new type of contemplative filmmaking that captures the philosophical musings and frustrations of the disenfranchised youth of America. Profiles of the cast – with information including preferred Italian city, last book read and formative experience – highlight what it was they brought to a stage that Linklater created for their voices to be heard on. What becomes apparent is that these individuals are expressing the same sentiment that Linklater describes in his introduction to the book: a transformation ‘from thinking (as I had been told over and over again) that my generation had nothing to say to thinking that it not only had everything to say but was saying it in a completely new way.’[6] It is thanks to this film, and the works of writers such as Douglas Coupland, that such a large, creative and marginal group of individuals were given a platform at all above the ubiquitous currents of the mainstream.

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[1] Richard Linklater, Slacker (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992) p. iv.

[2] Douglas Coupland cited in Slacker (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992) p. 2.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Richard Linklater, Slacker (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992) p. 3.

[5] Ibid., p. 12.

[6] Ibid., p. 4.

John Smith with special guests Dennis Ellsworth & Jamie Brewer

A review for Skiddle

Shuffling into an intimate room ready to hold over 100 eager folk fans at its capacity, it was clear that an evening of inspiring music was ready to be lapped up by all. With the arrival of Jamie Brewer onto the festively-lit stage, that inclination was confirmed. Handling his Takamine guitar with great dexterity, Jamie started the night off with a blend of acoustic tracks spanning across his own material to cover versions of Marvin Gaye’s ‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine’ and an atmospheric rendition of a piece from the Final Fantasy VII soundtrack. Confessing, in a somewhat self-effacing manner, that his own material tended to appeal more directly to “guitar nerds”, it could certainly be said that it was on his own compositions that Jamie was able to show off his sheer technical ability which he has devoted a great amount of time to perfecting. Using his instrument for both percussion and string purposes, Jamie delivered a master-class in this innovative and compelling method of guitar playing. It was a set that was as mesmerising as it was impressive. One could run out of adjectives.

Described affectionately by John Smith as a “beautiful brute”, Dennis Ellsworth next brought his slice of Americana, though Canada is his home country, to Preston’s Continental. Adding a touch of sincerity to the evening, the prolific songwriter played tracks largely from his latest release in a wealthy back-catalogue, Hazy Sunshine; a selection of songs which suited the December weather outside as they touched on love and loss as well as drunken ramblings around Central Park after a lengthy pilgrimage from the Canadian capital (we’ve all been there, right?).  The change in mood was tactile as Ellsworth played through his set with assured confidence, allowing his distinctive voice to carry the power of his material to an attentive audience. The inclusion in his set of a track that both he and Smith wrote together whilst our headliner was visiting Ellsworth in Canada served as the perfect set up for the main event.

So it was time, 9:30pm arrived and John Smith climbed to the stage joined by revered double bassist Jon Thorne, who had played a homecoming gig in Manchester with Smith only the night before. Despite this being the Great Lakes Tour, Smith didn’t want to confine himself to tracks wholly from his new album – one which marks a slight change in direction from his more bluesy, and “dense” (in his own words) previous offerings. Instead, he embarked on a medley of songs that showcased his unprecedented talent for crafting as well as executing music of great beauty and truth. Hearing the Devonshire-cum-Liverpudlian man’s nimble guitar picking layered over Thorne’s expressive bass playing left the audience enraptured; a sentiment which was also picked up on the other side of the stage with Smith being taken aback by the intensity of an audience he had expected to be much smaller. Indeed after the first song, Smith kindly requested that the entire monitor be turned up: the size of the crowd soaking up the resonances that he had set up previously.

Shifting momentarily from his own material, the crowd of folkies were treated to a lively cover of Queen of the Stoneage’s ‘No One Knows’ before returning back to his latest album with an exquisite rendition of his wonderful single ‘Salty and Sweet’, a track which Smith originally wrote for Lisa Hannigan before deciding rather sagaciously to keep for himself. Not wishing to cut all ties with the song, Hannigan lends her beautifully delicate vocals to the recorded version which appears on the album; a collaboration which Smith seeks to commemorate in his live shows with a vibrato of his voice that shows off the full extent of his impressive vocal range. Furthermore, it must be said what an astounding voice this songwriter has. Drawing numerous comparisons to the recognisable vocals of John Martyn, Smith’s voice is one which seems to know no bounds as an encore consisting of his seminal ‘Winter’, a track which influenced the lap-tap guitar playing of Jamie’s opening set, and a collaboration with Dennis Ellsworth on a cover of Elvis Presley’s unreleased ‘Dark Moon’ serves testament to. Keeping the audience engaged throughout the gaps in between his songs in which Smith plays around with a great number of tunings, the singer-songwriter wins over the room. Indeed it is in one of these moments towards the end of the set that he gets his biggest applause of the evening, proclaiming that it is on nights like this that he has trouble believing the rumours circulating that the music scene is dead. He finishes this speech with an expression of touching gratitude to the people that have come to see him play: “Thank you for keeping live music, well, alive!” No John, thank you. 

Review: Only God Forgives

A review for WAXXX Magazine

Vengeance permeates Nicolas Winding Refn’s latest film since 2011’s cool, Cannes-appreciated Drive. Indeed, its solitary figure of justice, Lieutenant Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm), cuts through the movie just as his executioners-sword cuts through the sinners that fall into his path; evoking the mercilessness of an Old Testament God amidst this fable of violence and confused sexuality set in the near-nocturnal world of the Thai capital. Yet not all is as driven as Refn’s previous outing with Ryan Gosling. In fact, with the exception of Chang’s ruthless progression through the criminal underworld of American expatriates and Bangkok gangsters, all is impressively still.

It is in this stillness of the dojos, brothels and Thai streets that cinematographer Larry Smith (The Guard, Bronson) creates a sensory overload of vibrant neon and textured walls, forcing us to recognise the beauty in brutality as Julian (Gosling), his mother Crystal (Kristen Scott Thomas) and Chang proceed, however slowly, along their violent paths. It’s a visual aesthetic that led critic James King to the observation that, for Refn, ‘it’s not film noir, it’s film rouge.’ Importantly, the transgression from black to red identifies the difference in the nature of the crimes between the two. If noir is concerned with cynical gangsters running rackets and fending off snooping cops, rouge is concerned with the crime of passion: murders committed in the name of revenge or, in Chang’s case, from a warped sense of justice. The problem, for Crystal, the icy matriarch of the film that takes the femme-fatale to a whole new level, is that her one remaining son, after her first-born is murdered in the opening scenes thus setting the revenge tragedy in motion, is less willing to fall under her dominant control as she would like. Sure, Julian’s there to light her cigarettes and sits obediently by as she identifies his supposed jealousy towards his brother as being rooted in penis envy; after all, ‘it was enourmous. How could he compete with that?’ But, he is crucially reluctant to commit himself to the acts of vengeance as she would like. Their relationship, culminating in a scene in which Julian perversely attempts to return to his mother’s womb in a bid to severe his connection from her forever, is a psychoanalyst’s wet dream, and an intrigue to see played out on the screen.

In the closing credits, Refn dedicates the film to Alejandro Jodorowsky, the kingpin of Transgressive cinema whose mark can be felt so pervasively on Only God Forgives, whilst offering special thanks to Gasper Noé: the French filmmaker also invested in making neon-lit transgressions of his own (Irreversible, Enter the Void). Cliff Martinez, whose soundtrack for Drive was perhaps equally as popular as the film itself, provides a backing track to the drama that heightens tension and chimes with the evangelical justice which is centred in Chang, as the sounds of an organ builds eerily on top of a whirling synth. At Cannes Film Festival Only God Forgives wasn’t welcomed with the open arms that Drive was, but then this is a film that is going to split audiences with its sheer perversity. With this in mind, can you see the beauty in brutality? Those who do not may find this a gruelling watch, with a substantial amount of time being afforded to the shifting of eyes or the image of Gosling in thought; after all, his lines come few and far between. However, for those that do, Refn and his DP have created a mystical Bangkok that is as thrilling to watch as the action itself.