Wednesday 22 April 2009

A day at the races



Having grown up in England, racing is a pastime that I associate with the Derby, the Grand National and ladies in funny hats. Basically an experience for the elite and the addicted.

Going to the races in Germany is, in comparison, a pleasantly democratic experience, involving everything that you would expect from a Volksfest, including sausages, beer, fried fish and red-faced gentlemen mopping brows warmed by indulgence in the aforementioned foodstuffs.



As well as offering relaxing atmosphere, our local racecourse in Cologne also provides a gently-paced racing schedule which allows racegoers to flow from track to paddock and back to the track like a gentle human tide.

But I think I'm beginning to overreach myself on the metaphors. Whatever - I'll be there again a few more times before the season is out.

Monday 13 April 2009

A dog's Dina


I am Dina (Norway, 2002)

Faced with the prospect of a Norwegian film in English with a plethora of international actors, I should have seen the warning signs. For one, people speaking accented English to convey the sense of a foreign language has always annoyed me ("Zose are ze fekts, mein fuhrer!").

This film isn't perhaps quite that awful, but the plot appears to have been written by the committee for Silly Twists together with the Fjord Tourist Board.

Equally, the style of the film is all over the place: a smörgåsbord of genre-dipping ranging from horror and ghost-tale to melodrama, costume drama, sub-Ibsenesque family saga, Bergman-lite and god knows what else.

Together these result in an utterly confusing accretion of episodes that usually end in death, or haunting, or both, but no clear directorial stance on how see either.

What I'm missing is any kind of moral, aesthetic or conceptual centre. We must remember that the woman upon whom the film centres is responsible for several deaths, at least one of the premeditated. But is she mad? Is she hallucinating? Is she simply dreaming?

Which brings us to the central character. Dina is played by the lovely Maria Bonnevie, who gives everything to make the role (strong, headstrong, creative and unconventional woman in a small, backward community) work. Personally I'm all in favour of strong female roles but the one that this film serves up is a completely anachronistic, projecting modern modes of behaviour onto a time where a woman would not have been able to do what Dina does without getting shut up in a nunnery or a madhouse at the very least.

Shouldn't a film that shows a woman overcome adversity and male prejudice at least show some pretty effective adversity and male prejudice? For most of this film Dina rides roughshod over men and women alike (or unshod, depending upon the stable boy in question). It's as if her initial trauma is so overwhelming that the world simply makes way for her for the rest of her life. Fat chance.

Therefore I'd have to recommend any discerning viewer to give this portentous, confused example of the international co-production a miss.

Saturday 4 April 2009

DID THE CAPS LOCK KEY GET STUCK WHILE WRITINg SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE?


I went into Slumdog Millionaire with high expectations based on friends' ratings, but came out feeling slightly knocked about and empty, as if I too had suffered at the hands of the Mumbai constabulary.

I'd like to emphasise though that my problem with the film was not its fable-like narrative - the sketchy, inconsistent and unexplained nature of events and the refusal to explain was rather a strength for me. Rather, it was the overall style and the compulsion to take the symmetries of plot and circumstance (which are a standard part of almost any narrative) and supercharge these to the extent that they become big signs screaming LOOK AT ME! I'M AN ECHO OF A PREVIOUS/PARALLEL SCENE!!!

Due to this overworked mechanism, the film lost me at its "climax", the point at which one brother wins 20 million rupees and the other brother is simultaneously gunned to death in a bathtub full of banknotes. Up to that point I had been quite happy to coast along on the Lonely Planet aesthetic of penury and picaresque, but after that it was a lost cause. It didn't even matter that the music was by a Singalese girl from West London (M.I.A.), or that Danny Boyle's aggressive jump-cut style turned every conflagration into a wheeze and a romp. But the bathful of money was the point where I pulled out the plug and started to wonder: does this film say anything useful about India? Or even about "Who wants to be a Millionaire"? Has it got anything to say at all other than slums are bad, crooks are bad, and "true love conquers all?"

A good film should reflect its age and say something about its main subject at least. But this one simply throws its boundless energy at a topic that begs for some sinuousness, intelligence and subtlety. For god's sake, it doesn't have to be La Dolce Vita, but a palette that includes something other than VERY BRIGHT and VERY DARK would have been welcome.

Overall not a bad film, but not a particularly good one either.

See my film comments on IMDB