A Cinderella Story

2004, US, directed by Mark Rosman

The prologue of A Cinderella Story, narrated with old-style economy, promises something more than is ultimately delivered: there's a canted, low-angled shot of a young Sam (played first by Hannah Robinson and later by Hilary Duff) as she heads to her garret room that hints at a darker version of this particular story, one ultimately never told. Instead, we get an insistently bright Valley update of the familiar fairy tale that mines a tired array of high school movie clichés. Although the tween stars Duff and Chad Michael Murray - the latter obviously older than everyone else - are likable enough, the story fundamentally lacks credibility, most obviously in the key encounter between the young stars, while supporting players like Jennifer Coolidge, usually so good, are trapped in one-note roles.

The Elusive Close-Up

(Posted as part of the Close-Up Blog-a-thon at The House Next Door)

Bamako (2006, Mali, Abderrahmane Sissako)

The close-up in films from sub-Saharan Africa is a story as much of absence as of presence - an absence that results from a quite conscious aesthetic choice on the part of many directors. As with so much of the history of post-independence cinema in Africa, at least in francophone Africa, it's possible to trace this choice back to the director known almost universally as the "father" of African cinema, Senegal's Ousmane Sembène. Although his first feature, La Noire de... features a number of close-ups at critical moments - perhaps most notably a shot where a handheld camera precedes the protagonist as she runs, tear-stained, from a room - as Sembène matured as a filmmaker he began to move away from such tightly focused shots, showing a strong preference instead for the medium and long shot. Critics like Manthia Diawara have tended to link this technique to the oral tradition in African storytelling; in this reading, Sembène occupies the position of a griot, observing his characters from a greater distance, and clearly indicating the physical spaces in which they interact.

La Noire de... (1966, Senegal, Ousmane Sembène)

As the academic critic Josephine Woll has written, it's also possible that this preference for the medium and long shot derives from the cinematic training that Sembène received in the Soviet Union during the early 1960's; Woll has unearthed similar stylistic choices in the work of filmmakers like Pudovkin and Dovzhenko, whose films would have been much used for training purposes. Sembène's influence on those who followed him - it's hard to find a meaty interview with an African filmmaker before 1990 that doesn't mention Sembène, mostly in reverent tones - was such that subsequent shot choices might perhaps have been made, even unconsciously, in the shadow of the Senegalese master.

Yeelen (1987, Mali, Souleymane Cissé)

That's not to say, of course, that the close-up is absent from films from Africa, more that it is used in sparing fashion: Souleymane Cissé, another Soviet-trained filmmaker, uses extreme close-ups, particularly on ritual objects, in his 1987 film Yeelen, for example, though the majority of the film shows a preference for longer shots (both in terms of camera placement and time). By contrast, Cheick Oumar Sissoko, a near contemporary of Cissé's who received his training in France, has shown a strong bias against the close-up, a shot choice which he feels to be a typically "American" technique at odds with an African style based on orality; his 1989 film Finzan is notable for the almost complete absence of such shots. As Teshome K. Gabriel has written, for many directors from Africa - or the broader Third World in Teshome's view - the close-up is seen to be unnatural as it calls attention to itself, and eliminates wider social considerations, a theme that is central to the work of African filmmakers until the late 1980s, at which point it's possible to trace the emergence of a more consciously "popular" streak of filmmaking, less chary of using Western commercial cinema as a reference point, and consequently more open, among other things, to the close-up.

Dakan (1996, Guinea, Mohamed Camara)

Given this generally spare attitude to the use of the close-up, particularly in more "artistic" African filmmaking, Mohamed Camara's 1997 film Dakan upends tradition in a number of ways. Best known as the first sub-Saharan African film on the subject of homosexuality, it's also an aesthetically daring project, with tight, sometimes claustrophobic shots not simply of faces - as well as shot/reverse shot combinations that are unusual in African cinema - but also extreme close-ups on body parts: an eye, a nose, lips, often enhancing the film's fraught atmosphere (unfortunately, given the difficulty of finding a copy of the film there are few images to illustrate this). In many ways, Dakan hearkens back to the work of the great Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambéty, whose work can't easily be squeezed into any particular tradition, and who makes startling use of close-ups on faces, hands and inanimate objects in his 1973 film Touki-Bouki, another film with moments of intense sensuality, a rarity in sub-Saharan African filmmaking.

Touki-Bouki (1973, Senegal, Djibril Diop Mambéty)

Most recently, Abderrahmane Sissako has developed his own unique aesthetic: another filmmaker trained in the Soviet Union, his films combine languid observation in long and medium shot - conversations often feature both speakers rather than switching back and forth - with prolonged close-ups, whether he is filming an unfortunate parade of people attempting to use the unreliable village telephone in his wonderful 1998 La Vie sur terre or when holding the camera, to mesmerizing effect, on the witnesses who take the stand, or the locals who move in the same orbit, in his more recent Bamako.

(In addition to those critics whose work is cited above, I'm indebted to work by Jonathan Haynes, Roy Armes, and Françoise Pfaff).

Thank You For Smoking

2005, US, directed by Jason Reitman

Jason Reitman's adaptation of Christopher Buckley's novel is a broad, and often very funny, satire of both the tobacco industry and the spin doctors who do such sterling work on the industry's behalf. It's not clear, though, whether the complete lack of smoking onscreen is part of the joke, or further conformity with current Hollywood (double?) standards; there's certainly no reluctance to show drinking and guns (the central character, Nick Naylor, pow-wows weekly with his counterparts in those industries).

Aaron Eckhart is perfectly cast as Nick, the ideal pitchman for the kinds of moral equivocations so dear to Big Tobacco. Even in those films where Eckhart plays an out-and-out cad, there's an aspect of his character that's insistently attractive. Director Neil LaBute exploited this quality to particularly good effect in his début film, In the Company of Men, though Eckhart's first opportunity to really charm an audience came with a supporting turn in Steven Soderbergh's Erin Brockovich. Here, he deploys his full wattage on behalf of an unreasonable cause and yet starts to make the viewer feel that it would be even more unreasonable to even think of disagreeing with him. Reitman has surrounded Eckhart with a top-notch supporting cast: J.K. Simmons and Robert Duvall, among others, are especially good, but Rob Lowe has a standout sequence as a Hollywood super-agent; his meeting of minds with Nick is a joy to behold.

Shaolin Soccer

2001, Hong Kong, directed by Stephen Chow

Shaolin Soccer is built on spectacle rather than tight plotting, with Stephen Chow using digital effects to give a new spin (in every sense) to the traditional kung fu film. As in previous generations of martial arts films, the key here is the big "fight" scenes rather than the sometimes less-than-fully-coherent filler material, which is scattershot and, not incidentally, often very amusing. Much of this material disappears in the heavily edited American version of the film, which loses in charm much more than it gains in streamlined narration. There's a fine wit at work throughout the film, playing with the traditions of martial arts films in affectionate ways, whether it's the goalkeeper who channels the spirit of Bruce Lee or the characters who, when confronted with another multi-talented team, are convinced the trickery must be the result of "wires".

Like Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Chow is a great connoisseur of oddball faces: there's quite a gallery of unusual physiognomies on display here, with the camera often just inches from the visages in question. Those more naturally cartoonish elements are often more successful than some of the CGI effects, which are less than seamlessly integrated with the "real" action, seeming to occupy different physical spaces (similarly, the CGI crowds at the soccer matches are devoid of atmosphere). Beyond all of the trickery, though, is a concern with those who are being left behind in a modern, upwardly mobile society; there's a surprisingly serious core to the portrait of the soccer players in bustling Shanghai, and the final sequence makes their triumph the more satisfying.

Les Poupées russes

2005, France/UK, directed by Cédric Klapisch

Like Cédric Klapisch's previous L'Auberge espagnole, of which this is a continuation, Les Poupées russes is an attempt to tell a truly European rather than purely national story (Michael Haneke's efforts in this direction are perhaps the strongest to date, but Klapisch is carving out an interesting niche). While the first film took a scenario familiar to many a young European, that of a year abroad in a polyglot setting, the follow-up spends most of its time traversing the English Channel between London and Paris, with an excursion to Russia, and a confrontation with a different aspect of the broader Europe - though St Petersburg is arguably the "acceptable" face or Russia from the Western European perspective. The notion of being a citizen of Europe rather than of one specific country is celebrated here, with those (generally young) citizens accepting the challenges of multiple languages and constant movement.

As in the first film, plot often takes a back seat to Klapisch's instincts to give his very personable cast free rein: the overall narrative shape is less important than the individual incidents. For the most part, the strategy works well enough, though it does tend to mean that the film's central character, Xavier (Romain Duris), is subjected to rather more incident than seems credible. There's also a sense that Xavier is a tremendously fortunate young man who doesn't appreciate that good fortune, and the film's rushed progress leaves little time to reflect on his confused position; in that, Klapisch is fortunate to have an actor of Duris's magnetism, who is capable of ensuring that we care about the character even when he behaves, at times, like a cad.

It's hard to hold this structural weakness against Klapisch given his sure hand with the individual vignettes, however. He's careful to ensure that each of his key characters has a moment to shine: Audrey Tautou is generally best with gamine roles, but she has a moment of real fire here that's quite startling, while Kevin Bishop has a lovely sequence wherein he narrates an encounter with the love of his life. Klapisch has fun, too, with the visual aspects of his story, whether recounting one young woman's rather sad love life as though it were a fairytale, or a running joke that spoofs - with eerie accuracy - French TV romances.

Zodiac

2007, US, directed by David Fincher

Zodiac, director David Fincher's finest film to date, marks a remarkable return to the big screen, particularly on the heels of Panic Room, a stylish but limited film. While Zodiac is framed as a strict police procedural - it evokes the narrative progress of the original Law and Order show, as well as another San Francisco cop film, The Laughing Policeman - with each scene carefully dated and located, Fincher is well aware of the viewer's likely familiarity with the conventions of less disciplined thrillers, and uses that knowledge to excellent effect. Educated by Jaws, for example, we know that an innocent drive, or an idyllic day by the lake, are likely nothing of the kind; what's especially jarring in this film, and what undoubtedly contributed to the public fascination with the crimes, is the sense that death can emerge at any time of day, anywhere. Later in the film, Fincher has fun with an "Old Dark House" sequence that frays the nerves of both the film's central character, who's already unraveling, and the audience; that one of the characters in the sequence is a movie projectionist only adds to the frisson.

The construction of the film as a strictly straightforward narrative isn't just a dry, formalistic exercise, however: it's critical to underlining the manner in which information becomes available to the investigators, particularly in a world far less interlinked than our own, where basic information either isn't or can't be shared with those in nearby jurisdictions. As viewers, we're constantly trying to push at the limitations this creates - though we still have access to more information than the investigators - in trying to stitch the details together in a manner that makes satisfactory sense. We're constantly confronted, though, with the reality that our search for some kind of meaning in crimes, particularly crimes of this magnitude and visibility, may be a fool's errand; Fincher isn't trying to provide us with the kind of resolution we get in a 45-minute television episode, though the longer his film runs, the easier it is to want such neat conclusions.

As Robert Greysmith, the San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist who becomes utterly obsessed with the Zodiac case - his book provides the film's raw material - Jake Gyllenhaal delivers another dependable performance; he's particularly good at capturing Greysmith's growing mania, which excludes and even alienates everyone around him. Greysmith has an interest in puzzles himself, and the case becomes the grandest he encounters; at one point, he appears to be the only person working full-time on the case, establishing lines and linkages that have eluded others who think of the murders in isolation. It's easy to take Gyllenhaal's work for granted, not least because this is another in a line of introspective roles that conceal his broader abilities. If anything, his co-star Mark Ruffalo is even more undervalued; he breezes through light comedy in 13 Going On 30 or Just Like Heaven, but is equally capable of carrying serious fare like In the Cut (perhaps over-serious fare) and We Don't Live Here Anymore, without seeming out of his element in either context. Here he's especially good as the most upright of cops, tireless, yet absolutely by the book, stymied by the difficulties not of identifying a suspect but of bringing that suspect to justice as the law requires.

From the very first shot, Fincher establishes an acute sense of place and time that goes beyond even the datelines provided so regularly throughout the film (though it takes an attentive viewer to assess exactly when certain events take place, since the passage of time is indicated primarily with titles of the "three weeks later" variety); there's an extraordinary degree of attention to the details of décor, costume, habit and speech - there's a wonderful sequence where Gyllenhaal takes Chloé Sevigny on a date that exudes the feel of the era - but also a profound sense of a very different communications world, where the "telefax" is the latest thing, available in the big city but not in downtown Vallejo, where key sequences revolve around payphones, and where, perhaps most notably of all, the newspaper is a medium commanding the greatest of respect (by contrast, television, in the film, seems prone to farce); though much of the film takes place earlier than Watergate, this is the America of All The President's Men, and a killer with a media fixation sees no better outlet for his threats than the local quality daily.

Catch and Release

2007, US, directed by Susannah Grant

Or Several Suitors and a Funeral. Susannah Grant's first film (as director, after several screenwriting successes) opens on an unexpected note for a romantic comedy, with Gray (Jennifer Garner) in tears as she mourns her fiancé, killed on the eve of the wedding, the preparations for which were already well underway. However, Grant gives her main character an easy out from her grieving, undermining the fiancé's saintliness and allowing Garner to quickly return to the single life in ways that strain the bounds of credibility. There's a scene where the fiancé's mother seeks the return of the engagement ring, a family heirloom, that's supposed to illustrate a callous nature, but in truth the mother's reaction, suffused with grief for her dead son, rings far more true than Gray's.

Grant is uncertain as a director, unable to map out her character's fairly simple evolutionary arc in satisfying ways, moving too quickly to the post-grief stages and then idling to regain credibility; she's also particularly prone to the musical montage. The film does benefit from several decent supporting turns, particularly Juliette Lewis, whose character finds herself in especially awkward circumstances, as well as the great Irish stage actress Fiona Shaw paying some bills as the dead fiancé's mother, while Clerks director Kevin Smith is amusing as a garrulous pal.

Hot Fuzz

2007, UK, directed by Edgar Wright

Coming on the heels of the splendid Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, though entertaining, is ultimately something of a disappointment, as it tries to stretch its central joke, that of a hard-charging city supercop thrown into quiet village life, well beyond its useful life. While the opening is amusingly brisk, and the film saves the best for its closing sequences, the middle sags rather badly (a flaw that also bedevils Knocked Up, though the success of both films seems to give the lie to the idea that mainstream movie audiences are attention-deficit). The plot, in that central segment, descends into complete absurdity that's obviously intended as a satire on self-obsessed Little Englanders, desperately clutching at the remains of a bygone (and non-existent) age, but which smacks, instead, of writers throwing random ideas together in the hope that something sticks.

By contrast, the repeated spoofing of American films is much more successful: Edgar Wright is merciless in his dissection of male-bonding actioners, with extended riffs on films like Lethal Weapon (particularly one hilarious rain-soaked sequence), Bad Boys and Point Break (that critically-loved film was pretty self-conscious to begin with, though). It might be that he - and co-writer Simon Pegg - is also trying to make a point about the degree to which American films have coloured the views of even provincial Englishmen, though one could also surmise - particularly given his subsequent plans - that he's simply auditioning for a bigger stage.

Ocean's Thirteen

2007, US, directed by Steven Soderbergh

After the oh-so-self-conscious second episode, the Ocean's franchise gets back to relative basics for its third installment, essentially a re-run of the enjoyable first film, showcasing a monstrously complicated heist that, of course, seems breezily simple for George Clooney and his crew. Director Steven Soderbergh indulges his taste for Traffic-style intercutting with some of the side stories (most obviously a semi-comic tale of labour unrest in Mexico fueled by one of the heist crew), though the complexity of the heist and the number of players means that the story shuttles around hyper-actively, proving quite distracting at times.

While a passing acquaintance with the previous films - and particularly the first installment - doesn't hurt, given the only half-explained backstories that link certain of the characters, the Ocean's trilogy has nothing like the web of interconnections that renders the maligned Pirates of the Caribbean franchise so much more fun to watch again; where those films seem to build towards a kind of resolution, Ocean's Thirteen is condemned to repetition of its own past glories.

Mr Brooks

2007, US, directed by Bruce A. Evans

As with many a contemporary serial killer movie, Mr Brooks imputes extraordinary, near superhuman, detection-avoidance abilities to its protagonist, as if, in addition to his twisted psychosis, he's also armed with a graduate degree in forensics to ensure his continued liberty. Perhaps the film, in choosing such a well-heeled killer (a kind of lethal Raffles) is engaging in unexpected social criticism, implying that access to great wealth can cover even the most sadistic of crimes (the extent of his holdings leads to an especially silly denouement involving a seedy photographer who believes he can one up Brooks).

Costner's star has fallen so far that it's easy to forget that he's still more than capable of carrying a film, his easygoing charm lending this effort far more credibility than it ultimately deserves, given its muddled plot and sometimes overwrought style. The film is most creepily successful, in the end, when it evokes the complicity between the two sides of Brooks's personality: the evil component is embodied by William Hurt, who has several enjoyably chewy scenes with Costner (there's a real frisson in the moments when the two parts of Brooks's broken psyche share a laugh over their plans).

A Colour Box

1935, UK, directed by Len Lye

I was unfamiliar with Len Lye until I read a fascinating piece by Kristin Thompson earlier this year, but was subsequently fortunate enough to see one of his better-known works (in a DVD transfer, but on a satisfyingly large wall-size projection screen), made for Britain's General Post Office Film Unit. In these days of "hard sell" advertising, it's hard to believe that the GPO thought that Lye's methods might be a useful part of their campaign to promote a new parcel post rate, but the film's surprising success cast the GPO in the most positive of lights (as noted in Roger Horrocks's Len Lye: A Biography). Lye's work at this time involved painting directly on, and scratching, pieces of film (a method he refined by using discards from Ealing Studios), and this short has wonderfully clever patterns in sometimes outlandish colour schemes; the work of painting the strips of film for A Colour Box apparently took just five days, which is remarkable given the complexity of what appears onscreen, not to mention the small scale on which Lye worked, given the size of film frames. Set to a piece of music from Martinique, it's an extremely witty piece of work, using the jaunty musical accompaniment as a template for wild experiments in shape and movement.

Amazing Grace

2007, UK/US, directed by Michael Apted

Amazing Grace is an unusually compelling historical re-creation, focused on the efforts of William Wilberforce to end British involvement in the slave trade in the late 1700s (his efforts didn't bear final fruit until 1807), but also providing a fascinating portrait of the realities of British parliamentary democracy in that era, and particularly during the governments of William Pitt the Younger. While inevitably the film spends more time with the moneyed classes of Britain (particularly England) rather than with slaves torn from Africa, it takes care to underline the connections between the two, and the uncomfortable sources of much of the Empire's wealth, while it also attempts to provide at least a cursory sense of the brutal circumstances that prevailed on slave ships and sugar plantations (one scene, where a genteel audience comes nose-to-nose with the stench of a slave transport, is especially effective, a bit of theatricality that Wilberforce used to his advantage).

Though Wilberforce harnesses parliament for noble ends, the film makes clear that it was a far from democratic place at the time (after all, even Wilberforce had to effectively purchase his seat), and the chronicle of shifting power alliances is especially engaging: director Apted is skilled at depicting both the backroom shenanigans, and the lowly but moving beginnings of the abolitionist movement, as well as the set pieces that inject a more conventional drama to the film.

Three Times

2005, Taiwan, directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien

Though it's tempting to embrace the differences between the three episodes that make up Hou Hsiao-hsien's film, it's really only in viewing them as a whole that the director's ambition becomes apparent, exploring the changes both in Taiwanese society and that society's attitudes to relationships from the early twentieth century to today. He experiments, too, with different aesthetics, employing handheld cameras in the final, modern, sequence that contrast sharply with the smooth grace of the first two segments. The middle sequence is set in 1911, and Hou films it as a silent, with extensive intertitles (as a consequence, it's easily the wordiest of the three stories), but he doesn't make any other concessions to the filming techniques of 1911: he shoots in lush colour, with beautifully serene camerawork. While the decision to shoot the film without sound (except for music, which sometimes recalls the soundtrack for Jane Campion's The Piano) initially seems distracting, it slowly creates a means by which to appreciate the extreme ritualisation of upper-class life in Taiwan of that era; the lack of aural distractions is combined with an intense focus on the details of daily routine.

It's in the film's first sequence, though, the the film comes most fully alive, for a charmingly slight tale of tentative love, a film that starts out in a pool hall - a place filled with its own rituals and rhythms - and ends up on the road, as a young man (Chen Chang) searches for the object of his affection. As the segment progresses, Chang allows his character's mask to slip, allowing for wonderful moments of warmth that reveal the growing depth of his love, never more so than the smile that flashes across his face when his girlfriend's mother provides him with her daughter's whereabouts. The entire sequence captures the giddy sense of self-containment that accompanies any burgeoning romance: the outside world, so fraught in many films set in the mid-1960s, seems irrelevant here, its challenges easily overcome as the two characters fall into step beside one another.

Black and White

2002, Australia/UK, directed by Craig Lahiff

Black and White recreates the murder trial of a young Aboriginal man, Rupert Max Stuart, who was convicted, in dubious circumstances, of the murder of a young girl in 1958. His incarceration and particularly the subsequent appeals on his behalf through the Australian court system and the House of Lords in London, created a divisive public debate that shone a light on Australia's tragic racial history (the film focuses on a period when elements of the now notorious "White Australia" policies - which affected immigration rather than relations with the Aboriginal community - remained in place).

Given the weighty themes, it's unfortunate that director Craig Lahiff can't craft a more compelling narrative from the raw materials: the pacing is uncertain, and the script sometimes rather obvious. Robert Carlyle seems miscast as Stuart's main lawyer; there's little convincing fire in his performance, which makes it hard to accept his decision to pursue the case as far as he does (by contrast, David Ngoombujarra is much stronger as Max). The film does come alive, though, with the appearance of a youthful Rupert Murdoch, whose Adelaide newspaper threw its weight behind Max (not on the issue of his guilt - even the film seems ambiguous on that front - but rather on the legitimacy of his confession and trial); while Murdoch's role is undoubtedly overstated, his arrival supplies a much-needed jolt.

Premonition

2007, US, directed by Mennan Yapo

Underneath the self-conscious direction and a plot that's often extremely difficult to follow - that's part of the point, I suppose - there's a surprisingly hard-edged story about a crumbling marriage, and a woman's struggle to make meaning for her life as the mainstays of her life come unmoored. It's rather a chore, though, to unearth this story, couched as it is in the framework of a confusing semi-supernatural yarn that never quite makes up its mind where to go. The film also takes itself much too seriously - there's none of the cod-Gothic genre fun of a film like The Skeleton Key, and Bullock is drained of the spunky charm that's one of her main draws (she was appealingly nasty in Crash, but that role was as much about turning her accustomed image on its head as anything else).

Les Misérables

1934, France, directed by Raymond Bernard

One of the few screen versions of Victor Hugo's novel conceived on something close to the scale of the source material, Raymond Bernard's adaptation was originally released as three separate feature films (which appeared on three successive weekends!), with a cumulative running time two-and-a-half times that of Richard Boleslawski's 1935 US version. That film focuses, inevitably, almost entirely on the central narrative thread covering Inspector Javert's pursuit of Jean Valjean: the shorter cinema adaptations have tended to reduce the book to that one aspect, whereas Bernard's film restores many -- though by no means all -- of Hugo's interwoven themes and plotlines.

The players, too, are almost entirely the reverse of the American version of the following year: in Hollywood, Javert is played by the portly Charles Laughton, whereas Harry Baur, with a remarkably similar physique, plays Jean Valjean here, and it's a much better bit of casting (Laughton, for all his virtues, was never a credibly relentless hunter, lacking any obvious signs of hunger, while the fairly slight Fredric March can't possibly hope to fully evoke Valjean's allegedly immense strength).

As with many a great nineteenth century novel, Hugo's plot depends on an extraordinary variety of coincidences, something made more obvious by the cutting necessary to adapt a book that runs to well over one thousand pages. On film, at least, Valjean isn't so much implacable as remarkably fortunate, with Valjean falling into his lap on a number of occasions. At one point, as if to acknowledge this, Javert notes that "the world is small"; Paris seems reduced to the scale of a village, a few streets where people keep running into one another. Of course, the narrative itself was only one of Hugo's concerns, and his vignettes on the Paris suburbs, or the writing of history, inevitably disappear on film, though Bernard does create richly textured backgrounds that go some way towards providing a substitute for Hugo's descriptive detail.

As in his previous Les Croix de bois, Raymond Bernard blends a variety of techniques to create different moods. The most obvious stylistic device throughout Les Misérables is the use of canted angles -- sometimes canted so much that it appears characters are walking vertically, particularly in the film's stirring courtroom scenes -- that evoke something of the fraught spirit of German film of the late 1920's; the camera tilts notably further from its natural centre when Valjean's fate hangs in the balance, creating a terrific sense of dread, with fate apparently waiting in the wings to drag a decent man back down. At other moments, Bernard makes use of the handheld camera that proved so effective in Les Croix de bois, bringing the viewer to the heart of the street violence of the 1832 uprising in Paris, and injecting a note of grim realism that Hugo would surely have approved of.



Jean Valjean is a gift of a role, given the character's many personalities, and Harry Baur is compelling in all the guises he's called on to adopt: while Valjean's more gentle aspects dominate the running time, at least once he has cast off the baleful influence of prison, Baur's much briefer turn as Champmathieu, at the climax of the first part of the film, is a lovely bit of character acting, a vividly imagined piece of work that underlines Champmathieu's pathetic state, though Bernard is careful to ensure that we never laugh at this broken man.
(The image is snagged from the Criterion Collection site since I returned the DVD without remembering to snap a few stills that would better illustrate Bernard's use of unusual camera angles; Criterion don't suffer from a shortage of praise, but they deserve particular credit for bringing the work of a neglected filmmaker like Bernard to light once again).

Les Croix de bois

1932, France, directed by Raymond Bernard

Thematically very similar to 1930's All Quiet on the Western Front - and, like that film, based on a novel that remains in print today - Raymond Bernard's masterful film of Great War trench life has fallen into the cracks of cinematic history: purchased by Fox for US release, it sat on the shelves, with war footage turning up in films like 1933 Oscar-winner Cavalcade (according to the DVD liner notes). Like the better-known American film, it's a profoundly pacifist work, drenched in the tragedy of the wartime period, though also imbued with a grittiness that surely resonated with contemporary audiences for whom the front was an all-too-vivid memory. Bernard doesn't pull punches, however, reminding the viewer of the initial enthusiasm for war with an opening montage that evokes an almost joyous atmosphere, crowds taking to the streets, and troop trains decked with flowers.

That spirit of adventure is quickly snuffed out in the trenches, where the world is reduced to just a few square metres: for all the vast scale of the war, each soldier ultimately experiences it as, at most, a village to village affair, with prolonged battles over tiny slivers of land. Bernard enhances the sense of restricted movement by shooting a lengthy sequence inside a small post, where the members of the unit become aware of a German mining crew planting a bomb. The tension inside the cramped space, which seems to promise instant death in the event of an explosion, most surely have influenced Henri-Georges Clouzot's similarly sweaty The Wages of Fear two decades later (it's perhaps no coincidence that actor Charles Vanel plays a major part in both films). The sequence is also unusual in that the German side is shown, dispassionately, from time to time, the soldiers there in similar conditions, carrying out orders from officers behind the lines and out of danger.

Later, the film moves outside as Bernard choreographs pummeling scenes of battle, particularly a prolonged depiction of a ten-day bombardment. Like the battle itself, the sequence constantly promises to end, only for another shell to drop: it's an extraordinary attempt to provide a sense of the reality of this particular war, of what it means to experience a bombardment of this duration, the sound pounding constantly on every soldier's eardrums and nerves. During the battle, the camera cuts between sustained tracking shots, moving rapidly over the pock-marked landscape, and handheld shots that seem remarkably modern, evoking the combat photography of much later wars, with occasional, near-abstract shots of the artillery barrels as they pump shell after shell into the air. Indeed, throughout the film, the director exhibits a remarkable ability to move between and to blend styles, to convey the profound disconnect between life on the front and behind the lines, as well as the depth of the tragedy in France and beyond, couched in bitterly ironic terms in the final montage.

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End

2007, US, directed by Gore Verbinski

The third installment in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise is a enjoyably shaggy finale that does its best to tie up vast swathes of plot, giving most of its numerous characters a suitable send-off (in one case taking an entirely unforeseen route), while introducing new elements to this particular world. While the film is occasionally confusing, with so many disparate strands interwoven, that's as much due to the gap since last viewing the first and second films than to any weaknesses on the part of the filmmakers (I tend to agree with Henry Jenkins's very fine analysis, which, while conceding some faults, argues that the filmmakers expect not a dumbed-down but a well-informed audience, something many newspaper critics can't quite grasp).

The most obvious point of comparison here is with the third of the Lord of the Rings films, which is also quite encumbered with plots in need of resolution (to the point that director Peter Jackson stages multiple climactic endings, as if to underline the need to appropriately conclude each part of the narrative, and give the characters the screen time the viewer feels is their due). Although there's a radical difference in their origins - with Pirates emerging from a theme-park ride, as opposed to from a pre-formed literary trilogy - director Gore Verbinski marshals his resources in a similar manner, cross-cutting effectively between the various portions of his story, and demanding that the viewer remain attentive over a lengthy running time. While the first film was focused to a great degree on Johnny Depp's Jack Sparrow, the second and third films use him more sparingly (though he does have several extraordinary, surreal sequences in which multiple Jack Sparrows ensure that the film is adequately dosed with the character), choosing instead to explore yet further shores in the pirates' world, most notably - here - the scenes set in Singapore and in Pirates' Cove, memorable amalgamations of old and new effects, with the latter also enhanced by an arresting, and amusing, cameo from Keith Richards.

The Bourne Ultimatum

2007, US, directed by Paul Greengrass

The third installment in the Bourne franchise is even more stripped-down than its predecessors, with almost all extraneous material removed from what is essentially a two-hour chase movie, through multiple countries and toward the ultimate truth of Bourne's identity. Though director Paul Greengrass doesn't seem overly keen on comparisons with the Bond series - if press snippets can be given much credence - this film evokes the Bond heritage in ways both large (Bourne's almost comic indestructibility) and small (the brutal fistfight in Tangier that evokes one of the signature Bond matchups, that between Sean Connery and Robert Shaw in From Russia With Love). Visually, however, the film owes nothing to Bond: the hand-held urgency of the film adds to the sense of breakneck pacing, with the camera constantly changing angles, and sometimes thrown quite literally into the action (one car chase appears to result in the destruction of at least one camera). That's not to say that the filmmaking is unclear: that Tangier fistfight is clearly narrated, with a palpable sense of real, not comic book, violence between human beings.

On the broader level, Greengrass has to navigate a rather awkward line between two sometimes contradictory views of the CIA, presenting the agency's frightening, almost literally godlike, ability to track individuals through the deployment of a sinister array of resources as well as its striking vulnerability to attack from a well-resourced and determined individual. That, of course, is the reality of modern terror, though the message here is also about the manner in which the agency's moral compromises create - we can hope - fatal internal weaknesses, with its own officers likely to turn when the lines are blurred to an unacceptable shade of grey.

Mansfield Park

1999, UK, directed by Patricia Rozema

As befits the source novel, Patricia Rozema's adaptation of Mansfield Park is considerably darker than other recent Austen-inspired films, with the horrific spectacle of slavery in the West Indies underpinning the more familiar society whirl that drives the main plotline. Rozema is also more interested than most in scratching the social surface and exploring Austen's depiction of the status of women in Georgian England; the lightness of touch in Pride and Prejudice and Emma are replaced here by the stark realities of social rejection (for sins - and perceived sins - great or small), while the decor is generally much more spare than in the overdressed sets of other period adaptations (the walls of Mansfield Park itself are often strikingly bare).

Rozema's camera works in interesting ways, from stately, classical compositions to unexpected whip pans, and occasional hand-held shots at moments of extreme drama; the camera proves itself supple in adapting to the demands of Austen's melodrama, while there are striking direct-to-camera moments when the heroine, Fanny Price (Frances O'Connor, perfectly coltish), reveals the contents of the letters she writes to her sister. There's also an extraordinary shot near the beginning, as Fanny arrives at Mansfield Park for the first time, when the lush lawns take on the appearance of the flowing sea in the half-light of night.