BFI LFF Round Up Part One

Because I saw so many films the other weekend, mainly at the London Film Festival, people kept asking (or at any rate my Mum did) - 'Why don't you become a film reviewer?'

Well here's why not.

Snowtown

Mum's new boyfriend brings some kind of structure into the life of directionless teenager Jamie in this true crime story from Australia, and he is soon joining his new Dad, name of John Bunting, on happy outings to the other side of the road to deface the house of Mum's previous boyfriend, a paedophile (for this reason, it didn't work out). John doesn't like paedophiles, or drug addicts, or gays and is soon making them disappear, one way or another. One way in particular.

This was quite hard to watch, not so much because of the violence and sexual abuse, but because I was sat at an awkward angle to the screen, so the characters looked too narrow, as in some of the later Tom And Jerries. I had the same trouble with The White Ribbon two years ago, but there I adapted. Here it was a continual distraction, perhaps making me more than usually critical.

And yet I enjoyed the film, which is the kind of thing I like. You know: bleak, ominous and, as the posters say, 'unflinching'.

It's so distracting when films flinch.

The director Justin Kurzel, and Lucas Pittaway who plays Jamie were on hand to answer questions. The director seemed to see killer John Bunting as a sort of community leader gone AWOL. I saw him as demonic throughout, but Australians may have different expectations. He talked about Bunting 'giving the community a voice'. This seems rather a grand term for the discussion groups he presides over, in which he encourages neighbours to say what they would like to do to paedophiles ('Well... first I think I'd skin his penis', muses one woman, as though discussing the preparation of a meal.) Having elicited these juicy fantasies, he then proceeds, more or less, to act upon them. 'It's an Australian tradition', he posits, half-humorously.

The film's main fault is that it puts far too much emphasis on the vulnerability of the teenager who comes to be complicit in Bunting's crimes. He's clearly the audience's way in to this seedy little world - his tears are our catharsis. But he's too busy reacting to do any real acting, and reacting with the horror of an outsider. But if he was really inhabiting that world, he would, on some level, accept it. It's a bleak film. But that doesn't mean it couldn't be a little bleaker.


Last Screening

A movie projectionist lives through the last days of a provincial French cinema that's about to be turned into a supermarket. He is most upset, not only because he likes his job, but because he has a shrine to his Mum in the basement, adorned with the left ears of women he has killed locally.

It may be an unlikely scenario, but an undercurrent of genuine emotion pervades this offering from Lauren Achart. Our projectionist only wants to flesh out an illusion (that the mother he worships loved him) and in many ways he is not so different from your average movie fan. The need to maintain the illusion is paramount. The hero/villain never blinks.

The murders are all the more effective for taking place offscreen, or being shown from a distance; even though the corpses pile up at a rate that makes the absence of police activity seem a little strange. That's because they couldn't afford police on their budget, the director said.

And this is exactly the kind of insight I go to the London Film Festival for.


Sleeping Sickness

This plunges us vividly into the life of an upstanding German doctor in Cameroon, then, 'three years later', drags us out of it to follow another character entirely, who has been sent out to Cameroon to monitor this doctor's sleeping sickness programme - which is fraudulent, for the doctor has been undergoing a moral decline. Or that's one way of looking at it.

This is a sort of postmodern riff on Heart Of Darkness with the darkness replaced by a deceptive twilight. In which, at the end, it is just possible to make out (SPOILER ALERT) that the doctor has been transformed into a hippopotamus. Or that's one way of looking at it.

This is a slyly oblique, curious film, and in its refusal to provide clear answers a lot like Africa itself. I suppose that's the idea anyway. I think it worked. The director, in keeping with his elusive main character, wasn't there.



Take Shelter

They were handing out free umbrellas for this one, and I didn't mind if I did. 'Ladies Umbrella', said the tag on it. I couldn't really see how it catered for the especial needs of ladies, but perhaps I'm missing something.

You get the idea though. Take Shelter. It's about a storm. Not necessarily a real storm. It might be in the head of Michael Shannon (present at the screening) who plays a perfectly ordinary family man afflicted by terrifying dreams about a ferocious tempest, dreams which soon leak into his 'real life'. Is he going mad or - well, yes I think he is going mad, or that does seem fairly likely considering his Mum's a paranoid schizophrenic.

But that doesn't mean that the storm isn't real.

Well-performed and initially scary, this becomes less like a horror film as it goes on. But I didn't mind.



The Troll Hunter

This wasn't at the festival, I saw it at the Prince Charles in between other things. I found myself resisting this because trolls are a bit, well, silly, aren't they? It took a 200 foot one to convince me otherwise.

Tongue in cheek, but the only decent 'found footage' horror film since The Blair Witch Project. If it is a horror film. Which it isn't. It is Norwegian. Is that clear?

So there you are. At least they got shorter as they went along. Maybe Part Two will be an improvement. Don't bet on it though.