tiggymalvern | SIFF the Final!

Yeah, it ended on Sunday, but for some not exactly mysterious reason, I'm still three films behind. But after this post I can stop spamming you all with this drivel and pick something else instead :-)

Last Thursday we went to see a Danish film called Allegro. If 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind' and 'Solaris' had a bastard love child, this is the film that you'd get.

A famous pianist becomes amnesiac after the loss of his lover, and spends ten years desperately pretending that there are no gaps in his life, that his memories are intact. But one day, a man approaches him who knows not only that the blank is there, but tells him he can recover his memories if he goes to a strange, impenetrable area of Copenhagen known as The Zone. He finds himself sucked into an isolated world where past and present run consecutively, chasing glimpses of his memories - can he not only remember what happened, but fix it?

This film covers much of the same ground as Eternal Sunshine - are the good times worth keeping despite the pain that goes with them? Unfortunately, it doesn't do it in half such an entertaining and enthralling way. Which isn't to say it's a bad film. It has some genuinely entertaining and funny scenes, some delightful little interludes in the animations that narrate and link the various episodes in Zetterstrom's life. And it's beautifully shot for the most part - I loved the use of intense close-up facial angles early on especially for Zetterstrom's developing relationship with his girlfriend.

But unfortunately, the film can't help but suffer in comparison with Sunshine, and it's largely because of the approach the film has taken to the subject. Zetterstrom is a man who, never open to begin with, has shut himself down completely emotionally and isolated himself after his disastrous love affair. And this is the man we spend most of the film with. A very good performance by the actor, which almost makes it worse, because it's difficult to have any emotional connection with a character who has none with anyone else. As

media_babe said afterwards, the film has no heart. As an audience, there's no way in to feel this man's loss and pain, and as a consequence, the final outcome isn't something you feel either. Technically, a very good and interesting film, but not one that resonated with me the way of Sunshine or Solaris, another film exploring loss and what people will do to retrieve the past. If you haven't already seen them, go and see those two instead, because they're both fantastic!

Incidentally, the pianist here is the same actor who played Adam in the first film we went to see in the festival, the black comedy Adam's Apples. He won the SIFF best actor award for that role, the only one out of all the award-winning films and performances we'd actually seen.

Saturday night we went to see Pierrepoint, a dramatisation of the life of Albert Pierrepoint, Britain's most prolific hangman, during the years surrounding WWII. (This film is getting a general US release under the title of 'The Last Hangman', which is rather stupid, because he wasn't). I booked tickets for this film purely on the basis of the cast rather than the subject matter, since you can always guarantee a fantastic performance from Timothy Spall, and Juliet Stevenson's pretty good too. And it turned out to be a great decision, because it's a great film.

It's hard to say what makes this film so good, except that it captures exactly what it sets out to do, and does it perfectly. The whole setting and feel and attitiudes of thirties through fifties Lancashire is right there on screen, drawing you in. The subject matter obviously has the potential to be deeply disturbing, and sometimes it is, but the film doesn't overplay that - it treads a very fine line perfectly, neither shying away from the hangings and the fact that these are people being ritually killed, nor dwelling on it ghoulishly. We went to see the film with a couple of people who have sensitivities to certain kinds of violence, and though they were disturbed as they were meant to be, they didn't feel it was too much.

The film is an exploration of the executioner's mindset - Pierrepoint distancing himself and his family from the job, at first highly successfully ('it's not me killing them, it's the system'). The callousness innate in his actions and the ghoulish black humour among those people (chasing after the record for the fastest hanging, which Pierrepoint still holds) contrasted against his attitude to the corpses - they've paid for their crime, and deserve to be treated with respect afterwards. Later, his distance starts to break with his hangings of the Nuremberg Nazi war criminals, a dozen or more in a day, and the subsequent loss of his anonymity. But the film is as much social commentary as it is about the individual man - perhaps one of the more disturbing scenes in the film is when Pierrepoint returns to his local pub after Nuremberg, to huge cheers and everyone wanting to buy a drink for the man who hanged the Nazis. In the context of a country just escaped from six years of war and still suffering its effects, it's understandable, but a long way from nice. Everything about this film is handled on just the right note, and the great performances just finish a telling picture.

And Sunday, to end the festival, was a French drama Itineraires. A young small-town and small-time thief, just out of prison, discovers a murder victim. But who's going to believe an ex-con?

Another film with difficult subject matter that does a fantastic job of exactly what it sets out to do with a great cast. The film manages to gain your sympathies early on for the main character despite his thieving, which is important since the whole film revolves round his alternating panic and his desperate attempts to do the right thing. Convinced they've got their murderer, the police aren't looking for anyone else, and with the system working against him, Thierry escapes and goes on the run, still desperately trying to figure out how to clear himself. But as you'd expect from the French, this is no 'The Fugitive'. Instead it's a drama focussing on small town life and the consequences of choices, both Thierry's own and those of the people whose lives he touches along the way. It's a well-handled mix of the ridiculous, the delightful and the appalling, mingling humour and pathos seamlessly through scenes.

If I have one main fault to pick out, it's that the film ends rather abruptly. It's not the ending itself I quibble with, just the lack of warning that it's coming, that this is the end. It left me sitting there when the credits started to roll, thinking, 'Huh? But where'd the film go?' Which I guess might have been the point, since Thierry has no more idea of what's coming and where his life's gone, but it felt vaguely unsatisfactory.

Gee, that was a cheery bunch to end the festival with, huh? Not a conscious decision, just the way it turned out. So now, I've got about four films out on general release I need to go and see, because I've been so involved in SIFF - X-Men 3, District B-13, time for some trashy action fun to counter the esoteric and intelligent overdose - hee! XD

And as an aside, I'm going to be largely out of e-contact this weekend, Friday through Monday, so if I ignore your e-posts, that's why.