LEFFEST'11: Drive (2011)

The proper way to describe the connection between my mind and body by leaving the room after watching Driver is somewhat close to shattered. This is a film I certainly want to watch a couple of more times before getting into a deeper analysis (oh, the details!), but I must write down some words for the time being. I am as dazzled as one would be after watching a lesson of cinema that wouldn't even let him stand up. A lesson of screenwriting, of directing, of editing, of cinematography, of acting I believe. You've got a pretty rare character, brilliantly written, inspired in Alan Delon's collaborations with Jean Pierre Melville (chiefly The Samurai), and the French filmmaker's influence persists throughout. Ryan Gosling goes into one of the most fantastic performances I've seen (other actors are great too). You've barely got dialog and the lines that remain are short and incisive, reminding us of David Mamet or, and that goes for the premise too, of Walter Hill's The Driver. It also imports the director's fluency in horror film aesthetics (from Mullholand Drive to Cassavetes, he says) and the film noir. Mixing gore (the film is dedicated to Alejandro Jodorowsky), suspense, love story and fabulous action sequences (car chases), this is something like an LA neo-noir action drama, that not only emerges itself into the past but also makes us look at the future, by imagining how will Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice be like. And the songs, and the lettering, everything sounds so appropriate. I don't even remember the last time I've jumped off of the chair in an action sequence. Written by Academy Award winner Hossein Amini, adapted from the homonym book by James Sallis, it guaranteed Nicolas Winding Refn the award for Best Director in Cannes'11, following filmmakers like David Lynch, Iñarritu and Julian Schnabel (2001, 2006, 2007) who even got the Academy nomination, the Coen brothers in the same situation (1996) and other masters like Paul Thomas Anderson, Wong Kar-Wai or Pedro Almodóvar. Digitally shot.

I will make sure I watch the film a couple of more times before writing a longer and more detailed piece on it. It deserves it.

LEFFEST'11: Carnage (2011)

Yasmina Reza stepped into the stage a few minutes before the film started and summarized the story of her friendship and collaboration with Roman Polanski, with whom she adapted her play God of Carnage into the script Carnage which we were about to watch. Right there I considered I would probably like her to come back in the end to approach her style, dialog, structure, characters, work. In the end, I only wanted her to step back in order to feel that she was completely aware of the huge applause that burst as soon as the ending credits started rolling.

Many reviewers wrote that this is no more than a play taken to the screen with a brilliant casting in order to allow a massive audience to see it. To some extent, I think so. It is in fact a play, more than a script, for everything comes out of the dialog and the mimics. The conflict travels through the words of each parent, the beats come with reactions to each line, the emotional shifts and the character arch are due to precise words and their continuous lines of interpretation and response.

Polanski doesn't create the destructive feeling of impotence from The Pianist, nor the claustrophobic nausea from Repulsion. But this is a work of huge sensibility on how to put the camera, on how to frame a face and a word and on how and where to insert a reaction. Roman had to engineer a square of people in a room and make use of the great distinction between cinema and theater (the scales - remember how Griffith departed from Mélies and Porter ?) to convey the proper emotional journey of the two couples. Sometimes the framing is slanted, sometimes the camera is shaking. A stage won't give you that. Anyway, what makes this a very good movie is the script and the actors. I laughed all the way long, at each thirty or sixty seconds. Incredibly witty, very believable, extraordinary performances (Winslet was gorgeous). An intelligent satire to middle class and to contemporary politically correctness of human relationships, which specially by the setting reminds us of The Exterminating Angel by Buñuel. The ending, with Desplat's hithereto absent notes, is genios and hilarious.

LEFFEST'11: The Ides of March (2011)

Although The Ides of March may have been sold, at some points, as the typical political drama starring George Clooney, foreseeing a much frayed genre melodramatic picture, you wouldn't have to dig too deep to find a glimpse of freshness. It all departed from the extraordinary poster, which portrayed with clearness the cynicism we would be invited to testify, but in a kind of witty and intelligent way. From there you'd peek at the rising star Ryan Gosling in a promising trailer performance and then at the old captains Philip Seymor Hoffman and Paul Giamatti in parts that could've fell by the hands of role-modeled actors like Clooney. Don't get me wrong, the acting director doesn't do a bad job. He is simply perfect for the character carved for him, and it's something we've seen him doing over and over, and not being great, he carries out well. On the other hand, Gosling draws a really great performance, the best I've watched him do (you will not forget the last shot from the film), backed up by the untouchables Seymor and Giamatti, who insistently make you want them to have more time up on the screen.

I think what makes me want to talk of the actors so much is the stylistic consistency I've tracked from Good Night and Good Luck to here. Yesterday I realized Clooney loves to work in approximate scales, namely the close up and the big close up. You're most of the times traveling on the dialogued contrivances of the plot while at the same time following a character-driven dimension of the film, from expression to expression, reaction to reaction. He does it in a pretty geometrical fashion, whether the shot is a rigorous 3/4 or a perfect profile picture, and just like he did in the film about Edward Murrow, he plays with the shadows on the faces to create a very nice suspense of what one may be thinking, feeling and hiding.

This being the first reason why I think the actors have such a particularly important figure here, now I'd like to add the well-written screenplay to the discussion. The Ides of March comprehends an intricate and in general well driven plot, which even ends up leaving you in the limb that divides the political drama and the political thriller. It opens with a very well paced twenty-minutes, with proper exposition, nicely economical, and finishes in a most fantastic third act. From the end of the first act until some point I'm not going to spoil you about, it may thank the cast for overcoming some common places and by making them yet enveloping. After this middle unexpected point (could've been much more melodramatic than it was), it is great to find that you're always wrong regarding what happens next, providing a successful way to handle the need to awake hypothesis in the mind of the audience. Although I believe in everything I've written so far, in the end I think what we will remember more intensely is not the plot or the twists, but the arch of Goslin's character, especially because of moments like the one in the kitchen, with Clooney's, when the writing (or the producing ?) surprises you by not making the latest the ultimate pretty adamant idealist politician, arising a good inner struggle in our protagonist (and avoiding an expected cliched development of Governor Morris). About the characters, I only have my doubts about the girl and her actions regarding her true situation - does it sound real, coherent ?

"I don't have a religion" and this is not the proper subtle film. Indeed, it works the desire to awake global consciousness, but I wouldn't call it moralist. It is very cynical that is, disenchanted, never letting the idealism by Morris win over the egoism of all the characters. All are good and bad, none is good nor bad. It sends you to the idea of unending circle (the arrival of the new girl) and of the weakness of mind of the engineers of the political campaigns and the political entrepreneurship of the United States, while the temporal track in which the film happens leaves you with the paradoxical assured incertainty of what had been going on till the movie began and what will be going on after it ends - a metaphor for what the worldwide citizens may feel about their society, for we're all assuredly uncertain that shit has been going on and will still be going on before and after we leave the room.

Lisbon & Estoril Film Festival: High expectations for huge premieres

Lisbon & Estoril Film Festival opens on November 4th with a great line-up, chiefly because of some of the most awaited premieres of the year - movies that made it to Cannes and Venice and that will, most of them, possibly be a part of the Academy's counts. Other spotlights go to Wes Craven's retrospective and William Friedkin's homage, with French Connection, Bug and others (wonder why they won't play The Exorcist).

Everything gets warmer because of some pretty promising masterclasses, that will have a tough job on making it to the level of last year's Abbas Kiarostami and John Malkovich/Stephen Frears. I am talking about cult-filmmaker David Cronenberg ("The Fly", "History of Violence"), Oscar-nominated actor Paul Giamatti ("Cinderella Man", "Sideways") and worldwide renowned playwright Yasmina Reza, author of God of Carnage, the play Roman Polanski adapted into Carnage this year, starring Christoph Waltz, Jodie Foster, John C. Reilley and Kate Winslet. You can check the program in here and I lay down my personal biggest expectations right bellow.

DRIVE, Nicolas Winding Refn (2011).



CARNAGE, Roman Polanski (2011).



THE IDES OF MARCH, George Clooney (2011).



THE SKIN I LIVE IN, Pedro Almodóvar (2011).



DANGEROUS METHODS, David Cronenberg (2011).



MELANCHOLIA, Lars von Trier (2011).



KILLER JOE, William Friedkin (2011).