Amador

Amador (2010)
Director:Fernando León de Aranoa
Country:Spain

Runtime:112 minutos



Marcela (Magaly Solier from Milk of Sorrow) is a young woman who lives with her boyfriend, Nelson. Both of them are immigrants. She intends to leave him, but changes her mind when she finds out that she is pregnant, although she doesn't tell him about her pregnancy. Nelson earn a living as a flower thief. He keeps the flowers in the fridge, but when it breaks they have to buy a new one, but don't money for the rent. So Marcela decides to take a job in the city. She begins to take care of a bed-ridden older man whose family is out of town. But only a week into her job and the man dies. Marcela knows that if she calls his family to inform about his death she won't get the money so she keep the things as they are as if the man was still alive. Written by Ilia Ginzburg

Norwegian Wood

Norwegian Wood(2010)
Director: Anh Hung Tran
Country: Japan
Runtime: 133

A beautiful dream-like interpretation of Murakami's novel.

Like the Japanese translation of the Beatles song itself (Norwegian Forest, rather than wood) this adaptation of Murakami's best-selling novel is just a little askew. It makes up for this by being a sumptuously shot, dream of a film.

The story is deceptively simple. Toru, Naoko and her boyfriend Kizuki are best friends in their high school days in the '70s. Everything seems perfect, except of course everything is not perfect. Without warning, Kizuki sits in his car in a garage with a pipe attached to the exhaust, and turns on the ignition killing himself. The story picks up again 3 years later with Toru now a university student in Tokyo. The student riots are going all around but they always feel peripheral to the story. He bumps into Naoko in a park and they reignite their friendship, which eventually becomes something more. This is too much for the fragile Naoko. She heads to a retreat for depression, isolated in the Kyoto mountains. Toru meets Midori, playful and lively, she is the the opposite of shy Naoko, and finds himself trapped between the past and the future. The deviation from the books narrative is minimal and anyone who has read it will feel immediately familiar.

The book was of a man reflecting from his 30s, scouring his memories. Whilst this flashback element is not really here, apart from Toru's occasional voice-over. The film does manage to recreate this through its airy style though, making the whole film feel like an extended memory. It struck me at times as sharing some parallels with Wong Kar Wai's 2046, visually and thematically, the scene from the back of the cab seems like a direct homage. Unfortunately, the actors don't strike you as Murakami creations at times. Kenichi Matsuyama is handsome and does a good job, but the Toru from the pages doesn't really leap out of him. This is perhaps unfair criticism, as a lot of Toru's characterization was achieved through the access to his inner thoughts as narrator of the book, but there is a notable paring down of all the characters. Rinko Kikuchi, here as Naoko and familiar from Babel, applies herself well to the role. She seems ethereal, adding to this otherly effect by spending half the movie in the clouds of the mountaintop retreat. The three main stars, with Kiko Mizuhara as Midori, are maybe a little too picture perfect for this film but overall they contribute solid performances.

Anh Hung Tran's direction is great and the film is really beautiful from start to finish. The shots of Toru and Naoko in the mountain are spell-binding. Those scenes are translated perfectly into film. He envelops Naoko and Toru in the nature surrounding them, losing them in it. The essence of the seasons, snowy mountains, autumnal hues, are distilled into the film serving as a timescale and a metaphor for the story.His focus on nature, the extreme close ups of the plants are stunning, make for some brilliant imagery.

Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood's score is pitch perfect. It briefly seems at odds, it's the last thing you expect, but very quickly makes a great deal of sense. As in There Will Be Blood it is never merely background music, but something that bears almost the same influence as the camera itself. He imbues a foreboding dread, lacing otherwise innocuous scenes with the feeling of something toxic. There are even sequences reminiscent of Anderson's masterpiece, as the mountainous ranges of Japan are captured just as the desolate wilderness of America's hunt for oil was. The occasional music tracks, apart from the titular Beatles one, comes from krautrock band Can. All well chosen and appropriately used they, along with the immaculate attention to the period detail on screen in the sets and costumes, let the '70s ooze out of the screen.

The film does have moments where it lapses. The acting is a little in patches. One scene where Toru is crying and drooling (literally) in anguish on the rocks is a bit too much. There should be more trust placed in the audience. His turmoil is apparent, he is sleeping in a rock cave, it doesn't need to be overplayed like this. The film is a bit slow in getting running, though it seems to grow with confidence as the story progresses. A couple of the big scenes, like where Reiko, Naoko's confidante, sings Norwegian Wood don't quite come off as perhaps intended, but are in the minority.


Flawed definitely, but an exceptional film. For any Murakami fans complaining about the legitimacy of this as an adaptation, I urge you to cast your memory back to the forgotten Tony Takitani. That was a film, largely ignored, that truly, in every essence, adhered to the Murakami style and atmosphere. Norwegian Wood is more of a compromise but an entirely valid one. At the end Midori asks Toru where he is. He can't answer, unsure like the feeling of waking up from a dream. Norwegian Wood is a film that is hard to hold onto, but lingers with you, a meandering dream-scape of sorrow. --filminjapan.blogspot.com

The Strange Case of Angelica

The Strange Case of Angelica(2010)
Director: Manoel de oliveira
Country: Portugal
Runtime: 93


Isaac is a young photographer living in a boarding house in Régua. In the middle of the night, he receives an urgent call from a wealthy family to come and take the last photograph of their daughter, Angelica, who died just a few days after her wedding. Arriving at the house of mourning, Isaac gets his first glimpse of Angelica and is overwhelmed by her beauty. As soon as he looks at her through the lens of his camera, the young woman appears to come back to life just for him. Isaac instantly falls in love with her. From that moment on, Angelica will haunt him night and day, until exhaustion.

The charm of “The Strange Case of Angelica” lies in the way it balances this mysticism with a thoroughly secular sense of the business of everyday life. Not that any of the nonsupernatural occurrences that surround Isaac — the Greek-chorus chitchat among his landlady and her friends; the steady work in the fields and olive groves; the rise and fall of empires and economies — are exactly banal. The world as seen through Mr. Oliveira’s lens is as fresh as if it had just been discovered and as thick with secrets as if it had always existed.
Of course, both things are more or less true, and Mr. Oliveira’s film has the added virtue of feeling entirely original even as it evokes a number of rich literary and cinematic traditions. As a ghost story, it owes more to Henry James’s psychological curiosity than to Edgar Allan Poe’s sensationalism, but it is also indebted to the various kinds of realism that flourished, in film and in novels, in the early and middle decades of the last century. Finally, though, it exhausts comparison, even to other films by this director, who has both done everything and is just getting started.
A.O. Scott (movies.nytimes.com)

Love is abstract and it’s absolute. True passion between two beings is so violent that it doesn’t even admit children. They would be disruptive to absolute love. Absolute love craves androgyny, it’s the anxiety of two beings to become just one. It’s an impossible desire, but it’s real. Here, everything is violent. This is a terrifically violent film and much more violent than my films about war, which reveal a more or less calculated violence. This is real, it kills. It comes from the individual, the person. The act of filming is... I mean, of photographing, is in itself violent. (...)
I once said that a director is like a murderer. And just as a murderer can’t avoid killing, the director can’t avoid the act of filming. It’s its own attraction and it’s fatal because it has nothing to do with life. Life is something else.
Manoel de Oliveira (A conversation with Manoel de Oliveira)

In a Better World

In a Better World(2010)
Director:Susanne Bier
Country:Denmark | Sweden
Run time:119 min

Anton is a doctor who commutes between his home in an idyllic town in Denmark, and his work at an African refugee camp. In these two very different worlds, he and his family are faced with conflicts that lead them to difficult choices between revenge and forgiveness. Anton and his wife Marianne, who have two young sons, are separated and struggling with the possibility of divorce. Their older, ten-year-old son Elias is being bullied at school, until he is defended by Christian, a new boy who has just moved from London with his father, Claus. Christian's mother recently lost her battle with cancer, and Christian is greatly troubled by her death. Elias and Christian quickly form a strong bond, but when Christian involves Elias in a dangerous act of revenge with potentially tragic consequences, their friendship is tested and lives are put in danger. Ultimately, it is their parents who are left to help them come to terms with the complexity of human emotions, pain and empathy.

OUR DAY WILL COME

OUR DAY WILL COME(2010)
Dir:Romain Gavras
Country:France

Runtime:90 min


Though it remains to be seen whether he will be loved our hated by audiences at large - and both seem equally likely - there is no doubt at all that Our Day Will Come announces the arrival of Romain Gavras as a significant new talent in world cinema. Though working with a very different style, Gavras embraces the same sort of fuck you abrasiveness that has made Lars Von Trier such a polarizing presence on the world scene and we should expect nothing less from Gavras.

A cynical outsider epic, Our Day Will Come is the story of Remy and Patrick, a pair of misfits joined together by their dislike of society and their red hair. Patrick (Vincent Cassel) is a psychotherapist sick to death of listening to the banalities of people's problems and pretending to care. He is cynical in the extreme and seemingly desperate for anything he can manipulate for his own entertainment. And that object comes in the form of Remy, a boy in his late teens from a shitty family that treats him horribly who has been ostracized for his entire life, other children fixating on the color of his hair as the prime fodder for their teasing. Once the two meet sparks fly immediately.

Patrick stumbles across Remy as the youth runs down the road away from his home, where he has just assaulted his mother and sister. On a whim Patrick picks the boy up and offers a ride and begins to play, his training giving him ample skills to read and manipulate Remy's obvious insecurities. It begins with Patrick winning Remy's trust, offering to help him, but the help soon turns to Patrick picking fights that Remy cannot avoid and pushing the young man into ever more extreme and uncomfortable situations.

But what Patrick does not anticipate, perhaps, is that his goading will unlock something in Remy, a desperation for acceptance fused with a facility for violence, and before long Remy has taken charge of the situation and forced Remy to take him on an increasingly sociopathic road trip to the ferry that will take them to Ireland where Remy dreams he will assume the mantle of a sort of redhead messiah.

There is absolutely no doubt that Gavras is a wildly self indulgent film maker, one prone to ranting and bursts of rage. But there is also no doubt that Gavras has the skills and intelligence to back that indulgence up, his debut feature constantly writhing and twisting itself into new, unexpected shapes. He is bold and brash and one wonders if Remy is not simply a replacement for himself in the film with the brilliant Vincent Cassel - who turns in an absolutely bravura performance here while also serving as a producer - egging him on and goading him ever farther from the sidelines.

Not quite a genre film, not quite an arthouse film, Our Day Will Come is a powerful hybrid with a unique, sharply focused eye and a restlessly misanthropic sense of creativity. In many ways Our Day Will Come is this year's Ex Drummer, an instant cult title in the making.

Two In The Wave

Two In The Wave(2010)
Director: Emmanuel Laurent
Country: France
Runtime: 93

Two in the Wave is the story of a friendship. Jean-Luc Godard was born in 1930; Francois Truffaut two years later. Love of movies brings them together. They write in the same magazines, Cahiers du Cinema and Arts. When the younger of the two becomes a filmmaker with "The 400 Blows", which triumphs in Cannes in 1959, he helps his older friend shift to directing, offering him a screenplay which already has a title, A bout de souffle, or Breathless. Through the 1960s the two loyally support each other. History and politics separate them in 1968, when Godard plunges into radical politics but Truffaut continues his career as before.

Emmanuel Laurent appeals directly to fellow film buffs with this absorbing portrait of French New Wave icons François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, capturing their relationship through rare interviews and archival footage. Laurent's documentary premiered at Cannes Film Festival exactly 50 years after the Cannes debut of Truffaut's first feature, The 400 Blows -- a film that signaled the New Wave's cinematic arrival to much fanfare.

Two Daring Directors Who Changed Film History
New York Times, Critic's Choice

In Emmanuel Laurent’s new documentary, “Two in the Wave,” the “two” are the filmmakers François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. The wave, needless to say, is La Nouvelle Vague, a journalistic name that not only stuck to Truffaut, Mr. Godard and their colleagues, but that also changed the way film history is understood.

Since the days when that Gallic wave crashed ashore, critics and cinephiles have scanned the horizon looking for the next one, while groups of young directors and critics, sometimes consciously, sometimes not, seek to replicate the daring and self-confidence that bubbled up in France in the late 1950s and early ’60s.

Mr. Laurent, for his part, dutifully combs the beach, gathering wonderful bits of detritus from that much-mythologized moment. The surviving members of the New Wave — Truffaut died in 1984 — are by now venerated members of the old guard. (Mr. Godard, at 79, showed his new film at the Cannes Film Festival on Monday.) But “Two in the Wave” wisely resists the temptation to invite them to share memories of youth. Rather, it gathers newspaper clippings, newsreel footage and movie clips to assemble a present-tense essay that is both time capsule and collage.

Instead of featuring talking-head retrospective interviews, the movie frames its backward looks with images of the actress Isild Le Besco reading old magazine articles and occasionally visiting a historically significant spot in Paris. Her presence is puzzling for a while, until you begin to absorb some of the images that surround her — Jean Seberg in “Breathless,” Anna Karina in “A Woman Is a Woman” — and recall Mr. Godard’s axiom that all he needed to make a film was “a girl and a gun.” Mr. Laurent displays no firearms, but Ms. Le Besco’s silent presence suggests a corollary, namely that any movie can benefit from a beautiful woman with an interesting face.

There is also a third man in “Two in the Wave”: Jean-Pierre Léaud, the actor who worked frequently with both directors and who became the on-screen embodiment of their attitudes and styles.

For Truffaut, Mr. Léaud served as a frequent alter ego, appearing as Antoine Doinel in a series of autobiographical films, beginning with “The 400 Blows” in 1959. That movie and “Breathless,” Mr. Godard’s first feature, occupy much of Mr. Laurent’s documentary, which was written and narrated by the film critic Antoine de Baecque. The triumphant arrival of “The 400 Blows” at the Cannes Film Festival in 1959 and the release of “Breathless” a year later feel almost like a single event, one of those epochal moments that divide time into before and after.

Before, there was a group of young movie buffs, haunting the Cinémathèque Française and the offices of Cahiers du Cinéma, disciples of two high priests of postwar cinephilia: the archivist Henri Langlois and the critic André Bazin. They absorbed everything they saw, forming particular affinities with the American directors we now regard (thanks partly to the Cahiers gang) as idols of classic Hollywood.

These Hitchcocko-Hawksians, as they were sometimes known, set out to change French cinema, and in assessing their campaign, “Two in the Wave” becomes frustratingly vague. The grandiose rhetoric of revolution and reinvention is certainly there — mostly courtesy of Mr. Godard, a fount of aphorisms on the nature of “le cinéma” — but apart from a few remarks about hand-held cameras and jump cuts, there is not much in the way of concrete analysis. So the audience is left to guess at what exactly made Truffaut’s and Mr. Godard’s work so transformative.

And yet the evidence provided by the films themselves is a powerful reminder of just how exciting that work remains. “Two in the Wave,” while it provides plenty of biographical information, is above all interested in the artistic personalities of its subjects. It was, after all, the shared love of film that brought them together, despite their differences in temperament and background. And it was partly their divergent ideas about what cinema should become that drove the two men apart.

After their initial triumphs, with “The 400 Blows” and “Breathless,” Truffaut and Mr. Godard continued to work closely together through the 1960s. But as Mr. Godard’s work became increasingly politicized, and as his always uncompromising and prickly personality grew even more so, a schism emerged that would become irreparable in 1973.

That year Mr. Godard wrote a letter to Truffaut attacking his film “Day for Night” and enclosing an equally venomous letter to Mr. Léaud. Truffaut returned that letter, along with one of his own — 20 handwritten pages condemning the selfishness and pigheadedness of his longtime friend.

And that is where Mr. Laurent’s story ends, as so many tales of artistic camaraderie do. But “Two in the Wave” honors that collaboration by carefully recounting its details and arguing for its significance. The films of Truffaut and Mr. Godard stand or fall by themselves, but together they made history.-

…“Buffs interested in the filmmakers and the era will be delighted by wonderful early footage of the budding young auteurs.” – Variety

...“Brisk and fertile…helps to transmute the New Wave from contemporary explosion into a historical event.” – The New Republic

…An in-depth analysis of the relationship between New Wave pioneers François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, as seen through rare archival footage, interviews, and film excerpts — written and narrated by former Cahiers du Cinéma editor Antoine de Baecque and directed by Emmanuel Laurent.

…'Two in the Wave'/'Deux de la vague' is a French documentary about Jean Luc Godard and Françcois Truffaut with lots of period footage, "making of" clips and interviews. The Wave of course is La Nouvelle Vague, the movie revolution of the Fifties and Sixties those two directors are famously associated with.

The film explores the New Wave's early days with a focus on the style and contributions of those two key figures and the rise and fall of their friendship. It declined after the upheavals of 1968 and ended sharply in 1973 when Godard dismissed Truffaut after a visit to the set of 'Day for Night' as too unpolitical and Truffaut wrote Godard a letter calling him a "sh-t director." ??The film chronicles how filmmakers, actors, and students demonstrated to save Henri Langlois' position in February 1968, anticipating the revolutionary moment of Paris 1968 by three months. This action is a focus of Bertolucci's The Dreamers.??

A number of clips of Truffaut and Léaud show their close relationship, and there are more shots of Léaud at various stages of life than of any other person. The film ends with his screen test at 14, an image symbolizing the movement's eternal youth, as do a number of bright new-looking clips of Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo in 'Breathless.'…a good introduction, to the French mid-century cinema.

Particularly relevant to such an audience would be the way this film outlines the New Wave/Cahier du Cinéma crowd's debt to older directors like Nick Ray, Howard Hawks, Hitchcock (whom Truffaut did a book of interviews on), Fritz Lang (interviewed by Godard here). ??Plenty of archival material goes into Two in the Wave

There is also rare footage of Cannes 1959, when Les quatre cents coups won. Godard's first film, 'Breathless',' was also popular and there is footage of Paris movei-goers delivering a range of opinions outside the theater when the film was first shown. There are lots of clips of films by both directors to review their careers during the New Wave's heyday…Of particular note is the inclusion of student riot footage, which was better than average. And helps to illustrate the rebellions against what was seen as Gaullist repression of the arts (among other things) and artistic freedom of expression generally..??

Another Year

Another Year (2010)
Directed by: Mike Leigh
Country: UK
Runtime: 129min




A married couple who have managed to remain blissfully happy into their autumn years, are surrounded over the course of the four seasons of one average year by friends, colleagues, and family who all seem to suffer some degree of unhappiness.

Hors-La-Loi (Outside the Law)

Hors-La-Loi (Outside the Law)[2010]
Dir:Rachid BOUCHAREB
Country:France, Algeria, Belgium
Run time:2h13



Driven from their Algerian homeland, three brothers and their mother are forced to separate. Whilst Messaoud enlists to fight in Indochina, his brothers decide to settle in Paris. As Abdelkader leads the movement for Algerian independence, Said makes his fortune in the boxing clubs of Pigalle. Their fate will be inextricably linked with that of a nation fighting for her freedom..

A Screaming Man

A Screaming Man(2010)
Director: Mahamat-Saleh Haroun
Country: France, Belgium, Chad
Runtime: 90 Min

Present-day Chad. Adam, sixty something, a former swimming champion, is pool attendant at a smart N'Djamena hotel. When the hotel gets taken over by new Chinese owners, he is forced to give up his job to his son Abdel. Terribly resentful, he feels socially humiliated. The country is in the throes of a civil war. Rebel forces are attacking the government. The authorities demand that the population contribute to the "war effort", giving money or volunteers old enough to fight off the assailants. The District Chief constantly harasses Adam for his contribution. But Adam is penniless; he only has his son...

angamaly film festival