Promises Promises

David Cronenberg’s outstanding Eastern Promises, a sister film to his scorching History of Violence, opens with a throat slashed in a barber’s chair and a pregnant teenager collapsing in a pool of blood on a chemist’s tiled floor. The girl, just fourteen, dies in hospital, where Russian-English midwife Anna Khitrova (played by Naomi Watts) has managed to save her baby.

Troubled by the case and determined to return the child to her family, Anna returns to the house she shares with her widowed mother (Sinéad Cusack) and her gruff Russian uncle (Jerzy Skolimowski) with a scrawled diary, the girl’s only possession. Between sips of vodka, the uncle sets about translating the notebook but is soon warning Anna not to ask any more questions and to forget the whole affair. Ignoring him, Anna follows a name to the door of a Russian restaurant, run by the kindly-seeming Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl). He claims to know nothing about the girl, but asks Anna to return with the diary, so he can continue to translate it and promising money to help. What Anna doesn’t know is that Semyon is the head of a Russian Mafia family, the Vory y Zakone, a dangerous, ruthless gang with links to human trafficking, prostitution and drugs. His second in command is his out-of-control son Kirill (a boisterous Vincent Cassel), who is guarded by his loyal driver and fixer Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen).

Having girded us with a splashy opening, Cronenberg never lifts his mood of all-pervasive threat. This is a hardcore world, drawn in vivid reds and watery greys, under clouded skies and along steepled streets, peopled with unstable brutes and their scattered victims. Semyon, for all his twinkling charm, is a monster cast from power and greed. His son is an amoral fool, weak-minded and fearful. Nikolai, displaying his fidelity with a spray of symbolic prison tattoos, (stars, roods, nooses) is a practically minded killer, faintly amused by his work and demonically calm.

Screenwriter Steven Knight, who wrote the similarly themed Dirty Pretty Things, carefully positions the elements of the story in the first half to create a series of concentric twists for the second, as Nikolai finds his loyalty to his gang leader tested by a new, protective relationship with Anna. There is a point in Eastern Promises where everything switches. The film itself manages to make it a jarring rug-pull, but to even hint at it here would ruin it. Although on the surface the story, like History of Violence before it, is virtually indistinguishable from any recent genre-bound crime thriller, in Cronenberg’s hands the material takes a different form. Framed in the director’s trademark detailed sets and energised by a snaking, snooping camera, Eastern Promises has long, talkative sections that explore the characters psychologies, cut with equally lengthy sequences of astonishingly brutal violence. In History of Violence, Cronenberg was playing with guns. These characters prefer knives, a far more intimate implement. Not ten-inch cleavers either; scalpels or secateurs or, in the film’s central scene, small linoleum knives with a scimitar curve. There, in a remarkably graphic, physically draining sequence, Nikolai fights to the death with a pair of avenging Turks, Mortensen’s naked body flung against the tiles, awash in his own blood, before a galvanizing, gruesome pay-off.

As the plot unfolds, with surgical delicacy, Cronenberg devotes his interest to uncovering the characters themselves; peeling away layers of identity and patiently considering his findings. The story is just an excuse to test these people, to see what they are made of. For this experiment, he calls again on Viggo Mortensen and the actor delivers an exemplary performance, richly accented, ice cold and physically menacing. For all his bluster, beside him Cassell looks frail and uncertain, overplaying his mania by tiny degrees especially when faced with Mueller-Stahl’s rumbling thunder. Watts’ good girl, typically low-key and unshowy, cannot help being edged from the middle of things as operatic chaos rages around her.

Eastern Promises is Cronenberg at his best; malevolent, unflinching and altogether unforgettable.

Brad Bird & Ratatouille

Name the guy who directed Shrek? Any of the three. Or Shark Tale, The Wild, Hoodwinked? How about the Best Picture Oscar nominee Beauty and the Beast from 1991? Even for cinéastes, there’s no shame in struggling to recall the names of these talented filmmakers, animation directors rarely get the recognition and acclaim lavished on their live action counterparts, but there are a few exceptions. Matt Groening's bearded face is as well-known as any of his yellow creations. Walt Disney was canny enough to use his looping signature as the company masthead. Chuck Jones, the genius behind the Warner Brothers Loony Tunes, did likewise, filling the screen with his name at the end of the title credits. You might have heard of John Lasseter, who directed Toy Story and Cars. “Brad Bird”, he declares, “is the most talented filmmaker working in all of cinema in America today, animation, live action, whatever”.

Lasseter, media-savvy head of Pixar and producer of their new movie Ratatouille, might be expected to say exactly that, but on the day I met Bird, The New York Times’ powerful critic AO Scott called him ‘the greatest living American filmmaker”. People who know movies, know Brad Bird’s name. A graduate of Cal-Arts prestigious animation department, Bird got his start with Disney before going on to direct episodes of The Simpsons for Fox and making his criminally undervalued feature debut with The Iron Giant in 1999. Over the years, Bird has built up a considerable reputation as a cartoon virtuoso; through his indelible character design, his sparkling writing, his cinematic photography and the instantaneous personality his films acquire. Bird, a tanned Californian who looks exactly like a photograph of himself as a child, takes the compliments with a grin and a shrug. “I’m not the greatest anything, but it’s nice to have people say nice things about you and your work”.

Ratatouille, the story of a rat named Remy who dreams of becoming a gourmet chef, is the first of his film’s that Bird didn’t have a hand in from the start. The Czech animator Jan Pinkava came up with the unique premise and designed the characters but his progress was too slow, even for animation, and Bird took over. I ask him if he had reservations about appropriating another person’s project, and Bird nods his head sincerely. “Of course, yes. Absolutely. I have a lot of respect for Jan, and nobody likes talking over someone else’s ‘baby’. But the film had been in development for a long time and the story wasn’t progressing to the point that it needed to. It was a beautiful looking concept, and everybody at Pixar loved the idea, the world and the collection of character types.” He emphasises the last word with a straightened index finger. “But they were just ‘types’. They were not characters and they needed to be. The film needed to be simplified so that you could follow it and be emotionally engaged by it”. Pinkava left Pixar shortly after Bird took over the film, although the director is at pains to explain that everyone is still friends.

Whatever he did, it worked. Despite trailing in the wake of dozens of digital animated features, Ratatouille has the power to astound; beautiful to look at, brilliantly written and filled with precisely tailored individual moments that are among the best in Pixar’s illustrious repertoire. Bird acknowledges the compliment with a nod, but seems uncomfortable when I bring up the the film's difficult path to completion. He tugs his fingers through his swept-back red hair and groans. “Movies are hard, man! They are not easy things to do and the route to getting a film, any film, realized is not always a clean, easy route. Sometimes it is really tortured and hard.” Bird, clad in the Californian uniform of pressed jeans and a suit jacket, is proud of his results. “I think this is a unique film, and an odd film. Hopefully, odd in a good way. It is an unusual combination of ingredients.”

In the film, Remy (voiced by comic Patton Oswalt) lives with his family in a rubbish tip outside Paris. Blessed with a supernatural nose, Remy tries to get the rest of the pack to eat the best scraps, but they’re only interested in him sniffing out rat poison. When he becomes separated from his family, Remy travels through the sewers of the French capital, arriving underneath a five-star restaurant, and silently befriends a young kitchen porter named Linguini (Lou Romaro). Linguini too dreams of becoming a chef, but he is hopelessly clumsy. The film’s stroke of genius is to have Remy hide under Linguini’s toque and operate the gangling teenager like a marionette. With Remy operating his hands, by pulling on his hair, Linguini becomes a feted cook and the restaurant is saved.

I tell Bird that his screenplay is more complicated and far-reaching than the usual animated fare. “That seems to be the reaction”, he agrees. “It seems to be one of those films that is difficult to sum up in thirty seconds or convey on a poster, not like ‘Superhero Family’, or ‘Missing Fish’”. He is proud of the story, however, and of the efforts he made to ensure the quirkiness of the original idea was maintained in the finished film. “When you’re telling the story, you’re only in control of it about half the time. You have, in your own mind, what you want it to be, but in order to get the most out of a movie, you have to listen to what it wants to be itself. When I was getting towards the end of Ratatouille, all my screenwriter training was telling me, ‘here’s where you amp it up and make it faster and louder’. But when it came down to it, it felt like the movie wanted me to slow down, reflect on events and get contemplative. It became more emotional and romantic. So, I just wrote it that way”.

There is an obvious challenge in the film; somehow making the combination of rats and food appeal to an audience. Bird stops me again with the raised finger. “I get what your saying, but I don’t really spent all that much time thinking about what I think kids are going to like or not like. I think that’s a mistake. I just make a movie that I want to see and hope that kids will be interested. When I was a kid, I didn’t always understand every tiny detail of what was going on in a movie, and that was ok. As long as the film was engaging and had an underlying structure, I was captivated. And it fires your curiosity too, right? I think kids are both smart and curious about the world, and a lot of films treat them as if they were not”.

Regardless of health and safety issues, Ratatouille has all the elements that make up a classic children’s adventure. Remy the rat, if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor, is a fish out of water. Passionate about food, he follows his dream, overcoming obstacles and challenges to become who he wants to be. I ask Bird about splitting the story, and introducing Gusteau (voiced by Brad Garret), a ghostly mentor that is a figment of the tiny blue rat’s imagination. “Separating Remy from his family allowed me to open up the narrative and let Remy to make this leap into the kitchen with no competition for his attention. That meant also though, that he couldn’t talk to anybody, because he was on his own. So he’s a figment of his imagination. If you’re going to explain complicated things like the workings of a kitchen and the world of restaurants and cuisine to a rat, it becomes very handy for Gusteau to be a guide. Like Jiminy Cricket or Obi Wan Kenobi”.

Later, the film resolves the separation by examining a very grown-up concept, the difficulty in balancing family life and career. Bird, who tells me ‘in a good week’, he works 60 hours at Pixar, empathises with his character. “It’s an issue, sure. Although I’m looking at four months vacation now, it isn’t easy to divide your time between work and home. The challenge is to be in the moment. I can’t say I always succeed, but I am much more aware of when I am disconnected and slap myself out of it". He has a ready-made test market sitting in his living room, that he makes as much use of as he can. “My kids have seen the movie, several times. I use them as a preview audience, and why not? I worry about their reactions, actually. They were down with The Incredibles and Iron Giant because they’re about giant robots and superheroes but when I started talking about Ratatouille and rats and cooking, they were like, ‘er, OK Dad’. The fact that they love it is a significant relief to me”.

Special attention is paid at Pixar to the voice talent that brings their characters to life. The standout in the current cast is the growling, cobwebbed tones of Peter O’Toole. “When I was writing the script, Peter’s was the voice I was hearing in my mind. I was hoping against hope that he would agree to voice the food critic, Anton Ego. I ask him about that character - who looks like a corpse, lives in a coffin shaped room and has a typewriter shaped like a skull - and whether or not his appearance and demeanour had anything to do with the lukewarm critical reaction to Pixar’s last film, Cars. Bird widens his eyes, as if the idea had never occurred to him beforehand, and says, “Nope. The character of Anton is supposed to represent somebody who has become disconnected from what they love, and that they have become so revered and feared that he is caring more about what he says about things, than the things themselves. This is a dangerous thing for a critic, and for an artist, too. If an artist cares more for box office or pleasing the critics or indeed, anything other than the work itself, then they too become disconnected. So, the film in it’s way, is saying, ‘stick with your passions”.

Standing In The Way Of Control

The short life of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis is given a riveting treatment by Dutch photographer and filmmaker Anton Corbijn, best known around here for his long collaboration with U2. Control, based on the memoir by Curtis’ wife Deborah, is an outstanding film; beautiful to look at, brilliantly performed and heartbreakingly sombre and sad.

Opening in a small suburban bedroom, we meet the teenage Curtis (Sam Reilly) as he paints a Ziggy Stardust flash on his face. It’s 1973, and his pal has brought a new girl around to hang out. She’s Deborah (played by Samantha Morton), a shy teenager recently moved to the area. A surly teenager, Curtis is playing around with pills and punk imagery, reading Rimbaud and listening to the Stooges. The two start going out, walking in the fields outside town or squatting in her mother’s front room. Soon, they marry and have a child.

Moving into a small terraced house at the end of a street. Curtis, who had been working in an employment exchange, has formed a band with his pals Bernard (James Anthony Pearson), Hooky (Joe Anderson) and Steve (Harry Treadway), under the addled attention of manager Rob Gretton (the scene-stealing Toby Kebbell). Inspired by a Sex Pistols gig at the Manchester Free Trade Hall, the newly formed Joy Division start recording songs, catching the attention of local television and music impresario Anthony Wilson (Craig Parkinson), who signs them to his Factory Records. Curtis, already depressed, has started having seizures, and is given heavy medication by an indifferent doctor (played by Corbijn in a cameo). The pills don’t work, and the singer comes to fear live performances, embarrassed by his condition.

Corbijn’s film is in black and white, but that description doesn’t do justice to his luminous imagery, photographed by Martin Ruhe. Control is the best looking film of the year, flattened in shades of grey along the bleak streets of Macclesfield or framing a face in a window in a shimmer of dancing light. It is a mark of the film’s ability to capture and communicate the man and the times that the knowledge we have going in, Curtis committed suicide on the eve of the band’s first tour of America, doesn’t overwhelm the telling. When Gretton saunters into the rehearsal space, to tell his lads they’re off to New York, the moment has a bitter tang of finality.

Riley gives a stunning performance as the tortured singer. His movement on stage is an uncanny channelling of Curtis’ jerky, arm flinging dance. He grips the microphone with a frightening intensity. Away from imitation, Riley plays a difficult, almost silent role with aplomb. Beside him, Morton plays the young Deborah as a committed wife whose love for Curtis is palpable, but who has had to put herself second to his career. Control is a far more serious, and far more seriously affecting, film than Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People, which covered much of the same ground but with a smirk.

The Conscience of the Kings

Director Tom Collins (Bogwoman) adapts Jimmy Murphy’s play ‘The Kings of the Kilburn High Road’ for this sad, lonely film about four middle-aged Irish ‘paddies’ in London who are brought together again to bury a friend who has been found dead on the Tube tracks. After a poetic opening, where two red-sailed hookers slice through the Galway water, we meet the gang of friends as they gather in London to pay their respects to Jackie (Sean O Tárpaigh). Back in 1977, the friends had emigrated together to London from the West, jostling each other excitedly as they boarded the ferry in an 8mm blur of black sea, grey stone and heavy Aran knit. Thirty years on, only Joe (Colm Meany) has achieved success with his construction company, now employing a new generation of economic migrants. He has lost touch with his friends, separated by accomplishment and post codes and unable to face them without the courage a line of cocaine brings. They too have their own dependencies, Jap (Donal O'Kelly) and Git (Brendan Conroy) are transient drunks, scrabbling around their boxy flat for the money to buy a drink while Mairtin (Barry Barnes), pours his bottle down the sink in an effort to save his crumbling marriage. The sole voice of sanity and reason, Shay (Donncha Crowley), a modest vegetable seller, is the one who takes charge of Jackie’s funeral arrangements, meeting his grieving father Micil (Peadar O'Treasaigh) to bring him to the church and waiting with him while the coffin is flown back to Ireland.

It is odd, initially, to hear these men speak Irish to each other on the streets of London. The fluency of the language, it’s own idiom and intonation, sits uneasily with what the men have to say to one another; a long-playing mix of platitude, bravado and bullshit. Collins cuts this with sharp moments of quiet devastation, like when Micil takes his son’s few possessions, a life contained in two cardboard boxes, or when Jap can no longer contain his anger and disgust and cracks, railing against his friends and against himself. Against a backdrop of neon shamrocks and smuggled poitín, the story allows the men nowhere to hide from one another, rawly dissecting their characters and their hard lives by herding them into a corner and peeling away their facades. Jap and Git cannot hide being lost, so are easily corralled. Mairtin’s tendency towards grand gestures cannot hide his own loathing, of himself and his disease. For all his cocaine-tweaked swagger, Joe carries his guilt with him like a pocket full of loose change, his will to succeed tempered by his guilt at leaving his friends behind. Meany plays Joe extraordinarily well, capturing his self-importance and his self-disgust in a series of early grace notes that have him do little more than stare into the distance, drowning in thought, or sitting in his car caressing the leather steering wheel.

Collins has the skills needed to distinguish his film from it’s theatrical origins, filtering his flashbacks with a nostalgic grain and snaking his hand-held camera through his gathered cast, filling the screen with their hard, lined faces. This is confident, assured direction that captures the essence of the city street and the far shore. Kings does feel decidedly stage-bound later, as the men gather in a pub back room and drink, but what these scenes lose in scope they gain in intensity as old hostilities are revived in whiskey and regret. Here, at the heart of the film, everything darkens; the light, the language, the actors faces, as Collins delivers his scathing assessment of his emigrant friends; their sentimentality, deep-rooted bitterness, their dependencies and their cowardice in the face of disappointment. Kings, recently selected as the Irish entry for the Foreign Language Oscar, is a moving, involving film, economically told and burnished with outstanding performances. It’s is not a likable portrait, but it is an honest one.

Fortune Favours The Brave

In the new Neil Jordan movie, The Brave One, Jodie Foster plays New York radio host Erica Bain, who survives a vicious Central Park mugging in which her husband-to-be (Naveen Andrews) is killed. On recovery, she identifies the guys who attacked her but rather than give them over to the justice system, she buys a gun and vows to exact her own revenge. Back at work, Erica cannot relax, something Foster’s constantly clenched jaw communicates effortlessly. When she defends herself against two muggers on the subway, she develops a taste for more. Cheekbones bared, Foster continues her grim rampage until an ephemeral romance appears with pragmatic NY detective Mercer (Terrence Howard). First on the scene when Erika strikes, he agrees to an interview about life on the mean streets and the two start a slow dance around one another.

What rescues The Brave One from the edges of hysterical farce, I suppose, and nudges it towards seedy elegance, is Jordan’s own ability to create a fantasy world and people it with untrustworthy characters. The director is working off someone else’s script, so carefully places his own idiosyncratic stamp on what is a standard genre picture. Most of it is bathed in a sickly green, discomforting wash. Characters are either falling asleep or just woken up, dreaming or sleepless. Voices come from a remove, through the radio or on the phone. Reunited with Interview With The Vampire cinematographer Phillipe Rousselot, Jordan’s constantly mobile camera prowls around in yards and down alleyways. Skewed for tension and arching above the city (in one of the many visual nods to Taxi Driver) the images are scored with chopped strings and a soppy ballad, further disconnecting events into a kind of fever dream.

But the trance doesn’t hold. Every notch on Foster’s gun belt chips away at the film’s credibility, shaky to begin with, to the point of it becoming politically unsound. Erica’s vengeance separates from her own desire for justice and comes to resemble New York itself, battered by a laughing enemy and unconcerned with the high cost of retribution. As a vigilante, Erica might appear shaken and frightened but she is tyrannically ruthless and unequivocal in her execution. There are problems too with the script, which is contrived to the point of pantomime, and the dialogue, which contains more than a few howlers. A couplet of thigh-smackingly trite lines (“say cheese” and “give me back my dog!”) top and tail the story and even feature in the trailer, so their intent, like the film itself, is uncertain.