LFF 2015 Highlights: The Auteurs

I Am Belfast

Dir. Mark Cousins

Mark Cousins is arguably one of the best film essayists of our time, and the kind of thoughtful, gentle and poetic auteur that a city as traumatised and as beautiful as Belfast deserves. Cousins uses the imaginative conceit of Belfast as a blonde woman (Helena Bereen) with a golden double-ended clip in her hair (shades of Kim Novak in Vertigo).

I Am Belfast forms a kind of audiovisual reverie around Cousins as narrator conversing with Belfast, and listening to the stories of this interesting, elusive, 10,000 year old woman. She explains her name means where the “salt meets sweet” and Belfast often returns to this image, conveying the city divided by bigotry, walls and colours, slowly healing into a whole of peacefully coinciding, complimentary differences. Cousins walked every street of the city gathering footage and sound, and he has a knack for finding beauty and significance in the arbitrary and quotidian, the queer and comical in the tragic. [RB]

Carol

Dir. Todd Haynes

“I’m charting the correlation between what characters say and what they mean,” says a film buff while watching Sunset Boulevard in Todd Haynes’ Carol. This gloriously romantic film’s dialogue needs similar decoding, but not so its glances. As soon as flinty store clerk Therese (Mara) meets eyes with our title character (a radiant Blanchett) across a teaming department store, we palpably feel their attraction. This is the 1950s, though, and Therese is reticent to express her feelings: “I want to ask you things, but I’m not sure you want that.” “Ask,” replies Carol, achingly.

These women are trapped by their era’s conformity. Carol and Therese try to kindle a love affair, but the men who wish to own them continually snuff it out. Haynes’ images mirror the couple’s imprisonment, framing them in doorways and through windows. But like Carol says to her jealous ex-husband (Chandler), love is “like science, it’s like pinball.” Haynes is telling us that, thrillingly, passion burns hotter than fear. For Carol and Therese, the chemical reaction has begun; the ball bearings are in motion. [JD]

High-Rise

Dir. Ben Wheatley

Upon its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, Ben Wheatley’s adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s sci-fi novel High-Rise baffled many but seemed to delight the Ballard-inclined. In stark contrast, at the London Film Festival the majority consensus of negativity largely came from Ballard fans, while a good portion of the film’s appreciators were the Ballard-unwashed.

The reception’s a testament to the go-for-broke nature of the adaptation, already divisive among The Skinny’s contributors. For this writer, the film’s a vigorous and ferocious blast through a dark, dystopic labyrinth that only lets up in a third act that starts to lag. The novel’s slower, icy detachment and alienation is re-imagined by Wheatley and writer Amy Jump as a hedonistic whirlwind; a lone location Mad Max film with less motors and more upper-class twits, as filtered through a cocktail of the creative sensibilities of Kubrick, Fritz Lang, Joseph Losey and Ken Russell. [JS-W]

In Jackson Heights

Dir. Frederick Wiseman

Documentary veteran Fred Wiseman comes back with another epic, taking his contemplative, diaristic camera to Jackson Heights – the most ethnically diverse neighbourhood in America.

It’s a film of love streams and food chains, showing the rituals, leisure, commerce and support networks of sometimes cohesive, sometimes isolated communities amid tides of struggle and greed, as property developers show signs of usurpation and gentrification. Unsurprisingly, Wiseman’s style is quietly observant, and demanding in duration, but hypnotic and incredibly rewarding – and this is a quietly sad, angry movie whose political concerns remind us of the property crisis here in the UK. [IM]

Office

Dir. Johnnie To

In the crime and caper films of director Johnnie To, there’s always been a rhythmic element to how he composes procedural action or violent executions; were it not for the shakiness of the term’s definition, one might be inclined to incorporate “musicality” when describing something like the climactic shootout mayhem of 2012’s Drug War. As such, it’s not especially shocking Hong Kong cinema's elder statesman has made a foray into the musical genre with Office. Nor is it surprising that this is very much a “Johnnie To musical” in big, bold letters, as this is set around the 2008 financial crash. In 3D! But it’s really fun!

The star-studded cast (including Chow Yun-fat) are great, but the real highlight’s the simultaneously bare-bones and elaborate modernist structures To places them in, production design perhaps best described as a blend of Lars von Trier’s Dogville and Jacques Tati’s Playtime, as incompatible as that sounds. [JS-W]

Room

Dir. Lenny Abrahamson

Joy (Brie Larson) and her five-year-old son, Jack (Jacob Tremblay), live in Room. To the mother, it's a prison cell barely two meters square; for the son, it's the whole universe.

Lenny Abrahamson’s film is a beautiful and humane response to inhumanity. The versatile Irish filmmaker (his most recent work was moving oddball dramedy Frank) cannily presents the world from Jack's point of view, placing the camera at his eye level and keeping the framing tight to introduce us to his tiny world. Jack is happy in his ignorance, but every close up of the haunted Larson brings us back to reality.

Abrahamson works wonders with the actors, getting one of the all-time great child performances from Tremblay, whose vivid voiceover and air of sheltered kookiness can’t have come easy. Equally brilliant is Larson, who’s constantly communicating several conflicting emotions at once. If there’s one flaw, it’s an over-reliance on Stephen Rennicks’ score. We don’t need to hear cloying piano chords to perceive Jack’s wonder at the world or feel Joy’s pain, we just need to glimpse the faces of the actors playing them. [JD]

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