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Film REVIEWS
DRAMA HOLY MOTORS (18) 115min ●●●●●
Monsieur Oscar (Denis Lavant) is picked up by his driver Celine (Edith Scob) for a day’s work – 9 appointments that will take him across Paris and into the paths of an array of characters. If that sounds vague, it’s deliberate – to say any- more would spoil the joy of Holy Motors, a film that has a surprise tucked around each corner. Anyone who has seen Leos Carax’s previous films (he is perhaps best known for Les Amants du Pont-Neuf starring Juliette Binoche and the controversial and explicit Pola X) will know to expect the weird and the wonderful and Holy Motors has plenty of both. Relishing in visual spectacle it celebrates, in a playful manner, the magic of cinema and the thrill of performance, taking us from the sewers beneath Paris to the rooftops looking out to the Eiffel Tower.
Thrown into the mix are unexpected cameos by Eva Mendes and Kylie Minogue and even the reappearance of the underground dwell- ing creature last seen in Carax’s segment of the triptych film Tokyo. Oh and did we mention there’s even a musical interlude? But Holy Motors isn’t all shallow play,
beneath its imaginative surface of costume and make-believe is a tinge of melancholia and a sense of longing for a lost era of cinema. And in turn, with a futuristic concept at its very heart, it is a film that also muses on what might become of the medium.
Holy Motors is both hugely enjoyable and subtly thought-provoking and while it left Cannes Film Festival this year empty handed, it suggests a return for the director who has been off the radar for over a decade. (Gail Tolley) ■ Selected release from Fri 28 Sep.
RE-RELEASE HUSBANDS (12A) 131min ●●●●●
It’s hard to star rate this one, on account that it veers from the ridiculous to the sublime with little shilly-shallying in between. As married men in the aftermath of a friend’s untimely death, John Cassavetes (starring and directing), Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara ramble around New York and then London, becoming ever more drunk along the way. Perhaps surprisingly given Cassavetes’ rep as the great
advocator of improvisation, this is in the main a very scripted piece, deploying a breed of repetitive hyper-articulate stac- cato dialogue. Scenes unfurl into maddeningly long, struc- tureless ad-libbing duels, in which the actors’ increasingly desperate efforts to sustain some sort of activity achieve the very opposite of naturalism. The film is perhaps at its most affecting not when it indulg-
es its verbosity, but when it gives us these three redoubt- able actors – all gone now – roughhousing on the street in their funeral suits, in the path of puzzled passers-by. (Hannah McGill) ■ Selected re-release from Fri 12 Oct.
APOCALYPSE Archives
Take One Action Film Festival’s artistic director SIMON BATESON names the films he’d save at the end of the world
1 Blood in the Mobile (Frank Poulsen, 2010) ‘Docs are vital in my world. Because dramas take longer to make, docs are often more current, so I know I can influence the story. And often the people involved are jaw-droppingly courageous. None more so, or more moving, than Frank Poulsen in Blood in the Mobile about the conflict minerals we all carry in our pockets.’ 2 Carla’s Song (Ken Loach, 1996) ‘We’ve been chuffed to have Paul Laverty and Ken Loach as patrons these last five years. I’d want to save all their work, but perhaps the first film to switch me on to how western power has figured in other country’s sufferings was Carla’s Song, in which Robert Carlisle plays a bus driver drawn into the US-fuelled conflict in Nicaragua.’
3 Mary Poppins (Robert Stevenson, 1964) ‘I’m very excited about our free screenings of Mary Poppins in Edinburgh and Glasgow next weekend for all ages, with indoor street theatre we’re dubbing ‘the battle of the bankers’. For all the stick we give it, Hollywood can be highly counter-cultural, and in none- more-timely a way for banker Britain than this ‘nanny’ state vs. the free market mash-up.’
4 Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsay, 2002) ‘I just got hitched on Morvern, and am about to live on Uist, so I’m a bit doe-eyed about the West coast right now. But nothing eclipses the mind-altering pathos displayed in Ramsay’s second Scottish masterpiece in which Samantha Morton plays a grown-up foster child in search of home. Unforgettable: a Scottish Ulysses?’ 5 Ulysses’ Gaze (Theodorus Angelopoulos, 1995) ‘Speaking of which: I couldn’t leave Ulysses’ Gaze behind, one of those divine ‘what’s on BBC Two at 1am’ discoveries that sent me down this road. Harvey Keitel stars in Theo Angelopoulos’ lyrical masterpiece about love, memory and cinema in post-communist Eastern Europe. Worth it for the six-minute Lenin-floating-down-the-river scene alone.’ ■ Take One Action Film Festival, which celebrates the people and movies that are changing the world, runs in Edinburgh and Glasgow from Fri 21 Sep to Sat 6 Oct.
20 Sep–18 Oct 2012 THE LIST 67