list.co.uk/fi lm Reviews | FILM
DRAMA IN THE HOUSE (15) 105min ●●●●●
A sparkling black comedy, François Ozon’s In the House is a fascinating exploration of creating and consuming fiction. Fabrice Luchini plays jaded teacher Germain, married to gallery curator Jeanne (Kristin Scott Thomas). Setting his students a simple ‘what did you do this weekend?’ assignment, Germain is fascinated by the essay delivered by Claude (Ernst Umhauer), which articulates his desires to infiltrate the household of a bourgeois classmate. Soon, in encouraging the efforts of this teenager, Fabrice and his wife become strangely compelled by the youth’s audacious storytelling. In the House effortlessly shifts between genres,
tones and styles, thus becoming an inquiry into this gifted if erratic filmmaker’s career. It’s crammed with amusing references to previous Ozon films (not least Sitcom, Angel and Swimming Pool) and to literature (Germain’s bed-time reading includes Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents).
Shot and edited with cinematic flair, the visual motifs of windows and mirrors, and the key location of an immaculate suburban house that opens on to a park, help blur the lines of reality and fantasy for characters and spectators alike. (Tom Dawson) ■ Limited release from Fri 29 Mar.
DOCUMENTARY MEA MAXIMA CULPA: SILENCE IN THE HOUSE OF GOD (15) 106min ●●●●●
The latest documentary from American filmmaker Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Taxi to the Dark Side) is a powerful examination into how child abuse at an educational establishment in Wisconsin exposes the rottenness at the very highest levels of the Vatican City.
Father Murphy was a predatory paedophile at St John’s School for the Deaf, who from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s abused hundreds of pupils. Courageously, several of his victims reported the abuse they suffered, with a civil lawsuit taken out against the Archdiocese of Milwaukee in 1975. But rather than being defrocked, Murphy was simply moved to another parish, whose inhabitants were kept in the dark of his past behaviour.
Incorporating interviews with non-hearing victims of Murphy’s pederasty, alongside some superfluous dramatic reconstructions, Gibney illustrates how the efforts to cover up priestly paedophilia stretch all the way back to Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI himself. Unsurprisingly, no representative of the Vatican was prepared to be interviewed for Gibney’s justifiably damning film. (Tom Dawson) ■ Limited release from Fri 29 Mar.
BRAZILIAN DRAMA NEIGHBOURING SOUNDS (15) 131min ●●●●●
The current resurgence in Brazilian cinema throws up a major work in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Neighbouring Sounds, an allegorical tale of class conflict set in a Recife condominium. Upwardly mobile estate agent João (Gustavo Jahn) invites his latest flame Sofia (Irma Brown) back to his apartment for sex, but upon leaving the next morning, they discover that her car has been broken into. As the building’s ageing concierge is ‘pensioned off’ for sleeping on the job, the incident provides the trigger for the well-heeled residents to hire a security firm to guard their plush apartments. The danger, however, seems to come from within the community as well as from without.
Filho’s film is a genuine ensemble piece, taking the community as a central character and delivering an artfully split focus on several individual stories; it’s only in the final scene that the film’s point becomes clear. Until then, there’s a series of well-observed, sometimes surreal segments, with humour and menace behind closed doors. Neighbouring Sounds is a clever, original drama of social concern, with trivial incidents barely masking deep social fissures. (Eddie Harrison) ■ Limited release from Fri 12 Apr.
THRILLER THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES (15) 140min ●●●●●
Re-teaming Ryan Gosling with his Blue Valentine writer/director Derek Cianfrance, The Place Beyond the Pines is a thriller with a higher pedigree than many, with impressive support from Bradley Cooper, Eva Mendes, Rose Byrne and Ray Liotta. The result is an oddly broken-backed tale, with three distinct chapters and no central character to carry the narrative. The ambition, to tell a complex story over two generations, is laudable, but the result isn’t entirely satisfying.
Cianfrance’s story opens with a remarkable tracking shot
following Luke (Gosling) as he dresses, crosses a packed fairground floor, mounts a motorcycle and takes part in a death-defying stunt. Afterwards Luke reconnects with old flame Romina (Mendes), who is taking care of an infant son Luke didn’t know he had. Vexed with his responsibility, Luke takes up robbing local banks on his souped-up bike, but his daredevil escapes bring him to the attention of ambitious cop Avery Cross (Cooper), who has a young son of the same age. The Place Beyond The Pines has a surprising plot twist which
derails the narrative, while a second twist, which moves the action fifteen years forward in time, is much less convincing. It’s a disappointingly sloppy approach given that the first act of Cianfrance’s drama is so compelling, with Gosling’s charismatic performances as the scuzzy hero offering a variation on his savage chauffeur in Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive. Cooper, Mendes and an underused Liotta all perform well, but there’s a fatal flaw in Cianfrance’s execution: capturing how the sins of the fathers are passed on to the sons may make for great drama on paper, but The Place Beyond The Pines never manages to find an emotional pay-off from its grand design. (Eddie Harrison) ■ Limited release from Fri 12 Apr.
21 Mar–18 Apr 2013 THE LIST 63