list.co.uk/fi lm Reviews | FILM
BLACK COMEDY THE 100-YEAR-OLD MAN WHO CLIMBED OUT THE WINDOW AND DISAPPEARED (15) 114min ●●●●●
On his 100th birthday, Allan Karlsson (Robert Gustafsson) decides he’s had enough of life in an old folks’ home and gives the staff the slip. As he's preparing to get the next bus out of town, a thuggish skinhead asks him to keep an eye on his hefty suitcase. The skinhead goes to the toilet, a bus pulls up, and Allan climbs aboard, still clutching the case, which is – of course – full of money belonging to a psychotic gangster. Allan narrates this shaggy dog story in a laid-back
tone, as he fills us in on his remarkable, ridiculous life. Obsessed with explosives from a young age, he tells how his skills brought him into the employment of dictators and presidents while all he ever really wanted was a decent shot of vodka.
In a succession of vignettes, this Icelandic feature depicts various interactions between horses and humans that highlight both the symbiosis and the separation between human and animal lives. Against bleak volcanic farmland and unforgiving
seas, encounters with beasts throw off human plans in a variety of bawdy, bloody and even deadly ways, and a small community is shown to progress and falter as much via the vagaries of horse behaviour as through human trial and error. There aren’t that many films that successfully deploy animals as characters, but here the horses really do feel like part of the narrative. Director Benedikt Erlingsson, along with skilled cinematographer, Bergsteinn Bjorgulfsson, has shot them with attention not only to their grace and beauty, but to their personalities and individual mannerisms.
This might all sound like a Swedish Forrest The stories are small and whimsical, the human
Gump with an OAP twist, but 100-Year-Old-Man is a blacker-than-black comedy. It could come off as crass, which is exactly the problem with the bestselling book the film is based on. But this is a rare incidence of a film adaptation that is better than its source, as director Felix Herngren gets the balance of callously dark humour and playful storytelling just right. (Paul Gallagher) performances big and simplistic, and in the almost total absence of dialogue, an irritatingly bouncy score jollies the whole thing along rather too forcefully. But the film’s proximity to its animal cast, its lovely images and its unpredictable extremes of light and dark do make for a pleasingly original experience. (Hannah McGill) ■ Limited release from Fri 13 Jun.
DRAMA OF HORSES AND MEN (15) 81min ●●●●● HISTORICAL DRAMA CAMILLE CLAUDEL 1915 (PG) 95min ●●●●●
Sculptor and artist Camille Claudel spent the last 30 years of her life confined to an asylum near Avignon. Bruno Dumont’s sparse drama focuses on a brief period early in her incarceration and effectively conveys the decades of abandonment and despair that lay ahead of her. It is a quiet heartbreaker of a film made all the more intense by a typically luminous performance from Juliette Binoche.
Dumont allows his camera to linger on Binoche,
who silently expresses the emotional torment of a woman who seems more of a prisoner than an inmate. There are deliberate echoes of Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan Of Arc as we bear witness to her suffering. The decision to cast non-professional, mentally handicapped individuals as Claudel’s fellow inmates veers towards the uncomfortably voyeuristic but is handled with sensitivity. The film is less compelling when it focuses on her brother Paul (Jean-Luc Vincent) and the stern sense of faith that convinces him his sister suffers from an arrogance that is a form of possession. His claims to be acting in her best interests are chilling. Camille Claudel 1915 is a measured, challenging, historical drama but also one of Dumont’s more accessible films. (Allan Hunter) ■ Limited release from Fri 20 Jun.
CRIME COLD IN JULY (15) 109min ●●●●●
You never quite know where you stand with Cold In July and that is a large part of its appeal. Director Jim Mickle has a track record built on twisted genre hybrids like vampire yarn Stake Land and cannibal family drama We Are What We Are. Cold In July throws all kinds of pulpy B-movie ingredients into the blender and invites us to taste the strange brew that emerges. What starts as an overly familiar Cape Fear-style family- in-jeopardy thriller suddenly goes all gun-totin’ grindhouse Tarantino on us, complete with a game Don Johnson enjoying himself as Jim Bob, a pig farmer detective rustling up a tasty bacon sandwich at the drop of a stetson.
East Texas in 1989 is the setting for this dollop of Southern- fried gothic. Woken in the dead of night, mild-mannered store owner Richard Dane (Michael C Hall with a spot-on barnet) shoots dead an intruder. In coming to terms with his actions, he attends the funeral and puts his family in the firing line. The victim’s jailbird father Russel (Sam Shepard in menacing Magwitch mode) is a man of few words and clear intentions. Just when you think you have the measure of the plot and aren’t overly excited, it springs some major surprises that elevate your expectations of what is to come. Cold In July has the grimy look of something from the 1980s
you should really be watching on an old VHS tape, and the more melodramatic elements of the plot barely withstand close scrutiny as it heads towards a grand guignol bloodbath of an ending. The seasoning of black humour and the skills of all three actors combine to make this an entertainingly oddball adaptation of the Joe R Landsale novel. (Allan Hunter) ■ See interview with Don Johnson, page 12. Edinburgh International Film Festival, Fri 20 & Mon 23 Jun. General release from Fri 27 Jun.
12 Jun–10 Jul 2014 THE LIST 57