Posts Tagged ‘Cannes’
Fish Tank *****
Mia (the mesmerizing Katie Jarvis) is a typical 15 year-old girl who lives with her single mother Joanne (Kierston Wareing), little sister Tyler (the extraordinarily authentic Rebecca Griffiths) and their innocuous dog, Tennents. These girls, to borrow from Peter Bradshaw, “have learned from their mother mannerisms of pre-emptive scorn and rage to cover up perennially hurt feelings”. But Mia has dreams, fulfillable desires which afford her an optimism that shines out of this bleak suburban London landscape. She dreams of freeing a beautiful, gaunt mare chained to breeze-block by her owners, two intimidating and obnoxious young men and their more benign brother; of escaping her body, her emotions and her life through modern dance, the compulsion through which she bares her soul; of intimacy, fatherly or sexual, to free deep untapped reserves of passion. Yet all measures to these ends are misdirected, falter or come to nought.
Fish Tank is an extraordinary, touching, melancholic film in which Andrea Arnold manages to execute some of the harder tropes of social-realism with a tone of honest optimism, yet without resorting to a hint of sentimentality or cliché. There is beautifully choreographed photography, playing heavily on stark contrasts (though I would contend that the vast openness of the outdoors, set against often claustrophobic interior, manifests just as threatened and crumbling a beauty as in the life and soul of Mia). The city is never-ending, as we follow over Mia’s shoulder along broken sidewalks, across flyovers, the towers always behind and cars in the foreground. The only real escape from the sprawl comes in the form of a trip to the countryside with mum’s boyfriend, Connor (Michael Fassbender, whose tremendous performance appears so effortless as to become invisible).
Antichrist ****
Grief. Pain. Despair. Lars von Trier: Antichris♀. Prologue. As an unnamed couple (Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe) indulge in operatic, earth-shattering, slow-motion sex, their son tumbles out a window and plummets to the pavement with arms spread like wings of an angel. The high-gloss black and white, snow-globe aesthetics are a sarcastic snub to the highbrow stylization of grand opera. The child paused to watch his parents’ intercourse, and as they refused to acknowledge him, he resolved to take a leap: he put in great effort to arrange an elevated runway, across a table adorned with figurines labelled Grief and Pain and Despair. There is nothing accidental about Lars’ set-up. Act one. After spending some time in a psychiatric ward, tentatively exploring the early stages of grief, we enter the realm of a subverted Book of Genesis. The couple take refuge in their forest cabin, named Eden. He uses torturous psychoanalysis to drive her through grief; she is riven by guilt, as though it were the full weight of original sin, as borne by Eve. Rather than facing her fears, he immerses her in them. Act two. She wades through excruciating psychobabble, conflicted copulation and frustrated masturbation. Haunting symbols emerge in the guise of savagely mutilated animals. The fox speaks. We discover that she used to visit Eden alone with her child, to work on her thesis. A thesis on the concept of nature in archaic and pseudo-mythic acts of violence against women. She apparently gave up because he dismissed her subject as glib. Act three. She comes to the anticipated conclusion that her sexuality is responsible for the death of her son; internalizes her studies and becomes the embodiment of the evil she sought to critique; descends into psychotic sexual hysteria. Unbearably graphic violence ensues. Epilogue. Faceless souls of female subjects of violence ascend through the forest, spirits freed.
