On 4K HD - David Hare swoons over PARIS TEXAS (Wim Wenders, 1984) and adds a thought about THE THIRD MAN (Carol Reed, 1949)

Direct from Paree aujourd’hui.

Wenders’ Paris Texas in a new 4K 2024 restoration. I have the earlier 2022 Criterion and honestly wondered how much better this could get.

 

It is amazing. The clarity’s more film-like than ever. Depth and grain are like velvet. You get the feeling from watching this 4K that Robby Mũller was really falling in love with the super clean light of the Texas locations. The 2014 version which was the basis for previous discs managed all of that, but the new 4K with HDR/DV seems to capture the real “bloom” of Eastman Kodak stock (perhaps the “Vision” line.) There is a feeling of textural refinement that seems to cocoon each image, regardless of the striking slices of colour that constantly play with the eyes. 

 

If you are thinking about making a move to 4K this might be a decider, along with next month’s 4K remaster of The Searchers.

 

I bought the Carlotta release because they usually get all their encodes from David McKenzie. This release is only enabled for English French and German territories and comes with the expected language and audio options, including a totally gorgeous 5.1 mix which knocks the Ry Cooder score outta the room. 

 

Madman is releasing a version of this next month in Australia, but for reasons I cannot comprehend only in DVD and Blu-ray formats. But that’s their nightmare I guess. 

 

Oh, the Canal disc of the Carol Reed’s The Third Man picture… that’s another McKenzie encoding and is, if it could be possible, even more refined and texturally cinematic than the Canal/Criterion Blu-ray of two years ago. 

 

Worthy distractions from the circus that is now becoming the slow death of the American Empire.

The Current Cinema and Streaming on Apple TV, Amazon Prime and others - Rod Bishop recommends RETURN TO SEOUL (Davy Chou, France, South Korea, Cambodia, Belgium, Germany, 2022)

Carlo Battisti in Umberto D; Harold Russell in The Best Years of Our Lives; Haing S. Ngor in The Killing Fields; Jay Davidson in The Crying Game; Bjork in Dancer in the Dark; Barkhad Abi in Captain Phillips; Sasha Lane in American Honey; Yalitza Aparicio in Roma; Quvenzhané Wallis and Dwight Henry in Beasts of the Southern Wild. 

All non-actors acclaimed for their first screen performance. Ji-Min Park in Return to Seoul stands with the best of them.

In fact, a large number of the characters in this film are played by first-time actors, but you’d never guess. In the lead role, playing an adopted Korean brought up in France, but returning to Seoul in her late twenties to search for her biological parents, Ji-Min Park is so authoritative and commanding you’d never guess it was the first time in front of cameras for this established visual artist.

Her character Frédérique (“Freddie”) Benoit can’t speak a word of Korean and in the first couple of scenes, she relies upon the French-speaking Seoul residents Tena (Guka Han) and Dongwan (Son Seung-Beom) to guide her towards Seoul’s leading adoption agency.

Ji-Min Park, Return to Seoul

There she finds a lot of red-tape restrictions and at one-point asks why the agency spends more time protecting the biological parents than it does helping the adoptees.

When she does make contact with her father and his new family, the culture-shock is overwhelming and the headstrong Freddie is sent into a spiral of clashing emotions.

Writer-director Davy Chou, a French-Cambodian, has described his film as “two different sides of a broken history”, and Return to Seoul follows Freddie through many challenging changes in her personality. There are several time-jumps and, at one point, she grapples with her new career selling missiles (“for peace, not war”) while confronting the often clinging and controlling expectations of her French and Korean families.

Ji-Min Park is outstanding in the role. A lot of her changing emotional states are conveyed by looks, glances, stares and grimaces: visual non-verbal communication that is unique to the cinema. When done right, as it is here, the film develops an explosive power.

Ji-Min Park, Davy Chou

There are interviews with Ji-Min Park and Davy Chou on You Tube that are almost as entertaining as the film. Chou recounts how just prior to the shoot in Korea, Park asked for a meeting to discuss her character Frédérique. She had taken notes for almost every scene she was to be in, citing sexism and the male gaze among her concerns. 

“I told him if we can’t work together, hand in hand, I can’t be in the movie because I can’t do something I’m politically ashamed of. It’s impossible…I was fighting for the creation of my character”.

She took to the screenplay’s second section, telling Chou that Frédérique’s sexiness, blond wig, short stockings and short dresses were a cliched depiction of young Asian women and represented “the hypersexualized, objectified woman that you have in your fantasy”.

Elsewhere Park has said: “There are no more roots. The violence that a child can feel, when the culture, the language, everything is different. I think it’s like a trauma…it’s also something that I can understand, when you feel that you belong to a society, but you don’t look like, for example, French society. All my experiences as an Asian woman living in France, that’s helped. It’s sad to say that all the violence that I can feel everyday helped me to play that role”.

Selected for Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2022, Return to Seoul failed to win any awards. 

Must have been a hell of a year on the Croisette.

*************************

Return to Seoul is screening in Sydney exclusively at the Golden Age Cinema in Surry Hills. Next screenings on Sunday 30 July and Tuesday 1 August.  CLICK HERE to book or check session times.

GIORGIO MANGIAMELE'S DAY - The Italian Cultural Institute (Sydney) pays tribute to a pioneer Italian-Australian film-maker

Giorgio Mangiamele

The Italian Cultural Institute is pleased to present, in collaboration with Palace Cinemas and the N.F.S.A. (National Film and Sound Archive) an event dedicated to the Italian-Australian director, Giorgio Mangiamele's Day.

 The tribute will take place at the Chauvel Cinema in Paddington on 22 July 2023 commencing at 4.00pm. After a greeting by the director of the Institute, Paolo Barlera, there will be a screening of Ninety Nine percent (1963). This will be followed by a panel discussion focusing on the various aspects of Mangiamele's filmmaking, his contribution to the Australian film industry and the social issues of his films. The panel will include Gino Moliterno and  Geoff Gardner & Quentin Turnour from Cinema Reborn. 

 

After the round table and a brief convivial break, the public will be able to attend a screening of Clay (1965). Clay was the official Australian entry in the Cannes Film Festival competition in its year of production, a rare honour for an Australian film to this day.

 

In the post-war period, after almost twenty years of monopoly by Anglo-American productions, between the 1950s, 1960s and the early 1970s, two films that have now become "cult"  attractions appeared. Both of them narrate the Italian migrant epic journey in Australia: They're a weird mob (1966 ), an Anglo-Australian production directed by Michael Powell based on a novel by John O'Grady writing as Nino Culotta, and the Italian Bello onesto emigrato Australia sposerebbe compaesana illibata (A Girl in Australia, 1971) by Luigi Zampa with Alberto Sordi and Claudia Cardinale in the lead roles.

 

In the same period one name stands out above all others for the contribution given to the emerging Australian film industry and downunder productions that see Italians as protagonists, there was as well the cinema of Giorgio Mangiamele.

 

Based in Melbourne and filming on the streets of the suburbs which became home for tens of thousands of Italian immigrants, all of Mangiamele's film-making is characterized by, in the words of critic, historian and film-maker Graham Shirley a “poetic visual style that combined his already evident humanism with the ability to capture the inner life of his characters. His films represented the isolation, alienation and encounters with racism that could be part of the experience of migration to Australia in the 1950s and 60s“.

 

In Ninety Nine percent, his only comedy, Mangiamele tells the tragi-comic story of the father of a little boy, a widower who in order to appease the criticisms of the boy's School Principal who accuses him of not paying attention to the boy, decides to put an advertisement in the newspaper looking for a woman to marry him and help him support his child.

Clay tells the story of an escaped prisoner who finds shelter in a bohemian  community. His arrival of the intruder unleashes wild passion and jealousy among the small close-knit community.

 

After studying Fine Arts in Catania, Film Production at the Scientific Police of Rome and Journalism at the Pro-Deo University of Rome, Giorgio Mangiamele (1926-2001) arrived in Australia as a migrant in 1952. The following year he began to shoot the his first  film, The Contract (1953). This and his subsequent five films Unwanted (1958), The Brothers (1958), two versions of The Spag (c.1960 and 1962) and Ninety Nine Per Cent (1963) focused on the difficulties faced by migrants in the process of integrating into the new country. From the second version of The Spag onwards, Mangiamele developed his own particular style which critics define as the ability to transpose poetry onto the film material he produced. This style, developed extensively in his only comedy, Ninety Nine Per Cent, reached its most perfect form in Clay (1965), which represented Australia at the 1965 Cannes Film Festival. 

After Clay, Mangiamele had significant difficulty raising funds for the types of films he wanted to make. His science fiction film Beyond Reason(1970) for example, failed to break into the commercial circuit despite distribution by Columbia Pictures, and his final films were promotional and educational documentaries for the Papua New Guinea Information Bureau. However until his death, Mangiamele never stopped writing and planning further feature films.

 

Giorgio Mangiamele leaves a lasting legacy not only as a courageous and determined film poet, but also as someone who continued to make fictional films at a time when many in the Australian film industry considered it impossible. The National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra has paid tribute to Mangiamele by restoring five of his films and initiating and collaborating on the production of the Ronin Film DVD boxset Watch a Trailer of Giorgio's work

 

The scene of the newborn Australian film industry was dotted with Italian names. Without wanting to dwell here with detailed information that can be found in the writings of Gaetano Rando and Gino Moliterno. Humbert and Antonio Pugliese, Ernesto Crosetto, Joe Valli, Ettore Siracusa, Charles Zolli and Armando Lionello have all made significant contributions.

 

 

For Bookings Click Here

 

 

The Current Cinema - Janice Tong discovers a film with no simple answers - CLOSE (Lukas Dhont, Belgium/Netherlands/France, 2022)

Heartbreak and silence

Eden Dambrine (Leo), Émilie Dequenne (Remi's mother)
Gustav de Waele (Remi) Close

Belgian filmmaker Lukas Dhont’s follow-up from Girl (2018) took the Grand Prix at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival.. At first glance – the film’s tone is joyous: gameplay, running through fields of flowers – pink, orange and red dahlias – in the height of summer, the world is glorious and new. But this is a film about the breaking apart of a friendship and the fragility of growing up.

 

Two best friends, newcomers Eden Dambrine and Gustav de Waele as Léo and Rémi, (they are just brilliant, especially Gustav as Rémi), are at that age where they are completely unbound by the kind of social consciousness that is de rigueur these days. They hang out together, sleep in the same bed together, tell each other the kind of made-up bedtime stories that a mother would to lull their child to sleep without any self-consciousness. Any kind of physical closeness like holding hands is pure delight in their friend’s company. In the film’s context the two boys haven’t really built up a sexual language yet; let alone their identities. The two families adore the boys; they are like one big family unit; Léo’s brother, Charlie, as protective and jovial towards Rémi as he would his own little brother; Emilie Dequenne (I still think about her debut performance in Dardenne brother’s Rosetta (1999)) as Rémi’s mother and Léa Drucker as Léo’s mother, are both wonderful to watch.

 

Eden Dambrine as Leo in the tragedy of Close 

School starts and on the first day the pair was asked if they were ‘a couple’, or if they even realised that from the way they’re acting, their relationship could be perceived as such. A change occurs, immediately, and as one pushes the other away; without ever stating his intention or the reason for his actions – the hurt inflicted on the other cuts deep and with ruinous consequences. 

 

What I found devastating was that despite all the woke activism, the space for friendships that are as intense as the one experienced by these two young boys gets to be scrutinised by others who play no part in knowing their bond. And yet, just like that, this bond is savagely broken. 

 

 Gustav de Waele is sensitive and bright as Remi

My only criticism of the film is that it invested in the aftermath that followed. All the beauty that has gone before is wiped out. And yes, I understand this is true of real life – and perhaps that is how cruel the world that is all too ready to heal behaves: Rémi is remembered in a generic way by his classmates; the mother’s forgiveness; Léo’s confession and guilt. Everything that could be left unsaid was ‘said’ (by this I mean the overplay of the emotional rollercoaster) when you just want silence. The undercutting of a life, and I could only imagine that this has happened to families around the globe – is personal, cruel, unnecessary – and paying for a ticket to see this story seems to be in bad taste. Hard to know how to respond to this film, which to its credit neither preached nor explained anything away. There are simply no answers…

The Current Cinema - Barrie Pattison traces the origins of TRIANGLE OF SADNESS (Ruben Östlund, Europe, 2022) and finds much to lament.

"...washed up.." part of the ensemble from 
Triangle of Sadness

I did not enjoy Ruben Östlund’s new Triangle of Sadness any more than I would have enjoyed the first Ingmar Bergman films if anyone had had the nerve to show them here, or I enjoyed L’avventura when it was flavor of the month when it surfaced in 1961 or Bela Tarr’s 2000 Werckmeister harmóniák when it was the buzz entry on the festival circuit. These films are all product of a common aesthetic which says that popular entertainment lacks the substance of high art, the features of which are to be admired when they are imported into movies.

This is case unproven with that cycle and its satellites. How about Triangle of Sadness as the culmination of another line - The DeMille Male and Female with its riotous bad taste, the stunning tedious Rank 1957 The Admirable Crichton/Paradise Lagoon, along with a l918 British Film, a George Schaefer l968 TV movie and Royston Morley’s 1950 BBC production, all adaptations of J.M. Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton. Giving it a 21st century sex change is not that good a disguise. None of the reviews I've seen note Triangle of Sadness' obvious derivations, which is revealing. 

We kick off with a casting call for male models (above) demonstrating the “triangle of sadness”, the severe look required for upmarket underwear commercials (recall Zoolander) and shift into beautiful people Harris Dickinson (Richard Attenborough in See How They Run) and Charlbi Dean scrapping over her manoeuvring him into paying for their meal at the up market restaurant. This airhead couple could have wandered in from a Tilda Swinton movie. 

We see a yellow waterproof container being rushed by launch to a two hundred and fifty million dollar luxury yacht. It proves to contain Nutella. Our leads have won a cruise run by the no-nonsense chief steward Vicki Berlin, while Captain Woody Harrelson, who obviously wasn’t being paid enough to hang about for the whole movie, ties one on in his cabin. Either from inattention or malice, he sets the date for the Captain’s Dinner for the evening of the one batch of bad weather predicted. Meanwhile, the mainly aged, mainly over-indulged passengers get to exploit the fact that employees are instructed never to say no to them - scenes of the crew piling down the waterslide and Woody ordering the non-existent sails to be scrubbed. 

Rubbish management millionaire Zlatko Buric, who manages to dominate his footage, and Woody, the only ones not nauseous, have a drunken evening - a Russian Capitalist confronting an American Marxist - which is pretty much the level on which this film operates. Meanwhile, effluent and projectile vomit engulf the ship as each of the dinner courses, with a remarkable resemblance to the ones given similar close ups in The Menu, are served. This one keeps on evoking other, better, productions. 

Harris Dickinson, Charlbi Dean 

 

Limiting Iris Berben, once the winning teenage lead of Sergio Corbucci’s 1970 Compañeros, to repeating the phraze “In Den Wolken” endlessly, rips off Vin Diesel in the Guardians of the Galaxy films or maybe Timmy from South Park. 

I did like the elderly Amanda Walker recognising the hand grenade (“It’s one of ours!”)  which goes with the arrival of pirates (a survivor is indignant when they assume he was a pirate because he’s black) What happened to all those patrolling armed guards? We get the last shall be first stuff pivoting on Philippina toilet controller Dolly De Leon coming to shore in a lifeboat equipped with pretzels. 

 Dolly De Leon (front)

The director’s films seem to be aimed at telling us something about the thin veneer of civilization. Östlund’s The Square was sufficiently disturbing to attract attention. It made a couple of nice points about the arts scene, even if the footage with the wild man at the charity benefit was so conspicuous that it obliterated the rest of the film. Östlund appears to be preoccupied with shirtless fellers. One of the better touches in Triangle of Sadness is Dickinson, surprised at seeing Timoleon Gketsos put off the ship after the complaint that his bare torso caught Dean’s eye. 

The craft aspects from his Euro pudding crew are adequate. They run to five credited donkey painters. Once again it attempts to use fine art disciplines like a fifty, forty, ten colour palette. This all distracts from whatever the film thinks it’s telling us.

As with his predecessors, no one seems to be prepared to challenge Östlund’s status as a serious artist. I scored heaped abuse when I covered a time lapse in The Zombie Brigade with a title. So far, Ruben Östlund seems to be going without reproach for his.

Woody Harrelson

The Current Cinema - Rod Bishop examines The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeois–sea in TRIANGLE OF SADNESS (Ruben Östlund, Sweden and nine other countries, 2022)

Woody Harrelson, Triangle of Sadness

In the second act of this year’s Palme d’Or winner, a group of obnoxious,wealthy passengers on a $250 million yacht, skippered by an unhinged, alcoholic and dysfunctional captain (Woody Harrelson) sit down to fine-dining at the Captain’s Dinner. 

The yacht starts to wallow in a progressively strengthening storm and a lengthy sequence of vomiting and exploding toilets follows. 

Sight gags aside, as the mayhem swirls around them, a Russian businessman, who has made his fortune from manure (“I sell shit”) and the captain take over the yacht’s public address system and drunkenly trade quotations from Kennedy, Reagan, Twain, Thatcher, Marx and Lenin.

Passengers cringe in walkways in vomit-strained life jackets, avoiding floating excrement, runaway tables and other falling passengers, as the captain rants over the PA with “something that I wrote”:

“My government murdered Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Bobby Kennedy and John F Kennedy. My government overthrew good, honest, democratic leaders of the people in Chile, Venezuela, Argentina, Peru, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama and Bolivia. Along with Britain, we carved up the Middle East, creating artificial geographical boundaries and installed puppet dictators. War, itself, became our most lucrative industry. Every bomb that’s dropped makes someone a millionaire. You don’t have to know where those bombs are exploding. You don’t have to see the grieving mothers and the mangled bodies of their children”.

The last few sentences are overlaid with images of a pirate boat armed with grenades and automatic weapons silently approaching the luxury yacht.

So begins the third act, as a handful of these wealthy survivors make it to a tropical island only to discover one of the yacht’s employees, a Filipino “toilet manager”, is the only one capable of catching fish and making a fire.

After the setups, the second and third acts suffer from our ability to telegraph what comes next. But the first act is more intriguing. Two runway models – he and she – are in a relationship. She earns more money than he does (female models do) and she is also a social media influencer with a decent following. When she allows him to pick up the dinner bill one night (she’s distracted and texting), he confronts her about the inequalities in their relationship. The dinner bill dispute escalates and suddenly consumes all of their lives – will they survive this First World problem? Or will a cruise on a $25 million yacht revitalize their relationship?

After his similarly acerbic The Squarein 2014, this social satire from writer-director Ruben Östlund wasn’t universally acclaimed at Cannes. Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian described the film as “an unworthy winner” of the Palme d’Or:

“There were no ideas in it that had not already been aired more subtly, more rewardingly, and yet also more powerfully in his previous film The Square, and it seemed very shallow to me”.

Östlund’s win places him a rare club of dual winners of the Palme d’Or - Coppola, Haneke, Kusterica, Loach, Imamura, the Dardeenes, Sjöberg and August. Does he deserve to be there? Does anyone really care? After all, Godard, Varda, Bertolucci, Tarkovsky and Bergman never once won a Palme d’Or, let alone two.

And the title? The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeois–sea would have been better.

 

  

THE CURRENT CINEMA - A good word for ARMAGEDDON TIME (James Gray, USA, 2022)

 It has to be said that Armageddon Time didn’t exactly get the place throbbing at its opening Friday at the Ritz. My companions thought it ‘slow’ and a well-known Australian producer in the crowd mused about what it is that James Gray has on the Cannes selection panel that seems to get his films an automatic entrée even as they become ever more empty and ponderous.

But I was an enthusiast and part of the enthusiasm was in the way that Gray couldn’t resist what others might call a cheap shot at the Trump family. For, on the first day that Paul Graff enters his new private school, he is accosted by Fred Trump, Donald’s father, and given some quick advice. 

 

Banks Repeta as Paul Graff with Anthony Hopkins as Grandpa

Later that same day Donald Trump’s sister addresses the assembled school, an assembly marked by the schoolkids chanting “Reagan! Reagan!” It’s 1980 and we are in the run-up to the election and this collection of schoolkids comes from the Republican base. Except for Paul, whose family are nightly appalled by Reagan on the evening news and fearful of where he is going to take the country. The school in New Jersey is called Forest Manor (?), near enough to Donald’s secondary school Kew Forest in Queens.

 

In his 3 and half star review in the SMH Jake Wilson mentioned “Armageddon Time is also a political film, tying in with recent events in the US in a surprising way (I assume this is one of the parts of the story taken directly from life.” I guess so…but I think Gray was wanting to get his licks into Trump just for the fun of it.

 

Trump himself is the gift that keeps on giving and novelists, film-makers and everyone else are never going to leave him alone. And he’s going to be around for sometime yet as David Rowe in yesterday’s Australian Financial Review reminded us, via Stanley Kubrick. (Picture lifted from Twitter)

 

Armageddon Time is 'slow' if you think events unfolding gently, gracefully and mostly without outbursts of violence are 'slow', but it’s also about slow dawning discoveries, the greatest being Paul’s discovery of life’s pecking order. While his own family are sensitive to their place in a society where anti-semitism bubbles away, they are conscious that they are above the blacks and they aren’t going to do anything about that beyond be thankful.

 

Some people’s slow is other people’s engrossing.

Screened at Container (Brisbane) Ben Cho revels in the new film by Joao Pedro Rodrigues FOGO-FATUO (WILL-OF-THE-WISP, Portugal, 2022)

Editor's Note:  This film was screened as part of Container, a Brisbane-based film society. More information about Container can be found at https://container.org.au/ 

*******************************************

French Poster for Fogo-Fatuo

Unveiled at this year’s Directors’ Fortnight, Joao Pedro Rodrigues’ latest feature Fogo-Fatuo(Will-o’-The-Wisp) is a strange, singular experience with its sensual finger all over the pulse of a world on fire - our world actually, a world increasingly ravaged by natural disasters, viral plagues and political drama. 

A “musical fantasy” clocking in at just under seventy minutes, it’s a homoerotic adventure deep into the history and culture of Portugal, starting in 2069 (ha-ha) and moving back in time to the early 2010s and then onwards from there until finally returning back to a future Portugal ruled by a black president. 

You don’t need an intimate knowledge of Portugal’s history or terrain to enjoy Fogo-Fatuo but I can only hazard a guess that native Portuguese will find much of the film’s details, which are grounded in a world of that nation's terrain, music and history, resonating more than your average viewer in suburban Australia. Having said that if you’re familiar with Joao Pedro Rodrigues’ extraordinary body of work (spanning documentary and fiction, and sometimes directed with Joao Rui Guerra Da Mata as in the case of this year’s Where Is This Street? Or With No Before or After recently screening at the Locarno Film Festival) you’ll already have a solid sense of the kind of stylistic daring, graphic sexuality and narrative playfulness common throughout his filmography and certainly boldly on display here. 

What is perhaps more readily apparent in Fogo-Fatuo is an eerie tension between form and content that hasn’t been quite as pronounced in his previous features: the images here (cinematography courtesy of the brilliant Rui Pocas) are beautiful, the camerawork precise and meticulous, as is the art direction by Guerra Da Mata ... and yet that very precise form is all fused around a script which is jazzy, some might argue spiky punk too, and loose, full of winking nods to pop culture and political culture in ways that are joyful and deadly serious (at one point Greta Thunberg’s pleas are replicated by a character addressing the audience). This tension between style and narrative sits over the film’s outrageousness, its irony, its comedy, it tinges the proceedings with an unmistakable sense of unease about where we’re headed as a society dancing on the edge of catastrophe. Sure you can chuckle at some of the jokes thrown around, and the guessing game artistic recreations in the firehouse with naked firemen is funny, but the laughs never really can escape the sense a sociological fire alarm could go off any moment and trap our laughs in our throat. 

In an interview Rodrigues gave during the film’s Cannes opening, he made mention of his love for comedies and specifically called out Lubitsch. Crazy as it might sound, the basic premise of Fogo-Fatuo is something you could imagine a 30s or 40s comedy tackling quite well: a young prince of a noble European royal family decides to abandon a life of luxury and go for a job as a fireman, only to fall in love with someone on the job of whom his family would undoubtedly disapprove. Obviously Lubitsch would never go for quite the level of obviousness involving erect trees and erect penises like Fogo-Fatuo does, but he would have had quite a bit of fun with the sheltered and spoilt nobility trying to adapt to the rough and tumble world of firefighting (although there isn’t much actual firefighting in the film, it certainly won’t ever be giving Backdraft or The Towering Inferno a run for their money in the thrills department). 

While a specific number is unavailable, there is a lot of cock on show throughout the film, in all manner of flaccid, semi-erect and fully erect states, as well as one glorious interracial romp in the hills between two firemen that ends in, well, you can use your imagination but it ain’t the firehoses that end up spurting. What this means for the film’s broader chances of release I have no idea but I can only speculate after doing a run of film festivals, and LGBT-themed festivals in particular, it might find its way to a streaming service or on-demand platform. The other hopeful possibility is some distributor pairs it with Where Is This Street? for a Blu-ray twofer - seems like a perfect release for someone off OCN’s roster. 

The cinematic landscape is flooded with offerings but with so much slop out there and the industry itself undergoing momentous change due to Covid, a radical 67 minute queer fantasy musical with hardcore gay sex is something we should be celebrating and supporting for its bold and uncompromising vision, its commitment to a cheeky anarchy of form and narrative that is a rare beast in the wilds of filmmaking today. It might appear minor in run time and modest in production, but I can assure you there’s so much going on and so much to consider about the precarious nature of our world and the world of cinema, it packs more of a punch than many filmmakers could ever hope to achieve with triple the run time and one hundred times the budget.    

Sydney Film Festival and The Current Cinema - Rod Bishop reviews the wild ride of TITANE (Julia Ducournau, France, 2021)

Agathe Rousselle

Organizers of the world’s leading horror and fantasy film festival in picturesque Sitges outside of Barcelona must be bemused. 

They have been at it for 54 years and now one of their own, down the coast at Cannes, has nabbed the Top Gong from the most famous film festival in the world.

Unthinkable is probably close to the mark. After all, even the most venerated of the ‘arty’ horror mob at Cannes like the two Davids, Lynch and Cronenberg, haven’t come within a bull’s roar of taking home the Palme d’Or. 

In 2016, Julia Ducournau’s first film, the cannibalistic-horror Raw, collected the Best New Director award at Sitges. And now here she is, five years later with her second film, landing what is unquestionably the most prestigious recognition a film director can have.

By any standard, it’s a meteoric rise and Titane, by any standard, is a wild ride. 

Vincent Lindon

Body horror at its most expansive, it reconstructs rather than deconstructs notions of gender, sexuality and body-image. Opening with a car accident and a young girl having a titanium plate embedded in her head, Alexia (Agathe Rousselle) grows into a woman who has sex with - and gets pregnant by - a car, while doing a variety of murderous things to a variety of people with her lethal hair pin. And that’s just the first act.

Logic is not a strong suit here, nor is it meant to be. Much of what happens makes no sense and the viewer is asked to take plot contrivances on the chin. Playing the main character, Rousselle was cast in the role after only one short film and some Instagram photos. But as riveting as she is to watch, when she has to pass as a man (a French firefighter!), we don’t believe it and have to watch incredulously while her male firefighting colleagues take forever to twig to the truth. 

It’s reminiscent of the character of “Onion” in The Good Lord Bird, an African-American boy dressed as a girl throughout this Civil War era television series, clearly male and recognized as such immediately by every black he meets – male or female – but not by any of the whites, who are stupid enough to accept his feminine gender. 

Here, Ducournau seems to be saying most men wouldn’t know a cross-dressing, gender-bender, serial killer if they fell over one. There is one exception, however. The firefighting chief Vincent (Vincent Lindon) who wants Alexia (now known as Adrien) to be his lost son. 

Vincent is like a 21^stCentury incarnation of Osgood Fielding III (Joe E. Brown) in Some Like It Hot. When Jerry (Jack Lemmon) reveals he is not a woman and Osgood replies: “Nobody’s perfect”, you can almost hear Ducournau and her characters laughing their heads off.

*********** 

Titane has already screened at the Sydney Film Festival and begins screening at your cinemas across Australia on November 25th.

Julia Ducournau with the Palme d'Or