There is a sketchiness to Martin Provost’s biopic of the self-taught French artist Séraphine de Senlis that no amount of high calibre acting, verdant scenery, and meticulous replication of the era can mask. Yet, even as mere outlines, it remains a remarkable tale. Orphaned at an early age and an impoverished menial labourer for most of her life, Séraphine de Senlis (Yolande Moreau) was also blessed (as she would have seen it) with a burning desire to artistically represent how God’s glory was to be found in the natural world. Painting mostly in secret and only ever using her own ingeniously concocted colours, she was accidentally discovered when one of her employers, Wilhelm Uhder (Ulrich Tukur) – an art dealer and collector of avant-garde pieces – found one of her works and became her patron. Even then, her life mostly remained a hard one, fraught with mental instability.
Moreau is fantastic as the coarse, shapeless, and utterly intense Séraphine – be it her cumbersome movement, her sandpaper voice, or her occasionally cunning or subversive looks. That Séraphine believed that she was in direct communion with a higher plane of existence and that daily life was nothing but a bothersome inconvenience is fantastically well represented in Moreau’s performance – from the sonorous catnaps and late-night caterwauling to the near-ruthless single-mindedness, the devotion to the Virgin Mary, and the serenity that only comes over her when out in Nature. There is one lovely scene where a kindly nun asks Séraphine if she lacks for anything. “Enough time” is the unhesitating response. Read more »
Films by Jean-Pierre Jeunet do not come around that often. However, they are usually well worth the wait, as no one else quite paints his cinematic canvas or brings such childlike magic to an adult world like he does. Perhaps only the computer whizzes at Pixar get close. Moreover, the belated decision to freshen up his familiar style with the idiosyncratic slapstick and gobbledygook of Dany Boon proves to be an astute one. For, along with cinematographer Tetsuo Nagata, they combine to create a work here that is simply overflowing with inventive ideas and lush photography.
Here, though, the unconventional plot sees the little guy take on two large and unscrupulous weapons manufacturers. Boon plays Bazil, a video store clerk whose father was killed whilst clearing a minefield in North Africa. When a freak accident renders Bazil both unemployed and homeless, though, he ends up falling in with an unusual crew of junk scavengers. In the meantime, he also stumbles across the two companies responsible for making the weapons that killed his father and left him with a bullet lodged precariously in his head. With this improbable group of events thus set up, no time is then wasted in coming up with an ingenious but complicated plan for retribution and the rest of the film is all about its wild implementation. Read more »
The play dramatically opens to the juxtaposition of a wedding celebration with a tragedy at sea. Between the two events, on the strandline, stand four women and a teenage boy called Sweeney (Conor MacNeill). The scene may be a chaotic one, but the tensions between the five are obvious and will only grow more so when Mairín (Cathy Belton) insists that the other three women stay with her through a bodiless wake for her drowned husband. For this location, on a remote part of the Co. Antrim coastline, is a place of secrets and certain ways of doing things. It is a world where someone as cultured and sophisticated as Mairín is treated with both hostile suspicion and barely concealed derision.
Mairín, though, is an assertive and somewhat pompous individual in her own right. Indeed, she has already fallen out rather badly with her stepdaughter Tríona (Samantha Heaney) as a result of this. Therefore, it is only a matter of time before she is obliquely locking horns with Clodagh (Eleanor Methven), a rough-looking woman who is the unofficial queen of the area and someone with an undeclared agenda of her own. Completing this motley crew of reluctant bedfellows then is Eileen (Fiona Bell), a cigarette-smoking, hard-drinking airhead. Read more »
A quiet enough week on the new video front, with the dry season perhaps kicking in a couple of weeks earlier than usual. Not to worry, though, as Animal Collective are on hand to kick off proceedings, followed by The Cribs and then Mumford & Sons.
Posted on Thursday, 19 November 2009 by Longman Oz
This distinctly Irish play equally bears some casual resemblances to both the parable of the prodigal son and Arthur Miller’s All My Sons. It begins with a humorous and familiar domestic scene that is filled with the awkwardness and petty jealousies and rivalries that can arise when adult children return to the family home – with partners in tow. However, there are also frequent hints in the play’s lengthy opening exposition that this is a family who has been silently nursing a deep wound for a long time. Consequently, when an indiscreet remark unintentionally tears the scab away, ugly pus oozes out, with years of concealed guilt and unspoken resentment giving way to vocal anger and bitter rebukes.
However, in doing so, playwright Deirdre Kinahan does not appear to be especially interested in either the revelations themselves or what they might signify. Rather, her emphasis is more on demonstrating how one terrible instant can irrevocably alter the lives of many. Teresa (Deirdre Donnelly) has become a nervous wreck; her daughter Niamh (Maeve Fitzgerald) is insecure and testy, whilst Nial (Ronan Leahy) behaves like a furtive nocturnal mammal. Even the calm and sensible Ciara (Kate Ni Chonaonaigh), who was too young to properly understand at the time, has had her entire life overshadowed by this event. Read more »
Posted on Wednesday, 18 November 2009 by Longman Oz
The theatrical manner in which magicians perform their tricks has a twofold benefit. Firstly, it entertains the audience and entices them into a world where cynicism can be suspended for a time. Secondly, it keeps them distracted long enough for the magician to engage in the necessary sleight-of-hand for the trick to work. In Cold Souls, writer-director Sophie Barthes looks to employ a similar technique. Here, she draws the audience into a world where a company that claims to be able to extract a customer’s soul, store it, and replace it any time provokes only mild incredulity in its potential clients. On the other hand, when the cape is finally pulled away from around the bird cage, the latter frustratingly remains empty.
Put another way, there is no time given over here to providing insights into what the soul may be or even if we have one at all. The company’s managing director, Dr. Flintstein (played with deadpan lunacy by David Strathairn), would have us believe that this is because we still know so very little about it. All that he can offer is the ability to remove its heaviness from us. Hence, when an actor (Paul Giamatti playing a neurotic version of himself) turns up in search of a lightening of his spiritual burden, Dr. Flintstein gives his bottle of snake oil a good shake, easily fobs off any attempts by Giamatti to ask probing questions, and soon has his client agreeing to the procedure. Read more »
Soused in tall tales, volatile repartee, and introspective pauses, Sam Shepard’s play takes place on a wooden porch somewhere in backwoods America. At the request of Ames (Stephen Rea), two old friends have met up for the first time in many years. The opening scene finds them sitting outside, steadily knocking back bourbon, and catching up in their own inimitable way. Byron (Sean McGinley) is the milder and more poetic of the two. However, his occasionally flowery language and his regular need for clarification and precision typically get on the nerves of the much more blunt and temperamental Ames.
There then follows an engaging, free-flowing, and quick-fire exchange between the pair of them, with plenty of abrasive remarks and attempts at one-upmanship. Ames would have us believe that he casually picks up so many women that he cannot specifically remember an encounter with a girl well under half his age. Byron boasts of once enjoying a $1,000 glass of whiskey. Through a combination of drink and proximity, though, their confident facades are slowly peeled back to reveal far more vulnerable aspects to each character. Read more »
Director Philippe Lioret describes his film as being an understatement in terms of what is taking place in and around northern French ports such as Calais. Given that he makes allusions in Welcome to a police state existing in France that is bordering on the fascist, one can only wonder about the appalling acts that he was not willing to portray in this film. Indeed, the world that he presents here is one of hungry and dirty economic migrants desperately trying to cross the English Channel, whilst the local police are under orders not just to make life difficult for them, but also for anyone seen to be helping them. Offering someone a lift can bring you to the attention of the police. Harbouring anyone considered to be an illegal migrant can earn you a prison sentence.
Lioret’s plot concentrates on two principal characters. The first is Bilal (Firat Ayverdi), an Iraqi teenager who fervently wishes to be in London with the girl that he loves. The other is Simon (a somewhat wooden Vincent Lindon), a middle-aged soon-to-be-divorced local swimming coach. Simon is approached by Bilal for swimming lessons. When he correctly deduces why the youngster is so keen to learn, it leads to a gradual deepening of the relationship between the two. However, such friendship will not be without great risks for both men. Read more »
Rain Machine is the name of Kyp Malone (TV on the Radio)’s solo project. Back in September, he released his eponymous debut album, from which the song below is taken.
Also featuring this week is new music from Wetdog, The Most Serene Republic, and Hadouken!
Posted on Thursday, 12 November 2009 by Longman Oz
Allegedly born of a criticism that recent films about Romania’s Communist era were better suited to garnering international plaudits than to audience enjoyment, Cristian Mungiu wrote this anthology of short films based on actual urban legends from the country’s so-called “golden age” during the 1980s. Of course, despite such State propaganda, life in Romania was really quite difficult and such humorous anecdotes were one way of making life a little more bearable.
In total, Mungiu wrote six stories. However, they are not all shown together, as a symbolic reflection of life at the time, i.e. you never knew what would be on the shop shelves, etc. from one day to the next. In the version released in Ireland (at least), there are five stories included, each helmed by a different director. They are done in a tongue-in-cheek style and show different aspects of how people tried to survive under a repressive, corrupt, and failed regime. Read more »
Posted on Wednesday, 11 November 2009 by Longman Oz
“Terminus”, in modern day usage, can imply either a starting or a finishing point along a fixed route. In that sense, it has a circular aspect to it, i.e. each ending becomes a beginning. However, the term originally meant a boundary stone – a demarcation point where the remains of a sacrificial lamb would be buried in the ground and a marker placed on top. As it happens, both of these ways of understanding the word can be found in this dark and outlandishly contrived drama from Irish playwright and director Mark O’Rowe.
Told by way of three interlocking monologues, the play takes place over the course of a single night in Dublin city. The three plainly-dressed actors remain in the same position throughout, lit only by horizontally-placed spotlights when speaking, and without any interaction with each other. Their stories are then candidly related to the audience by way of (frequently ribald) rhyming couplets, delivered in ordinary everyday accents. They could easily be personal anecdotes casually told to you by a chance acquaintance in a bar. Except that no one who is sound of mind will ever tell you stories quite like these! Read more »
Directors Jeunet, Chabrol, Gondry, and Audiard are just four of the reasons to be excited about this year’s French Film Festival in the Irish Film Institute, which runs from 19-29 November.
Using, as always, the scientific techniques that some call gut instinct, past precedent, and blind faith, here are a few films that caught my attention!
MICMACS
There are few directors who do imagination and visual effect as well as Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Yes, he of Delicatessen, The City of Lost Children, and Amélie fame! His latest work, MICMACS, has the honour of opening the festival and tells the comic tale of a video clerk who gains an unusual opportunity for revenge against the weapons manufactuers who killed his father, with the help of some (undoubtedly) eccentric characters. The fact that Dany Boon has been cast in the lead role alone is enough to ensure that this will be no strait-laced affair! Read more »
There is always something decidedly irritating about a play that blatantly refers to the work of great writers such as Eugene O’Neill and William Falkner. Perhaps it is the self-aggrandisement that such name-dropping implies. Perhaps it is the insinuation that the audience is too pig ignorant to be able to draw such parallels for themselves without the assistance of some whacking great signposts in the script. Either way, it does take some of the good out of any positive assessment of this work by American playwright Christopher Shinn. That said, though, there is equally some validity to the observation that the play makes at least as many references to mass entertainment vehicles such as The Daily Show and Law & Order. Therefore, on balance, there is conceivably no disruption to the cosmic harmony at all!
Set in New York several years after the destruction of the World Trade Centre, the play examines the events of two different evenings spent in a cold and impersonal-looking apartment. The audience’s interest is initially piqued by an awkward reunion between Kelly (Gemma Mae Halligan) and an unexpected guest, her brother-in-law Peter (Paul Mallon). It is then gradually drip-fed enough information over the course of the play to piece together the dynamics of the triangular relationship formed by Kelly, Peter, and their husband/twin brother respectively Craig (also played by Paul Mallon). He had died a year previously whilst serving in Iraq, but appears now in flashback scenes that depict the last night that he ever spent with Kelly. Read more »
White Knights! Poison Pills! Greenmail! Insider Trading!
Making Money!
The play is called Serious Money. “Shameless greed” would be a more accurate two-word synopsis of this acerbic but utterly riotous portrayal of the City – London’s financial hub – in the late eighties. As with other contemporary works about unadulterated capitalism, be it non-fiction accounts such as Barbarians at the Gate and Liars’ Poker or fictive works such as Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities and Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, Caryl Churchill’s play takes the audience right into the belly of the beast where they are confronted full-on with the roaring, ruthless minions of Mammon.
Loosely structured around two intertwined plot lines regarding, firstly, the hostile takeover of a traditional British manufacturing firm, symbolically called Albion, and, secondly, the investigation into the apparent suicide of a shady deal-maker, the play’s real preoccupation is with assaulting the audience with the fizz and frenzy of high finance, the amoral ambition of the financial markets’ inhabitants, and how this great serpent has coiled itself right around the planet and is now squeezing the life out of the many for the unappeasable enrichment of the few. Mines close in Peru, factories shut in England, and champagne corks pop in London and New York. Read more »
A superficial understanding of contemporary American attitudes would suggest that having a French wife and an abundance of political songs questioning the country’s involvement in places like Iraq and Afghanistan is not likely to make John Vanderslice a terribly popular performer in wide swathes of the USA. Even if this were true, though, one could see how his boyish looks, calm assertiveness, and disarming friendliness might yet win him an encore or two.
Not that John is terribly into such rituals, preferring to carry on playing last night until he hit curfew. Indeed, promoting his new album is apparently not high on his list of priorities either, with only three songs from Romanian Names featuring on the occasionally spontaneous set list, which instead drew eclectically from his prolific output since going solo a decade ago. In a way, this came as a disappointment, as I had really been looking forward to hearing numbers such as Tremble and Tear, Fetal Horses, and D.I.A.L.O. However, with a promise to keep up his annual visits to Ireland, hopefully the chance to hear them will come soon again. Read more »
