A WONDERFUL, warm, witty and insightful cinematic memoir from the godmother of the French new wave, Agnès Varda, this finds the 81-year-old self-styled "little old lady" foraging through her past to show how her life and encounters shaped her films a
nd made her who she is. Varda began her career as a photographer, graduating to film at the ripe old age of 25 when she made her first feature. Having barely seen more than ten films in her life by that point, she instinctively felt that film would afford her an opportunity to marry pictures with words and, with no formal training and an interweaving narrative idea borrowed from a William Faulkner novel, she made La pointe-courte in 1954. In the process she helped usher in the Nouvelle Vague. Loved by that crowd, and subsequently married to Umbrellas of Cherbourg director Jacques Demy, she toured the world with him, and continued to make films and take photographs, becoming increasingly fascinated by the process of memory and how objects and images can be used to construct a fractured, mosaic-like portrait of our lives. She began this in earnest with her sole cinematic collaboration with Demy, Jacquot de Nantes, a biopic of his childhood made shortly before he died of Aids (a fact she reveals here for the first time). After continuing to make increasingly self-reflective documentary-style films such as The Gleaners and I (2000), Beaches of Agnès makes for a natural swansong and she knows it. Effortlessly illustrating how her work has acted as a memory aid for her experiences, she seamlessly blends reminiscences with meaningful scenes from her films that show the extent to which they come from a very personal place. It's magical, engrossing stuff, full of wondrous images, none more so than the scene where she's reunited with two old fishermen who appeared in La pointe-courte as little boys. Projecting the film onto a screen strapped to an old cart, they all watch it while pushing it through the village streets where the film was shot decades earlier. It's a lovely moment that speaks volumes about the lasting impact film can have. What's more, the film is full of such treasures (look out for previously unseen footage of her and Jim Morrison, as well as an early encounter with a very youthful, pre-fame Harrison Ford). This is a gorgeous celebration of an extraordinary life.
PASSCHENDAELE (15)
**DIRECTED BY: PAUL GROSS
STARRING: PAUL GROSS, CAROLINE DHAVERNAS, GIL BELLOWS, JIM MEZON
PASSCHENDAELE is something of a passion project for its star, Canadian TV actor Paul Gross (you may remember him from 1990s Mountie show Due South). Inspired by his grandfather's First World War experiences at the battle of Passchendaele in 1917, he's attempted to honour him by writing, directing, starring in this plodding epic. Blending scenes of muddy, bloody – but hardly Saving Private Ryan-style – battle carnage with a soapy story of love and honour, it yo-yos back and forth between the front lines and provincial life in the jaunty, under-populated environs of Calgary, where Gross's traumatised trooper returns to find his girlfriend's younger brother desperate to sign up for some action to impress the father of the well-to-do girl he loves. Naturally, both end up in the trenches, with typically tragic results designed to pay lip-service to the war-is-hell message of all modern films without risking dishonouring anyone who fought by taking an actual anti-war stance. Unfortunately, while there's no doubting Gross's noble intentions, such hoary story-telling ensures this remains strictly the preserve of Sunday-night TV drama, where its clunky dialogue, bland acting and chocolate-box production values will be less conspicuous.
PANDORUM (15)
*DIRECTED BY: CHRISTIAN ALVART
STARRING: DENNIS QUAID, BEN FOSTER, CAM GIGANDET, ANTJE TRAUE
PAUL WS ANDERSON rains down another cinematic crapstorm with Pandorum, a confused, unfocused (sometimes literally) attempt to make an ideas-driven but mainstream sci-fi flick. On producing duties this time out, he fuses the Solaris-for-dummies metaphysical horror of his almost-good Event Horizon with the jittery, indistinguishable action and tokenistic character development of his Resident Evil and Alien vs Predator films. The result is both excruciatingly boring and utterly shrill. German director Christian Alvart – making his English-language debut after Antibodies – conforms to the Anderson aesthetic of murky blue-hued visuals, out-of-control camera work and thrash metal soundtrack cues, burying any merits to be found in the performances of Ben Foster and Dennis Quaid beneath reams of impenetrable, blood-draining plot exposition. They play crew members of a derelict spacecraft who have awoken early from hypersleep to discover something has gone very wrong with their decades-long, humanity-saving mission to populate an Earth-like planet. Temporary memory loss is the device used to lend proceedings an air of mystery, but it quickly becomes apparent that this condition might have afflicted the film's makers too as they fail to supply a coherent story for all the vicious killer mutants, martial arts-practising scientists and nonsensical plot twists they pile on.
CHIKO (15)
***DIRECTED BY: ÖZGÜR YILDIRIM
STARRING: DENIS MOSCHITTO, MORITZ BLEIBTREU, VOLKAN ÖZCAN
PRODUCED by Head-On's Fatih Akin, this debut effort for writer/director Özgür Yildirim seems similarly determined to explore multicultural issues within the framework of a bracing genre film. Set in a bleak Hamburg suburb, Chiko hews to the low-level-hoods-on-the-make formula established by the likes of Mean Streets and Scarface, but puts a European spin on proceedings by showing how those influences are incorporated into the complex world of its titular protagonist (played by Denis Moschitto). He's a German-Turkish Muslim determined to make his mark on the criminal underworld by auditioning for a job with record producer-cum-drug lord Brownie (Moritz Bleibtreu) by beating up one of his employees. Impressed by such brazen self-confidence, Brownie takes Chiko under his wing, but when Chiko's 'bro' Tibet, a nervy thug with a sick mother to look after, attempts to rip off their new employer, he's torn between fraternal loyalty to his now-marked best friend and his desire to get ahead in the drug trade. Slickly made, but with a plenty of grit and vitality, the film thrives on the magnetic performances of its leads, with an unexpected ending helping the plot transcend some of its more familiar aspects.
THE SPELL (15)
*DIRECTED BY: OWEN CAREY JONES
STARRING: REBECCA PITKIN, PIETRO HERRERA, LAURA O'DONOUGHUE
NAFF and amateurish in a way that only cheaply made, self-financed British productions can be, The Spell is the cinematic equivalent of one of those deluded, tone-deaf warblers who turn up for X Factor auditions genuinely convinced they have what it takes for success. Full of laughably bad dialogue, tortuously constructed drama, am-dram acting and hilarious attempts at conveying terror on screen (watch out for the dead flies and the backwards demon speak), it's like a cover version of a horror movie done by some one who has never actually seen a horror movie. Based on an allegedly true story, it revolves around Jenny (Rebecca Pitkin), a Yorkshire lass with a troubled home-life whose soul is possessed by a demon after her ex-boyfriend casts a spell on her in a misguided effort to win her back. With rubbish attempts to explore the psychological state of its protagonist (cue lots of scenes of her in therapy), unintentionally amusing religious discussions and a fatal lack of genre thrills, writer/director Owen Carey Jones seems to be have been possessed by the notion that he's making a serious, social-realist exploration of this phenomenon, but not by the talent required to come close to pulling off such a task.
