Season 2005/6

Vanity Fair

Mira Nair's Vanity Fair is a far superior version of Thackeray's 'novel without a hero' than is her fellow Indian Gurinder Chadha's rather more radical Jane Austen adaptation, Bride and Prejudice. Perhaps, however, she, too, should have gone the whole hog and given us a modern Becky Sharp making her ruthless way in a selfish, snobbish, hypocritical materialistic modern Britain.

As it is, Nair's decided to encompass most of the novel from Becky's impoverished childhood through her periods of success and rejection, ending on a rather upbeat note that dispenses with Thackeray's astringent dying fall. A triumphant Becky comes to the Raj, doing the sights in a howdah alongside her benefactor, the Anglo-Indian trader Joseph Sedley, at whom she'd set her cap as a young woman.

After playing a succession of manipulative social climbers in pictures like Election and Legally Blonde, Reese Witherspoon is well cast as Becky and gives a spirited performance with a creditable English accent, though she is altogether too likable from the start. Her neglect of her small son, for instance, is toned down, her involvement with Lord Steyne attributed to an unlikely innocence.

She doesn't have to fight for our sympathy, the way the obviously comparable Scarlett O'Hara does. Some scenes come off well, the interruption of the Duke of Richmond's ball before Waterloo, for example, which would be hard to mess up.

Otherwise, the picture resembles a rather routine television costume drama with a cast of familiar British names and pleasant designs. What is missing is Thackeray's authorial voice, depth of character, wit and the feeling that we are watching a film of a great satirical novel.

Sideways

New classics of American cinema don't come along that often, so grab this one with both hands. It's an occasion for the singing of hosannas from the roof of every cinema. Director Alexander Payne has already given us two gems with Election and About Schmidt. This glorious, bittersweet comedy of male friendship and midlife crisis is even better. It's something to be compared with John Cassavetes or Hal Ashby or Woody Allen's Annie Hall; a particular kind of freewheeling film-making that hasn't surfaced for decades.

Sideways is beautifully written, terrifically acted; it is paced and constructed with such understated mastery that it is a sort of miracle. The observations are pitilessly exact and meshed with impeccably executed sight gags and funny lines, and everything is bathed in the solvent of exquisite sadness. Yet its gentleness and humanity do not preclude a mule-kick of emotional power. Audiences at the screenings where I have been present may have heard something like a fusillade of gunshots from the auditorium; it was the sound of my heart breaking into a thousand pieces.

Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church give the performances of their lives, complemented by two outstanding female leads: Sandra Oh and Virginia Madsen. Giamatti is Miles, the divorced English teacher and would-be novelist well into his 40s, who is staring failure full in the face. Church plays his buddy and old college roommate Jack: a handsome-ish actor and incorrigible "pussyhound" whose career washed up after a couple of TV shows 10 years before.

With many a suppressed bachelor's misgiving, he is about to get married, and acquire some rich Armenian-American in-laws who want him to leave showbusiness and come in with them in their fabulously lucrative property business. Jack is still in the process of kidding himself that he can do that and still keep the door open to getting back into movies. For his part, Miles is kidding himself that his ex-wife might still want to make another go of it.

The pair of them, deep in denial about the way their lives are turning out, go on a road trip. It is Miles's "wedding gift" to Jack: he will take him on a tour of the Californian wine country, and teach him about the passion for wine that has taken over his life. Secretly, he is hoping for a little male bonding to salve his wretched loneliness. But all Jack is hoping for is some bedroom action with local women before he has to tie the knot - and Miles cloaks his desolate feelings of betrayal with righteous disgust. All he can do to manage his despair is concentrate on the new love of his life: wine.

Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter ... Spring

Korean director Kim Ki-Duk is best known on the festival circuit for his studies in violence and cruelty, but this delightful, meditative film could not be more different. It is both serene and gripping, and carries a potent and mysterious charge in its visual poetry.

The seasons of a man's life are laid out in an eternal cycle. In Spring, a boy monk lives under the exacting tutelage of an elder in a lakeside hermitage, and is punished for tormenting small animals, a penitence which is to reverberate through his life.

In Summer, grown to a teenager, he is to be consumed with lust for a young woman. "Earthly lust leads to murder," warns the older monk prophetically, and we watch as the seasons advance, and the young man journeys towards a kind of fraught enlightenment.

This is one of the very few films which has a real spiritual dimension; it bears that dimension lightly, and persuasively transmits a Buddhist conviction that time, age and youth are an illusion. A charming and rewarding film.

Kinsey

Condon shows us the growth of Kinsey from a repressive childhood under a deeply religious father (John Lithgow), against whom he rebelled, through his scientific training as a zoologist and taxonomist to his becoming the world authority on the gall wasp.

Kinsey's scientific obsessions are revealed through his collecting a million examples of this minute creature, but classifying them leads him to conclude that 'diversity is life's only irreducible fact'. From this flowed seemingly conflicting impulses - his compassion for the individual and his aim to apply strict scientific methods to the understanding of 'the human mammal'.

In 1922, at the age of 30 and still a virgin, he married Clara, a gifted student (Laura Linney) in his zoology class at Indiana University. Their loving marriage, which lasted a lifetime, floundered on their honeymoon. But the practical Kinsey sought medical advice and this led to him teaching a class on sex and marriage at the university.

He wanted to share his liberation from ignorance with others. This, in turn, inspired the research necessary to answer the questions on sexual behaviour his students put to him. The climax, as it were, was the appearance of his first report in 1948, a determinedly unerotic book full of charts and statistics that became a sensational bestseller and led to a permanent change in the way people regard their sexual activities, revealing how widespread masturbation, oral sex, adultery, premarital sex, homosexuality, and even zoophilia were. It challenged ideas of what is 'normal' and the laws and moral codes that seek to enforce that normality.

The film is good on the world of philanthropic foundations and the groves of academe. Oliver Platt gives a charming performance as Herman Wells, the president of Indiana University, a canny operator in the interests of academic freedom, whether in the good days of the New Deal or the dark ones when McCarthyism cast a shadow over the nation. He stood by Kinsey during 20 years of controversy.

What is most remarkable perhaps is the film's mature view of sexual matters, balancing the serious side with its frequently tragic consequences, and the often comical, even absurd aspects. This it does without prurience or smirking. For example, the disturbing inability of the Kinseys to consummate their marriage is followed by a meeting with a doctor that is simultaneously heartbreaking and hilarious.

Shaun of the Dead

Edgar Wright's horror-comedy film, SHAUN OF THE DEAD, follows the title character (Simon Pegg) through his mundane life in London. Joined by his immature and ever-present roommate, Ed (Nick Frost), Shaun excels at nothing except drinking pints of ale and watching television, which causes friction with his girlfriend, Liz (Kate Ashfield). Before Shaun can save his relationship, however, he's got to fend off a horde of zombies that are slowly taking over the city. Armed with a cricket bat and a vague sense of direction, Shaun must rescue his friends and loved ones, and bring them to the only safe place he can think of - the pub.

Cowritten by Wright and Pegg, SHAUN OF THE DEAD succeeds remarkably well at combining droll British humor with good, old-fashioned zombie cinema. While the movie is often hilariously amusing, it takes its horror pedigree seriously, offering up moments of genuine suspense, and even a healthy dose of gore. Pegg is oddly charming as the put-upon lead slacker, and Frost is appropriately oafish, but the living dead themselves also take up a fair amount of screen time, shuffling and limping in their best Romero form. For lovers of zombie films and other chills-and-chuckles outings like EVIL DEAD II and DEAD ALIVE, SHAUN OF THE DEAD is an instant cult classic.

Photos to Send

In 1954, worled-renowned photographer Dorothea Lange traveled to County Clare, Ireland on assignment for Life magazine.

In her directorial debut, Irish American cinematographer Dierdre Lynch retraces Lange's footsteps, traveling the country roads to visit many of the same people who Lange met nearly a half centruy ago.

Dierdre Lynch is an accomplished news photographer for stations in Manchester, New Hampshire and the San Francisco Bay area. PHOTOS TO SEND is the first film she has directed. It premiered at the Galway Film Fleadh in Ireland, where it won Best Documentary. It has since screened at 20 festivals worldwide, capturing a number of additional awards.

Ray

There are two movies here: One is Ray Charles on stage, the other is Ray Charles in the rest of his life. The movie begins with Ray (Charles) Robinson leaving Georgia to move to Seattle, and his earlier life is told in flashbacks. The flashbacks are effective in showing the childhood traumas and lessons that drive Ray, but I was not engaged. Even Ray's battles with heroin feel a little off-key. Everything is tied up into a nice little package, and you know that you are watching an authorized biopic.

But who cares? The music is worth the journey. Ray recreated some of his earlier music, and remastered other material. You watch Ray's development from a Nat King Cole wannabe into a man who broke all the barriers in the music industry. With Jamie Foxx's incredible performance, it works. You absolutely feel you are watching the young Ray Charles, it is almost impossible to imagine a better performance. The music gave me chills and brought tears to my eyes.

The House of Flying Daggers

Zhang Yimou has only just finished seducing us with his gorgeous extravaganza Hero. Now, almost without missing a beat in his career, he has conjured another extraordinary, swoonworthy spectacle. This martial-arts romance delivers what I can only call a narco-exotic rush; it has the power of Hero and the reach of Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon - and might simply surpass them both with its unexpectedly painful and complex love story.

Hong Kong megastar Andy Lau plays Leo, a police captain in AD 859, the era of China's failing Tang dynasty. With his fellow officer Jin (Takeshi Kaneshiro) he is forced to battle a secret society, the Flying Daggers, dedicated to overthrowing the government. Neither man appears able to credit sensational new intelligence in their possession: that one of the Daggers' most dangerous agents is Mei, a beautiful blind dancing girl, exquisitely played by Zhang Ziyi, who is fast becoming the It Girl of Asia and probably the rest of the world as well. The two men close in on Mei, and their triangulated relationship is a fraught drama of double-cross and triple-cross, where nothing is as it seems, and whose impostures conceal a passionate, tragic love story.

When the truth about this love is revealed, it sheds a startling, retrospective light on the movie's opening scene - which heaven knows was jaw-dropping enough in the first place. The two agents turn up individually at a house of ill-repute, the Peony Palace, to watch Mei dance: a piece of choreography turning into a thrilling fight scene between Mei and Leo that had audiences gasping and cheering both times I've watched the film. The Peony Palace itself is one of the most remarkable movie sets I've ever seen: massive in scale, attended by hundreds of supporting artists in full costume, and sumptuously and intricately designed with ostentation that goes beyond vulgarity or absurdity. I just wanted to step through the screen and wander around this incredible, dream-like place. (Has this set now been demolished? Can it not be preserved for posterity? If so, it would be a real tribute to production designer Huo Tingxiao and art director Zhong Han.)

We are then treated to horseplay and swordplay in outdoor locations: a forest, a wheatfield and an open plain which with superbly achieved, painterly craft becomes a winter snow-scene. Bamboo canes are chopped down with stroboscopic brilliance to form palisade-cages and improvised spears. The Flying Daggers themselves are a dedicated band of men and women who are very handy with the airborne silverware. If I had any quarrel with the film, it is that these scenes in which we are given a dagger's eye-view as the weapon whizzes through the air, locked on to a hapless target, become a little bit repetitive. These reservations evaporate, however, with the emotional heat of the final moments and the sheer escapist enjoyment the film provides.

Vera Drake

The film is set in late 1950, the age of austerity, a sad, dreary time when rationing was still on, a minor black market thrived, Labour's brave new world was coming unstuck and the Korean War had just brought about an extension of national service. The eponymous Vera (Imelda Staunton) is a kindly north London cleaning woman aged about 50, whose cheerful response to every situation is to say: 'I think you need a nice cup of tea, dear.'

Married for 27 years, she lives with her husband Stan (Phil Davis), who works in his brother's motor repair shop, and their two grown-up children, Sid (Daniel Mays), a tailor, and the shy Ethel (Alex Kelly), a lamp-bulb tester in a small factory. Everything is specific and accurate, designed to recreate the world in which the film's dirty little secret and its concomitant moral dilemmas are situated.

In addition to her cleaning work, Vera has an unpaid sideline as an abortionist, which she has pursued for more than 20 years to help girls in trouble. She's a comforting presence, works efficiently and believes herself to be carrying out a social duty.

This is a thoughtful film, provocative without starkly presenting itself as a conventional problem play. It captures our class-bound country at a revealing juncture. It's also clearly a rather personal work for Leigh. He was seven at the time Vera Drake is set and it carries the dedication: 'In loving memory of my parents, a doctor and a midwife.'

The Edukators

Hans Weingartner's engaging feature from Germany is part suspense thriller, part satire on lost 1960s ideals. Two anti-globalisation protesters Jan (Daniel Brühl) and Peter (Stipe Erceg) hug a boyish secret to themselves. They have a hidden life as an anarcho-situationist duo calling themselves the Edukators, using Peter's skills as a former alarm-system engineer to bust into big houses - not to steal anything or hurt anyone, but just rearrange the bourgeois furniture, leave taunting messages and generally mess with the rich folks' heads. Then a woman comes between them, the beautiful Jule (Julia Jentsch); a job goes horribly wrong and the three of them get stuck with having to kidnap a glowering plutocrat who turns out to be a lapsed member of the radical vintage, and whose curdled idealism is a scary message from the future.

Should they face up to their destinies as radicals and execute him - or are they just too softcore? It's well acted, especially by Brühl (known for Good Bye Lenin!); the break-in scenes will leave fingernails pretty closely bitten, and the political and generational rancour between jailers and captive is nicely managed too. I couldn't help feeling, though, that if the Austrian director Michael Haneke had been in charge, he would have done something a lot more extreme with the ending.

Downfall

Der Untergang tells of the Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler's final days in a Berlin bunker during the closing days of World War II. As the Soviet army circles Berlin and ferocious street fighting ensues above ground, the Nazi high command conducts its business in the infamous, neatly appointed bunker under the Reich chancellery. It's as if hell was on earth and Satan's private quarters buried beneath. This is the end of what one character calls '15 years of madness'.

Hitler's demise and the fall of Berlin has been the subject of numerous films over the years, but here, finally, is a German filmmaker's take on that country's most cataclysmic event of the past 100 years. Dramatically, Der Untergang works with great effectiveness as the Fuhrer's world slowly crumbles around him. Those closest to him, including Albert Speer and Joseph Goebbels, are wrought with conflict while Hitler himself clearly begins to lose his grip on reality. The Sekt-quaffing officers and sieg-heiling party officials dare not contradict their leader’s increasing fantasies of success in his presence, but alone they have just one topic of conversation: how best to commit suicide. They are Hitler's willing self-executioners.

At the centre of the film is the towering, guttural, authentic performance of Bruno Ganz (Wings of Desire), who not only bears an uncanny resemblance to Hitler, but manages to both absorb and emanate the seething mass of contradiction that this most destructive of historical figures must have been.

Oliver Hirschbiegel's film has been criticised for 'humanising' Hitler. It does precisely this – and makes him seem, in consequence, far more grotesque and sulphurous than any of the newsreel documentaries on TV. It restores to him “evil's banality”, in Hannah Arendt's phrase, and its silliness and cheapness. Any movie that removes the great dictator from the horrors of the camps and places him in a situation in which he is history's biggest loser, risks conferring, if not tragedy exactly, then the pathos of a cut-price Götterdämmerung. But Hitler has never looked more noisome, more like a tatty charlatan. If anything, it is the SS on whom the film goes relatively easy, although they never appear anything other than chillingly pompous.

Perhaps the most uncomfortable taboo that Der Untergang breaks is having Hitler played with gusto by a German-speaking actor (although Bruno Ganz is actually Swiss). He shows that shouting and raving was where Hitler's real identity lay, even in private. There was no fascinating 'real' Hitler, no charming statesman or brilliant visionary or tactician. Brooding over his toytown model of Germania with Albert Speer, he is just a petulant, capricious child who has imposed his will on everyone around him and created a system to enforce it. He alternates between moments of kindness and outbursts of anger in which he rants against the world, denouncing his closest associates as traitors and calling his generals cowards.

Screenwriter and producer Bernd Eichinger devises some very queasy moments, particularly the Goebbels's six blonde children taking tea with 'Uncle Hitler' and singing German folk-ditties to cheer everyone up. It is a Von Trapp nightmare that concludes horrifically. And there are also some frankly comical moments; for instance when Himmler, treacherously contemplating making peace overtures to the advancing Americans, wonders whether he should greet Eisenhower with a handshake or a 'Sieg Heil'.

Insofar as there is a moral centre to the film, it resides in the person of Hitler's young personal secretary, Traudl Junge, on whose memoir, Until the Final Hour, it is partly based. The film concludes with interview footage of the real-life Junge confessing, as an old woman, that she finally came to admit that her extreme youth was no excuse for following Hitler.

Der Untergang is a sombre, intelligent piece, a long, riveting study of a nation at the mercy of a poisonous ideology and a charismatic fanatic who has led them to the brink of an abyss.

A Very Long Engagement

Jean-Pierre Jeunet, a film-maker best known hitherto for whimsy and surreal tricksiness, has combined elements of both these films in his outstanding A Very Long Engagement. Audrey Tautou, star of Jeunet's Amélie, plays Matilde, a young Breton orphan determined to discover whether her lover and childhood sweetheart, 19-year-old infantryman, Manech (Gaspard Ulliel), actually died after being sentenced to death for self-mutilation in 1917.

The movie is based on a novel by Sébastien Japrisot, a writer best known for his thrillers (Costa-Gavras's The Sleeping Car Murder is based on a book of his) and, in fact, this is a detective story. This is not in itself entirely new. In the years after the Second World War, there were a number of thrillers that turned on mysterious wartime incidents being investigated in the postwar world - Fred Zinnemann's Act of Violence, for instance, and, in a more lighthearted vein, Stanley Donen's Charade. But A Very Long Engagement is altogether more complicated than these and its meaning goes to the heart of the conduct of the war.

It's a remarkably rich movie, full of detail, and it grips and entertains like a detective story while never losing sight of the horrors of war. The sequences of artillery bombardment of the trenches and of soldiers being mown down by machine-gun fire are among the most terrifying and viscerally affecting ever filmed.

There is an astonishing visual set piece in a vast barrage balloon hangar being used as an emergency hospital. During a German aerial assault, a tethered balloon breaks loose and moves slowly upwards towards an unexploded bomb lodged in the roof.

Jeunet, his cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel and his production designer Aline Bonetto have created distinct visual styles for the various areas and time periods. Brittany and the French countryside are bathed in an idyllic golden glow, all primary colours have been virtually drained from the trenches and battlefields, while the bustling streets of Paris, most notably the re-creations of the vegetable market at Les Halles and the traffic in the Place de l'Opéra, are given the look of tinted postcards. Altogether a very satisfying movie, though some may find the end a trifle abrupt.

The Chorus

Told in nostalgic flashback, the film has a famous French conductor look back from the present to 1949 when his life was transformed by a new teacher, Clément Mathieu (Gérard Jugnot), at a dreary state reform school for misfits, orphans and difficult boys in the Auvergne. The short, bald Mathieu cuts a sad figure in his ill-fitting clothes, but he has a belief in the lads' potential that is not shared by his cynical colleagues or the director, a sadistic, unbending disciplinarian.

His passion is music and gradually, and not without serious setbacks, he forms a choir. The boys are given a sense of hope, comradeship and beauty, and he has them, as Bing would say, 'going my way'. It's a likeable, warm-hearted, manipulative film, predictable right down to the finale (which is almost identical to the end of Julia Roberts's recent venture into pedagogy, Mona Lisa Smile). Among the most popular French pictures of the past couple of years, it might well have been called 'Au Revoir, Monsieur Pommes Frîtes'.