"Breaking The Waves" (18) Screen at D'Olier Street, Dublin
Unusually, and refreshingly, all five of today's new releases are European, and the pick of them is the Danish director Lars von Trier's emotionally wrenching Breaking The Waves, which took the runner up prize, the Grand Prix du Jury, at Cannes in May. This is by a very long way the most powerful, accessible and intensely heartfelt film directed by von Trier, whose previous work for the cinema, such as The Element Of Crime and Europa, were visually arresting but essentially shallow and pretentious in their studied bleakness.
Breaking The Waves is set in a remote and austere Scottish coastal village in the early 1970s and among a small, tightly knit and deeply conservative Presbyterian community. The film is sub divided into chapters, each of which is introduced by a surreal postcard style image, a caption and a 1970s pop song from the likes of Mott the Hoople, David Bowie, Deep Purple and Elton John.
At the centre of the drama is B, a naive and devout young local woman whose life is transformed by marriage to an outsider, Jan, who works on a North Sea oil rig. When their blissfully happy honeymoon has to end and Jan goes back to work, Bess is distraught and has one of her regular conversations with God, pleading for Jan's return.
Miserable, she counts the days until he is due on leave again. "Why should you be any different?", her mother sternly rebukes her. Fate, however, has many cruel blows to deal the happy couple - and what has begun as one of cinema's most persuasive and joyous celebrations of true love metamorphoses into harrowing melodrama as Bess makes one sacrifice after another and endures shocking degradation.
Such is the cruelty of her experiences, and so unbearable her accumulating tragedy, that the viewer at times may feel tempted to look away while at the same time sharing her desperate hope for salvatron. This is tough and passionate cinema which delivers an emotional punch that lingers vividly in the memory for long afterwards,
A Royal Shakespeare Company actress making her film debut, Emily Watson gives a performance of astonishing range and depth as Bess, and the exemplary international cast also features Stellan Starsgard as Jan and Katrin Cartlidge as Bess's widowed sister in law, along with Jean Marc Barr, Mikkel Gaup and Udo Kier. The disturbing nature of the film is heightened by the distinctive grainy hand held camerawork of Robby Muller.
"Don't Forget You're Going To Die" (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin
The most controversial and divisive film at Cannes in 1995, and the winner of the third place award, the Prix du Jury, was N'Oublie Pas Que Tu Vas Mourir (Don't Forget You're Going To Die), written and directed by the 27 year old Xavier Beauvois, who also plays its leading role. His second film after the excellent Nord (seen here only at the Dublin Film Festival), it opens on a deceptively light note as Benoit, a young art history student (played by Beauvois himself) concocts various excuses to avoid compulsory military service.
That tone shifts abruptly when he discovers that he is HIV positive, and his consequent emotional turmoil propels him in directions far removed from his everyday life, towards drugs taking and smuggling, gay and group sex. His immersion into a relentless exaltation of the senses becomes a personal odyssey of extremes in which he is guided by a young Arab junkie, Omar (Roschdy Zem), whom he meets in a police station, and inspired by the doomed 19th century Romantic poets whom he studied and admires.
The scenario's final leap is the riskiest in a consistently adventurous film, and while the film falters with that lapse in credibility, it is one of the few false moves which Beauvois makes in his thoughtful but provocative picture. At Cannes there was much less debate about the film's resolution than about the unflinching explicitness employed by Beauvois for the various drug taking sequences and for one startlingly graphic sex scene involving Benoit, Omar and a prostitute in Amsterdam.
This daring drama makes for challenging and unsettling cinema. It is shot in a simple but precise and firmly effective naturalistic visual style and accompanied by a moody John Cale score. In the central role, Beauvois himself gives a gritty, low key performance which anchors the movie.
"The Pillow Book" (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin
Set in Kyoto and Hong Kong although filmed substantially in a Luxembourg studio, the new Peter Greenaway, film, The Pillow Book is unique in many respects, not least for having a principal credit for calligraphy in its opening titles. The film is inspired by a 10th century pillow book written a female courtier at the Japanese Heian Dynasty Imperial Court - a collection of reminiscences lists - literary quotes and amorous adventures.
Greenaway's film deals with Nagiko (Vivian Wu), a young Japanese woman who, in a prologue set during her childhood Kyoto in the 1970s, is introduced to calligraphy by her writer father (Ken Ogata). Cut to the present and Nagiko, leaving Kyoto and an unhappy arranged marriage, moves to a cacophonous Hong Kong where she works as a model and she meets Jerome, a bisexual English translator played by Ewan McGregor at his most uninhibited.
Jerome persuades Nagiko that his naked body should be the paper for her pen and that he will carry her writings on his body to her publisher (Yoshi Oida). When Jerome becomes sexually involved with the publisher, who is gay, a vicious battle of jealousy rages between the translator's two lovers.
In its early stages The Pillow Book appears wilfully obscure and there is the further distraction of Greenaway's propensity for regularly switching the ratios of the images and superimposing additional imagery in frames within frames, many of them steps ahead of each other chronologically - and, characteristically, Greenaway cannot resist bombarding the viewer with a succession of numbers yet again.
Daunting as it may sound - and there is no doubt that some audiences will not have the patience to bear with Greenaway's scheme of things initially - The Pillow Book is ultimately rewarding, an audio visual experience that eventually exerts an hypnotic hold on the viewer and grows consistently more fascinating. Much of the imagery is dazzlingly beautiful and the film is laced with mordant dry humour. This is Peter Greenaway's richest and most imaginative movie in quite some time.
"The Last Of The High Kings" (15) Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin
The uneven quality of the performances mars Irish director David Keating's debut feature, The Last Of The High Kings, from the outset. Adapted by Keating and Gabriel Byrne from Ferdia Mac Anna's entertaining novel and set in Howth during the summer of 1977 with a plethora of Thin Lizzy singles blasting out on the soundtrack, this cheerful comedy follows the coming of age experiences of the 17 year old Frankie as he struggles with his sexual urges, his unusual family and the prospects for his future as he awaits the arrival of his Leaving Cert results. The film is at its most effective as it captures the frustrations of teenage love and lust.
Frankie is played by Jared Leto, an American actor who resembles the young Rob Lowe and starred in the TV series, My So Called Life, but while the camera loves him, Leto's performance is blandly unremarkable. However, the performance which capsizes the film is that of Catherine O'Hara - the mother in the Home Alone movies - who is wildly over the top as Frankie's Protestant hating mother, a historically selective and hysterically prejudiced woman. Gabriel Byrne makes a fleeting cameo as the boy's horn tooting, Shakespeare spouting actor father, while Stephen Rea has a couple of scenes as a bullshitting taxi driver and Colm Meaney chops up, as a leering, electioneering Fianna Failer.
"Brassed Off" (15) Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin
Director Mark Herman follows his inauspicious debut feature, the dreadful Dudley Moore vehicle Blame It On The Bellboy, with the socially concerned Brassed Off which is set in Herman's native Yorkshire in 1992, when the local coal pit is threatened with closure. Meanwhile, the long established colliery brass band is experiencing rare success, having qualified for the national semi finals and their ailing conductor (Pete Postlethwaite) dreams of them making the final at the Albert Hall.
Postlethwaite brings his trademark integrity to bear on this uneven movie which is carried by its committed cast - the ubiquitous Ewan McGregor, Tara Fitzgerald, Jim Carter, and Stephen Tompkinson, much more impressive than in Ballykissangel, complete the central roles. However, neither the cast nor the often stirring brass band music can distract from the gaping holes and implausibilities in the screenplay, and Herman unwisely piles on the sentimentality in the movie's closing stages.
